A Mental Ethnography: Conclusions from Research in LSD

445 Pages·2023·10.33 MB·English

by  Niccolo Caldararo

A Mental
Ethnography:
Conclusions From
Research in LSD
Niccolo Caldararo
A Mental Ethnography: Conclusions from
Research in LSD
Niccolo Caldararo
A Mental
Ethnography:
Conclusions from
Research in LSD
Niccolo Caldararo
Department of Anthropology
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, CA, USA
ISBN 978-3-031-13744-0 ISBN 978-3-031-13745-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13745-7
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Autopsy means in Greek the act of seeing for oneself
Preface
A Beginning Note on Form
[A]re we on the road toward a wrong-headed, super spin-out revolution of
ruin, building on defiant acts in savage side-shows where THEM and US
fight forever?
—Steve Leiper, Assistant Editor, San Francisco Oracle, 1967
This book was influenced by two experiences, one from an article that
appeared in the Weekend section of the Financial Times on LSD use by
tech workers and CEOs (Hannah Kuchler, “How Silicon Valley discov-
ered LSD,” 12–13 August, 2017), which was a remarkable document in
that it reviewed perceptions and beliefs of people using LSD today. It is
of interest how the drug is being used and its effects perceived now com-
pared to the period in the 1960s. My presence in the Haight-Ashbury in
the 1960s and at the Mogar Laboratory at San Francisco State University
(SFSU) is the second influence. A number of references to the 1960s and
the nature of LSD that appeared in the Kuchler article (and many others
since LSD became fashionable) were incorrect in my view. Interpretation
is at the center of the issue; just as a reading of Leiper’s quote above is seen
by many as a political statement applying to the “left and right,” it was
read by many people at the time living in the Haight-Ashbury district of
vii
viii Preface
San Francisco as referring to those who wanted to explore the potential of
human consciousness and those who feared such exploration, from the
Inquisition to Richard Nixon.
This problem of interpretation has many aspects. I am calling this book
A Mental Ethnography, because like a traditional ethnography it attempts to
reveal something about a time, place, and people by using an informant,
me. Ethnographies became the focus of substantial criticism after the 1950s
for a number of reasons, one of which was how they were seen to “speak for
the Other,” to define groups in a frozen manner as if change did not hap-
pen in indigenous society, or that they played a role in colonialism and the
commodification of non-European people and their culture (Clifford and
Marcus 1986). While I do not agree with these criticisms from my reading
of the ethnographic literature, I do agree that ethnographic writing became
a kind of literature and while each could be seen as a snapshot of society
and culture, what was used and what was ignored reflected interests of the
anthropologists in many ways (Clifford 1988). So this book is an ethnog-
raphy because it relates the behavior and culture created at a time and place
due to ideas surrounding the use of psychedelic experiences. I use many
approaches to examine this society and culture, some from anthropology,
some from medical science, and others from a variety of Native peoples’
cosmologies. All these approaches attempt to provide a broad picture and
a number of unique focused aspects of what many others and I experi-
enced. Like any ethnography it cannot be comprehensive; other people
saw, felt, and experienced different things, but like people in ships at sea
and fish below, they are in the same place but differently.
Language, Behavior, and the Brain
This book looks back to the 1960s and forward to today. The concerns of
many of my student friends and the professors I had often revolved around
the crises of the time, H-Bombs, the Soviet Union, disease, and overpopula-
tion, among many others. Often people wondered why humans seemed to
recreate the crises of the past in war, population, and intolerance. There was
some focus on the problem with language and my mentor, Robert Mogar,
studied the problems people faced with expressing themselves and become
active and effective people. His work led to a number of articles on
Preface ix
language, and it seemed that as smart was we were, we had some central flaw
that prevented humans as individuals and societies in general from coming
to meaningful resolution of difficulties that often seemed simple to solve.
In the text below I often refer to “the Mogar Lab.” In doing this I am
including meetings and work I was involved with in the 1960s at San
Francisco State University (then College) as well as locations where Dr.
Mogar and his colleagues met, worked, and had patients. This includes the
Psychology Department facilities at San Francisco State University, Napa,
Mendocino, and Sonoma State Hospitals and the Palo Alto facilities.
The question then was to look at pathologies and try to find keys to
healing mental illness and perhaps society as well. Many people began
their study of LSD as part of their path to this end. My studies began
there too, but then I was led by the failures in these studies to look past
the clinical findings to an investigation of culture and human evolution.
In my 2017 book I describe the evolution of the human brain in compari-
son with other mammals, both social and solitary, and with other social
animals, for example, bees, ants, and termites. In that analysis we want to
know why humans or animals, in general, developed complex brains.
The idea of whether other animals have cognition similar to that of
humans often ends in circular arguments, what is thought, what is an
abstraction, what is a symbol, and so on. Deacon’s (1997) description of
this problem is a typical example, and Erikson (1951) also travels the
same circular trail, “What is a symbol?” “… something that stands for
something else.” Then there are the problems of complexity and learning.
It is the contention of Flynn (2012) that this is due to education, where
the type of education focuses on abstraction and complexity as opposed
to learning methods to accomplish tasks. He calls this concrete thinking
versus symbolic. He regards this as the main difference in IQ scores across
time, with nations and between classes and ethnicities. This idea is not
new; a form of it was contained in the work of Levy-Bruhl (1966), who
argued that primitive people, that is, people living in non-industrial con-
texts, had different thought patterns and perceptions because of their
lifestyles. I am perhaps being charitable to Levy-Bruhl here, as some have
criticized his theory as being racist and essentialist, that is, the idea that
people’s abilities are tied up in their racial makeup; however, as an analy-
sis of how people think at a particular time in human history it is useful.
x Preface
One could say, routine and learning make reality. On the other hand,
a more phenomenological view I sometimes play with my students looks
at how commensals, like our pets or some beetles with different species of
ants, come to learn to respond to the behavior of the host in ways that
benefit both. Often people argue that certain animals, usually birds and
mammals, can learn complex tasks, yet the idea of a consciousness that is
like our cognition is denied them. Their behavior is termed simply con-
ditioning for rewards. I have argued that this is also true of humans—
only our conditioning schedule is more complex and aided by a very
efficient conditioning system, language. Another aspect of interpretation
that I will comment on using a variety of sources, mainly cross-cultural,
is the nature of psychiatric evaluations of individuals’ expression of expe-
rience, either in clinical settings or under the influence of psychedelic
drugs in other settings. There is a vast literature on this and I will cite
examples from time to time, but an adequate outline is presented by
Alarcon (2009). Another aspect of phenomenology that dogs research
into dreams, psychedelic experience, hallucinations, and visions is the
question of authenticity. We cannot yet “see” or experience and record
someone’s dream and so on; we have to assume that what they tell us is
actually lived and not a product of conscious expression and intention.
Instrumentation like fMRI has made some original inroads to this prob-
lem. Some practitioners have held that the schizophrenic hallucination is
a measure of authenticity, but to assume it is devoid of intention and not
the product of conditioning, however tortured is perhaps incorrect (see
Laing 1959 for a critique on this). The hallucinations of delirium tremens
are outside our brief, as they are caused by alcohol, but the fact that they
generally produce images of animals, mainly dogs, snakes, and mice
(Platz et al. 1995) falls within our theory of origin, which will be pre-
sented later on. I will discuss this below in a variety of contexts.
Preface xi
Consciousness, Mind, Awareness,
and Experience
Crick (1994) uses the terms “consciousness” and “awareness” inter-
changeably. This is problematic, as many neurologists refer to “varieties of
awareness,” one of which provides a paradox, “the waking state,” and
these varieties can grade into variations of coma and vegetative states
(Zeman 1997). Rivers (1920) specifically finds “consciousness” and
“unconsciousness” need to be separated from temporary periods of atten-
tion that we all experience from moment to moment. Cognitive scientist
Jackendoff (1987) calls this attentive moment the “phenomenological
mind.” Animal perception has evolved to certain conditions in the envi-
ronment for survival, to concentrate attention on a limited amount of
stimuli, which is why awareness is limited. This was the central point of
Rivers’ thesis, derived from his work with Head, though Hughlings
Jackson had a similar idea earlier of higher levels of the evolution of the
brain “constraining” lower ones (Sacks 2012). Seth (2021) focuses his
definition of reality on this limited feature of our primate perception.
Uexkull (1934/2010) extends this species-specific reality to all animals,
producing a multitude of phemonomenological visions. Some have
divided theories of consciousness into a “central cognition hypothesis”
generally associated with a brain of some kind, and other theories grouped
around an “extended cognition” where the idea of brain, as in spiders and
squid is not centralized and even, as in the case of Uexkull, this extension
can associate with aspects of the environment (Japyassu and Laland
2017). This experiential view has been renewed recently by scientists
under a general concept of the Integrated Information Theory (IIT)
where experience is translated into feeling (Koch 2019). In many ways
this is much as Uexkull proposed, but benefiting from the vast advances
in biology and especially neurology and the instrumentation used to
chart the physiology of brains. Damasio (2021) constructs an inner self
or mind by the association of images of memory with the feelings of daily
experience, while Rivers’ and Freud’s idea of repression and suppression
to produce attention and awareness at any one moment is often referred
to today as a self-referencing effect (SRE) and was identified by Rogers