SIDNEY COHEN AND HIS COLLEAGUES in Los Angeles had, like the Canadian
group, started out thinking that LSD was a psychotomimetic, but by the
mid-1950s Cohen, too, had come to question that model. Born in 1910 in
New York City to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, Cohen, who in
photographs looks very distinguished, with thick white hair slicked back,
trained in pharmacology at Columbia University and served in the U.S.
Army Medical Corps in the South Pacific during World War II. It was in
1953, while working on a review article about chemically induced
psychoses—a long-standing research interest—that Cohen first read about
a new drug called LSD.
Yet when Cohen finally tried LSD himself in October 1955, he “was
taken by surprise.” Expecting to find himself trapped inside the mind of a
madman, Cohen instead experienced a profound, even transcendent
sense of tranquillity, as if “the problems and strivings, the worries and
frustrations of everyday life [had] vanished; in their place was a majestic,
sunlit, heavenly inner quietude . . . I seemed to have finally arrived at the
contemplation of eternal truth.” Whatever this was, he felt certain it
wasn’t a temporary psychosis. Betty Eisner wrote that Cohen came to
think of it instead as something he called “unsanity”: “a state beyond the
control of the ego.”
As often happens in science when a theoretical paradigm comes under
the pressure of contrary evidence, the paradigm totters for a period of
time as researchers attempt to prop it up with various amendments and
adjustments, and then, often quite suddenly and swiftly, it collapses as a
new paradigm rises to take its place. Such was the fate of the
psychotomimetic paradigm in the mid-1950s. Certainly, a number of
volunteers were reporting challenging and sometimes even harrowing
trips, but remarkably few were having the full-on psychosis the paradigm
promised. Even poor Mr. Katz’s twelve hours as a madman included
passages of indescribable pleasure and insight that could not be
overlooked.
As it happened, the psychotomimetic paradigm was replaced not by
one but by two distinct new theoretical models: the psycholytic and, later,
the psychedelic model. Each was based on a different conception of how
the compounds worked on the mind and therefore how they might best
be deployed in the treatment of mental illness. The two models weren’t at
odds with each other, exactly, and some researchers explored both at
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(Frankie)
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