In Los Angeles, Cohen, Eisner, and Janiger began incorporating LSD
in their weekly therapeutic sessions, gradually stepping up the dose each
week until their patients gained access to subconscious material such as
repressed emotions and buried memories of childhood trauma. They
mainly treated neurotics and alcoholics and people with minor
personality disorders—the usual sorts of patients seen by
psychotherapists, functional and articulate people with intact egos and
the will to get better. The Los Angeles group also treated hundreds of
painters, composers, and writers, on the theory that if the wellspring of
creativity was the subconscious, LSD would expand one’s access to it.
These therapists and their patients expected the drug to be
therapeutic, and, lo and behold, it frequently was: Cohen and Eisner
reported that sixteen of their first twenty-two patients showed marked
improvement. A 1967 review article summarizing papers about
psycholytic therapy published between 1953 and 1965 estimated that the
technique’s rate of success ranged from 70 percent in cases of anxiety
neurosis, 62 percent for depression, and 42 percent for obsessive-
compulsive disorder. These results were impressive, yet there were few if
any attempts to replicate them in controlled trials.
By the end of the decade, psycholytic LSD therapy was routine practice
in the tonier precincts of Los Angeles, such as Beverly Hills. Certainly the
business model was hard to beat: some therapists were charging upwards
of five hundred dollars a session to administer a drug they were often
getting from Sandoz for free. LSD therapy also became the subject of
remarkably positive press attention. Articles like “My 12 Hours as a
Madman” gave way to the enthusiastic testimonials of the numerous
Hollywood celebrities who had had transformative experiences in the
offices of Oscar Janiger, Betty Eisner, and Sidney Cohen and a growing
number of other therapists. Anaïs Nin, Jack Nicholson, Stanley Kubrick,
André Previn, James Coburn, and the beat comedian Lord Buckley all
underwent LSD therapy, many of them on the couch of Oscar Janiger.
But the most famous of these patients was Cary Grant, who gave an
interview in 1959 to the syndicated gossip columnist Joe Hyams extolling
the benefits of LSD therapy. Grant had more than sixty sessions and by
the end declared himself “born again.”
“All the sadness and vanities were torn away,” the fifty-five-year-old
actor told Hyams, in an interview all the more surprising in the light of
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(Frankie)
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