ambivalent: LSD, he wrote in a 1959 letter to a colleague, had “opened a
door from which we must not retreat merely because we feel
uncomfortably unscientific at the threshold.” And yet that is precisely
how the LSD work often made him feel: uncomfortably unscientific.
Cohen also began to wonder about the status of the insights that
patients brought back from their journeys. He came to believe that
“under LSD the fondest theories of the therapist are confirmed by his
patient.” The expectancy effect was such that patients working with
Freudian therapists returned with Freudian insights (framed in terms of
childhood trauma, sexual drives, and oedipal emotions), while patients
working with Jungian therapists returned with vivid archetypes from the
attic of the collective unconscious, and Rankians with recovered
memories of their birth traumas.
This radical suggestibility posed a scientific dilemma, surely, but was it
necessarily a therapeutic dilemma as well? Perhaps not: Cohen wrote that
“any explanation of the patient’s problems, if firmly believed by both the
therapist and the patient, constitutes insight or is useful as insight.” Yet
he qualified this perspective by acknowledging it was “nihilistic,” which,
scientifically speaking, it surely was. For it takes psychotherapy perilously
close to the world of shamanism and faith healing, a distinctly
uncomfortable place for a scientist to be. And yet as long as it works, as
long as it heals people, why should anyone care? (This is the same
discomfort scientists feel about using placebos. It suggests an interesting
way to think about psychedelics: as a kind of “active placebo,” to borrow a
term proposed by Andrew Weil in his 1972 book, The Natural Mind. They
do something, surely, but most of what that is may be self-generated. Or
as Stanislav Grof put it, psychedelics are “nonspecific amplifiers” of
mental processes.)
Cohen’s thoughtful ambivalence about LSD, which he would continue
to feel until the end of his career, marks him as that rare figure in a world
densely populated by psychedelic evangelists: the open-minded skeptic, a
man capable of holding contrary ideas in his head. Cohen continued to
believe in the therapeutic power of LSD, especially in the treatment of
anxiety in cancer patients, which he wrote about, enthusiastically, for
Harper’s in 1965. There, he called it “therapy by self-transcendence,”
suggesting he saw a role in Western medicine for what would come to be
called applied mysticism. Yet Cohen never hesitated to call attention to
frankie
(Frankie)
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