TIMOTHY LEARY'S MID‐CAREER SHIFT: CLEAN BREAK OR INFLECTION POINT?

Abstract

The psychologist Timothy Leary (1920-1996), an iconic cultural figure in the United States in the 1960s and afterward, has received comparatively scant attention in the history of psychology. This may be due to perceptions that, after a major career shift centering around his experimentation with psychedelic substances and his subsequent dismissal from Harvard in 1963, Leary parted company with the field. While there are several good reasons to adopt this view, examination of his entire career as well as his intellectual ancestry reveals unacknowledged continuities, suggesting that a more prominent place be accorded to him in the history of psychology, as well as to the challenges he poses.

The radical potentials of human experience: Maslow, Leary, and the prehistory of qualitative inquiry.

“…Existentialism was also an important influence for Timothy Leary who was recruited by Harvard in 1960 in the hopes that his budding “existential-transaction” theory would prove a viable alternative to behaviorism and psychoanalysis (Devonis, 2012; Greenfield, 2006). As with Maslow, Leary had begun to distance himself from the positivist strictures of the discipline, formulating in the process alternative methodologies and conceptions of science.…”

“…Of course, Leary’s life continues to be well documented, but not his work within the discipline. As Devonis (2012) notes: One strategy for dealing with him as a historical figure appears to be to not deal with him at all. He has no American Psychologist obituary: he does not appear in the indices of the current textbooks with the greatest emphasis on recent modern history of psychology .…”

“…The ultimately quite divergent destinations for these stories—one passing through prison and the other through the APA presidency—are well-known but perhaps not as telling as they might seem. These figures’ pioneering efforts, and the accompanying conflicts, struggles, and consequences, have been extensively documented (Devonis, 2012; Lattin, 2010; Nicholson, 2001, 2007). What is less well-known, and what we elaborate in this article (largely through personal documents), is the extent of their methodological trailblazing, and the illuminative quality of their variant paths toward understanding human experience—within and beyond psychology.…”

Leary, Timothy

“…His social and developmental sources derived, via Hubert Coffey, his PhD advisor, from both Coffey's mentors and associates at the University of Iowa, Beth Wellman and Kurt Lewin, and also from Jean Walker Macfarlane, awarded the second doctorate in psychology at the University of California in 1922. Leary had special affection for Macfarlane, a developmental psychologist whose work with troubled youth he took as a model (in an otherwise unpublished typescript, "The Corrupted Experimental Design" from 1960) of the need for mutual egalitarian interpersonal interchange between the researcher and those researched, and by extension between the therapist and the client (Devonis 2012). Leary also encountered, during the period 1946-1950, not only Lee Cronbach but also Frank Barron, a recent Minnesota M. A. who had fresh MMPI experience (notable in light of the amount of cross-validation between Leary and colleagues' models and the MMPI) and also Donald MacKinnon, who came to Berkeley in 1947 and directed the Institute of Personality, Assessment and Research from 1950 onward.…”