LSD Psychotherapy (4th Edition): The Healing Potential of Psychedelic Medicine

by Stanislav Grof

Book Overview

The sensationalism surrounding the widespread use of LSD in the late 1960s and the subsequent legislative overkill virtually ended psychotherapeutic LSD research. Much of what had been learned over thirty years of scientific medical study was so distorted or suppressed that no objective overview was available to the general reader except for this book. LSD Psychotherapy is a complete account of a remarkable chapter in the ever-continuing inquiry into...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0979862205
• ISBN13: 9780979862205
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic
• Length: 374 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Great book

i`m not very good writing in english, but this book rules, is quite serious and the investigation is very well done...the pics are great, so the edition

3,000 sessions and counting . . .

Stanislav Grof's book "LSD Psychotherapy" is definitely not a light read. Its divided into 9 main sections, and also includes an epilogue, index, two appendices, and an extensive bibliography. Weighing in at over 350 pages, it's Grof's history of LSD therapy, a discussion of the circumstances/therapeutic paradigms under which LSD has been used, and most importantly, a collection of practical wisdom gleaned from the "more than three thousand sessions over the years" which Dr. Grof personally supervised. Although a book of this size and scope is obviously written for clinicians, it's nevertheless an interesting and informative read to the layperson. Dr. Grof's writing is erudite, informative, and flows surprisingly well (especially when one considers that English is actually not his native language. He was born in Czechoslovakia). He has very practical information regarding the set/setting required for this type of therapy, and lays down a clear outline of how a session should go, and what a subject (or sitter) is likely to encounter. Two points he stressed repeatedly: -- an LSD session is a transformational and decidedly internal experience. The goal isn't to see pretty colors or watch Disney cartoons in the palm of your hand; it's to undergo a great deal of introspection and apply what you learn from it. -- LSD isn't always a lot of fun, nor is it supposed to be. He spends a lot of time discussing difficult experiences, and explaining how they hold the most potential for personal growth in a subject. All in all, if you're interested in psychedelics, this book is a great read from a man who has devoted his life to researching these areas. If you like this book, I also recommend Myron Stolaroff's "The Secret Chief" (another primer on hallucinogenic psychotherapy) and Rick Strassman's "DMT: The Spirit Molecule".

Remarkable, practical wisdom

I have to respond to the review of Zosimos, listed previously. This is a training manual for hosting psycho-therapeutic sessions involving close encounters with LSD. Obviously, today this is going to be frankly difficult to pull off. Sandoz quit making it 40 years ago, and they made it out of organic base materials. The underground chemists of the 60's and 70's tended to use a synthetic base, and ended up with a product that was probably not the equivalent of the Sandoz pharmaceutical that was available to Grof. Remember that Grof was engaged in Research, not practice, at a time when this was truly a new frontier. In the early days most the research was being sponsored by the CIA. Not in Czechoslovakia. This was a period of intense intellectual challenge. Grof had been trained as a confirmed Freudian. He gave the stuff to his experimental research subjects--then observed what happened. Now, this is basic science. His preconceptions were all Freudian. But mapping his observations to Freudian theory left a lot hanging over the edges. He quickly grasped the fact that LSD is a non specific mental amplifier. He also realized that neurotic resistance limited the reaction tot he drug, and that numerous encounters were required to break through this resistance. On other occasions, the full range of effects would manifest themselves in a single session. One of his breakthroughs was the recognition that, experientially speaking, the unconscious tends to categorize together experiences that share a common pattern of elements. For example, someone feeling intense pressure at work might recall, with great affect, a collection of memories from their childhood when they were under intense pressure by teachers, parents, a playground bully choking them, getting tangled in the blankets of their crib, intra-uterine birth contractions. These layers of related memories he called condensed experiences, or Co-ex systems, because, collectively, they tended to organize the personality, and, when remembered, seemed to lose their organizational influence. Grof observed that subjects who recalled the various stages of their birth resolved many of their previous symptoms. But not always. Sometimes it was only as if they had peeled away a layer, exposing a deeper nodal disturbance, as if they had opened a door in the floor of the basement that leads down to catacombs. The act of reliving these apparently repressed conflicts or traumas seemed to deflate their energy and organizing influence within the subjects personality. These layers seemed deeper because they typically emerged later in a series of sessions, after birth related material stopped surfacing. The birth related material he called peri-natal, and he regarded them to be the gateway to a transpersonal, or collective unconscious, as suggested by the writings of C.G. Jung regarding the racial archetypes. Grof discovered that, under the appropriate circumstances, the psyche tends towards equilibrium, and will stri

LSD, the Universe, and Everything.

Stanislav Grof is one of the pioneers in using LSD for psychotherapeutic research. Personally, I'm not sure I buy it, but I read these books more for personal amusement than for any scientific content they may have. (I give this book five stars because it's interesting, not for it's scientific content, which I believe to be virtually nil.) In this book, Grof has thrown together some of the most bizarre and far-fetched speculative nonsense in an attempt to explain a hodge-podge of LSD experiences. Grof gives a detailed picture of the various forms of therapy including, psycholitic therapy, psychedelic therapy, hypnodelic therapy, and his own holotropic therapy (which is basically hyperventilation and doesn't require LSD). Grof then goes on to explain the effects of LSD. Here, he concocts a bewildering schemata of various LSD induced states, which fit under various matrices: COEX systems (systems of condensed experiences) and basic perinatal matrices (BPM I-IV). This is where things get a little hocky, because according to Grof (and he gets this from Otto Rank) we can regress the individual to birth and then resolve various aspects of the birth trauma, freeing the individual of various neuroses, etc. He throws in a mix of eastern philosophy and mysticism to explain various aspects of this regression process. Apparently, one can go beyond even this level, into that of transpersonal experiences (here essentially all hell breaks loose and virtually anything goes). The rest of the book is pretty much devoted to explaining various aspects of the therapy sessions, the effects of various environments, stimuli, etc. on the sessions, and much anecdotal evidence of alleged cures, resolutions of conflicts, breakdown of neurotic defense systems, etc. I haven't made up my mind how much of this I buy into, and I don't see any easy way to do so without more research being done. The book concludes with an appendix on the effects of LSD on chromosomes.