The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 33 of 125
Love has to be reinvented
For the first time I understood what a terrible blow banning LSD from psychoanalysis had been. We’ve seen that therapists at the time had reckoned the drug could cut down the average duration of individual analysis by a magnitude of ten to one. This could have meant that psychoanalysis entered society as a mass healing force. Either such a huge potential breakthrough was going to have to be scrapped—or the professional mystique about analysis was going to have to be brushed aside, and many of us would have to start to learn the basics. With acid we would have a head start. Whatever technical skills there were to this or that school of therapy we could rediscover for ourselves. All you really needed to begin was a good sitter—most obviously a lover or close friend—for surely nothing could match the healing power of someone who genuinely cared for you. And, in broader social terms, wouldn’t this bring back to friendship and to sexual relationships much of the spiritual muscle that has been filched? “Love has to be reinvented,” wrote the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, an observation whose edge time has done nothing to dull. Wouldn’t LSD give friends and lovers a profound psychological adventure to share—at once reempowering intimacy, and bringing some magic back to interpersonal relationships, from which it is so cruelly absent?