The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 35 of 125
Revolution needs psychotherapy at its heart
Whatever the truth, one of the ideas I kept coming back to was that any future revolutionary movement, however you conceived it, must have some kind of psychotherapy at its heart: some basic analysis of the ego. This struck me as being just as important, if not far more so, than any purely political or economic strategy. What kind of psychotherapy? Obviously my own recent experiences, both of getting in touch with repressed emotions and of seeing how this could be organized clandestinely along the lines Jacob had been exploring, were uppermost in my mind. But when I tried to work out how this could be done on a large but decentralized scale, I was forced to admit that I hadn’t a clue . . . Several months later I was to find myself researching psychedelic history; and, oddly enough, one of the first things I ran across was an example of just what I had been trying to envision. During the mid-1960s a young radical feminist had gone to Tim Leary’s psychedelic center at Millbrook, New York, and taken LSD. On her return she introduced the rest of her sizable and tight-knit group of friends to the drug. Such was their enthusiasm, they started to take it regularly together and to turn on other people they knew. They were cautious and responsible, offering the drug only to friends, or close friends of friends. Books were passed around, and newcomers were welcome to attend group trips solely as observers.