Authors: David Jay Brown,Rebecca McClen Novick
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Psychiatric Alchemy
with Oscar Janiger
Oscar Janiger was born on February 8, 1918, in New York City. He received his MA. in cell physiology from Columbia, and his M.D. from the UC Irvine School of Medicine, where he served on the faculty in their Psychiatry Department for over twenty years. His research interests have been wide, and he describes himself as a "tinkerer. " He established the relationship between hormonal cycling and pre-menstrual depression in women, and he discovered blood proteins that are specific to male homosexuality. His studies of the Huichol Indians in Mexico revealed that centuries of peyote use do not cause any type of chromosomal damage. He is perhaps best known for establishing the relationship between LSD and creativity in a study of hundreds of artists. In addition to his research interests he has also maintained a long-standing private psychiatric practice, which he continues to this day.
Back in the late fifties and early sixties when LSD was still legal, Oscar incorporated LSD into some of his therapy, and is responsible for "turning on " many well-known literary figures and Hollywood celebrities, including Anais Nin and Cary Grant. More recently Oscar has been involved in studying dolphins in their natural environment, and is the founder of the Albert Hofman Foundation--an organization whose purpose is to establish a library and world information center dedicated to the scientific study of human consciousness. He has also just completed a book
entitled A Different Kind of Healing
, about how doctors treat themselves. Jeanne St. Peter and I interviewed Oscar in the living room of his home in Santa Monica on January 3, 1990. Surrounding virtually every wall in his house is the largest and most interesting library I’ve ever encountered. Oscar spoke to us about his scientific research, creativity and psychopathology, the problems he sees with psychiatry, and his discovery of the psycho-active effects of isolated DMT. Oscar is an extremely warm, highly energetic man. There is a deep sincerity to his manner. He chuckles a lot, and one feels instantly comfortable around him.
DJB
DJB: Could you begin by telling us what it was that originally inspired your interest in psychiatry and the exploration of consciousness?
OSCAR: I was about seven years old and I was living on a farm in upstate New York. The nearest neighbor was a mile away. I would go for a walk, visit them, play, and then come home in the evening. This was a wild kind of country setting, and I had to get home before dark. Some evenings I would be coming home and the scene around me on the path was filled with menacing figures; pirates and all kinds of cut-throats ready to grab me and do me in. There was a place I called the sunken mine, where people had supposedly drowned and there was a frayed rope hanging from a tree. All of these menacing things gave the evening a very sinister cast, and I’d finally run to get home. Certain evenings I’d make the trip, and everything was just light and airy. Things around me were filled with joy and pleasure. The birds were singing, rabbits, squirrels and other animals were having a wonderful Disneyland time. So one day I was thinking, My God, that’s a magic road! One time it’s this way, another time it’s that way.
So I puzzled over that. I finally came to the conclusion that, if it wasn’t a magic road, then I was doing something to these surround- ings and if I was doing it then I could change it. So the next time I came back from my neighbour’s place, and everything got murky, strange and sinister, I said, "No! If I’m doing this then bring back the rabbits, bring back the squirrels, bring back the fairies and let’s lighten this thing up." Sure enough, it changed. That was the beginning of my interest in consciousness. It was all crystallized into a marvelous saying from the Talmud - "things are not the way they are, they’re the way we are." From then on, when I’d get into situations, I’d determine what aspect that was within me was being projected outward, and what was a reflection of the world that others can validate along with me.
That, of course, has been the theme of my work in therapy and as a scientist. The important distinctions regarding projection are among the fundamental things that one has to solve to understand how people behave and the contradictions in their behaviour. Other inspirations are simply those of curiosity. I was enormously curious about how things worked. I was always asking why? why? why? Then I got to medical school and the why extended to the brain and the activities of the nervous system, which seemed to me to be the largest why of all. Aslo, I had personal experiences with people who had become, I guesss you’d say, psychotic, or who acted bizzarrely or strangely. These matters have been of great interest to me.
DJB: How do you define consciousness?
OSCAR: Well, I was afraid you were going to ask me that. When you say define something, I’m caught between what I recognize as the accepted definition - the sources that come out of dictionaries, legal definitions and all that stuff that belongs in the pragmatic world - and the definitions that come from my intuition. The Oxford English Dictionary offers at least six or seven varieties of definition for consciousness, and several have entirely different connotations. When you get down to contradictions like being conscious of one’s unconscious, it get’s pretty strange and labyrinthine.
I would say the conventional definition contains the idea of being aware of one’s self - a sort of self-reflection. Or you can describe it operationally as being the end product of a complex nervous system that eventually produces a state that allows us to be in some way congnizant of ourselves and the enviroment. It allows us to extrap- olate into future events, into past events, and allow us to take a position in one’s imagination so we can examine realities that are not responsive to the ordinary, daily context of the world around us. Many of these things require qualifications, but let me then stay with the word as something that gives us a feeling that distinguishes us as individuals, that gives us a sense of self, and sense of self-reflection and awareness.
JEANNE: Many years ago, while you were studying at Columbia, you had some problems with your high school teaching job. What happened?
OSCAR: Well, I was practice teaching at the same high school that I had attended, Erasmus Hall in New York, the second oldest high school in the country. I was teaching general science with the lady who taught me, Miss Thompson. I took over her class, and she would sit in the back of the room. So, I was teaching astronomy to these sophomore or junior students. I borrowed a ladder from the custodian and I bought a bunch of gold stars. I spent the entire night pasting them on the ceiling in the form of the constellations. When I wound up it was getting light outside, and I thought I had done this incredible job. So the next day when we had the class, I said with a grand gesture, "We’re studying the stars - look up." All the kids looked up, everyone was fired up and we had a good time learning about all the stars. That evening, as I was going home, I discovered a note stuck in my letter-box from Mr McNeal, the principal of the school. It said, "See me."
So the next day I went to see him. He said, "The custodian told me that you pasted things on the ceiling." He shook his head and said, "I’m afraid you’re going to have to remove those, that’s defacing school property," and he just waved me aside. I spent all the next night scraping the stars off the ceiling, thinking about the errors of my ways. A week later, I decided that we would study eclipses. I said to the kids in the first row, "You bring in the lemons." To the second row I said, "You bring oranges." The third row I told, "You bring in grapefruits." To the fourth row I said, "You bring in knitting needles." So they were all very eager and they came back with these required things. I said, okay, the grapefruits are the suns, the oranges are the planets, the lemons are the moons, and the knitting needles go through the planets to make them tilted and spin around accordingly. So we had a ball, but a big commotion ensued.
During this general upheaval, the door opens and McNeal puts his head in and pulls back again. So sure enough, in my little box, there’s a note that says, "See me immediately". So I see him, and this time he’s very unhappy. I said, "Dr McNeal let me explain about the sun and the moon and the oranges and the lemons," but I couldn’t explain it. He said, "Did you know that the teachers on the floor were complaining about you? You were making a lot of noise." I said, "Yeah, well, you know it’s very difficult to get the spatial relationships right." (laughter) He said, "I don’t understand. You come from Teacher’s College, that’s the finest college in the country for teachers, it’s the cradle of American education. It was Dewey’s shrine. Don’t they teach you about discipline in the classroom?" I said, "Gee, yeah, I guess so." He says, "Well, your classroom was in chaos!" I said, "Gee, I....but let me tell you about the oranges and the lemons." He said, "What are you talking about?!" The guy was ready to explode, he just couldn’t handle it.
He said, "I don’t under- stand this, Mr Janiger, but I’m sure that we can work it out. Now please understand we’re here to keep discipline in our classrooms." I said, "Okay." So I continued teaching and one day we had to study fermentation. That was my undoing. I brought into class that day, a loaf of bread which was covered with penicillin mold, a flask of vinegar, a few pieces of blue cheese and a little flask of wine. I put them out on the laboratory table and I said, "These are the useful and harmful results of fermentation. Then after class I said, "If any of you want to come up, you can sample a little bit, you can see how the cheese tastes, and so on. So one kid came up and nothing would please him, but he had to have a slug of the wine. Then I get the note, "See me immediately!"
DJB & JEANNE: (simultaneously) Uh oh!
OSCAR: I went to see McNeal. He shook his head and said, "I’ve been a principal for twenty years and I’ve never run into this in my life. You will have to go back and see your professor because you’re under suspension right now." I said, "What’s wrong?" "Wine, wine! You brought spirits into the classroom!" I said, "Now let me tell you about fermentation." "Please!" he said, "don’t tell me about it, I don’t wan’t to hear about it!"
He was apoplectic. So I go back and see my professor, the holy of holies, the teacher of teachers. He was perplexed and then said to me, "There’s something you should know. We’re here to teach children, not to entertain them." Well, that phrase broke loose in me and I got very upset. I got up and said, "You know what professor? You can take your goddamn class in general science and stuff it." For weeks after, he’d call me and write me letters saying, we can work this out, but I refused. That was my stint at teaching in high school. It was the best thing that ever happened, I’d still be teaching high school today if it hadn’t.
DJB: You’ve used the term "dry schizophrenia" in desribing a creative artist. Could you explain what you mean by this and what similarities and differences you see between certain aspects of madness and the process of creativity?
OSCAR: Well, of course that’s always been on my mind. I remember that I could make the wallpaper do all kinds of tricks when I had a fever, and I could sit - if you’ll excuse me - on the john, and watch the tiles recompose themselves and make patterns. Therefore I suspected that there was a part of my mind which had a certain influence over the world around me, and that, under certain conditions, it can take on novel and interesting forms. The dreams I had were very vivid, very real, and there were times when I found it hard to distinguish between the dream life and what we might call the waking life. So there was a very rich repository of information that was somewhat at my disposal at times, sometimes breaking through at odd moments. I later on thought that could be a place that one could draw a great deal of inspiration from.
So I studied the conditions under which people have these releases, breakthroughs, or have access to other ways and forms of perceiving the world around them and changing their reality. When I studied the works of people who profess to go to creative artists and ask them how they did it and what it was about, I realized that what we had by way of understanding creativity was a tremend- ous collection of highly idiosyncratic and subjective responses. There was no real way of dealing with the creative process as a state you could refer to across the board, or how one could encourage it. That’s how I got the idea for a study in which we could deliberately change consciousness in an artist using LSD, given the same reference object to paint before and during the experience. Then I would try to make an inference from the difference between the artwork outside of the drug experience and while they were having it. In doing so I was struck by the fact that the paintings, under the influence of LSD, had some of the attributes of what looked like the work done by schizophrenics. If you would talk to the artists in terms of the everyday world, the answers would be very strange and tangential. Then I began to look into the whole sticky issue of psycho- pathology and creativity.