Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American writer, psychologist, futurist, and advocate of psychedelic drug research and use, and one of the first people whose remains have been sent into space. An icon of 1960s counterculture, Leary is most famous as a proponent of the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of LSD. He coined and popularized the catch phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out."
Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, an only child[1] of an Irish American dentist who abandoned the family when Leary was 13. He graduated from Springfield's Classical High School. Leary attended three different colleges and was disciplined at each.[1] He studied for two years at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Leary received a bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Alabama in 1943. An obituary of Leary in the New York Times said he had a "discipline problem" there as well, but that he "finally earned his bachelor's degree in the U. S. Army during World War II,"[1] when he served as a sergeant in the Medical Corps. Leary dropped out of the class of 1943 at The United States Military Academy at West Point. He received a master's degree at Washington State University in 1946, and a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1950[2]. The title of Leary's Ph.D. dissertation was, "The Social Dimensions of Personality: Group Structure and Process." He went on to become an Assistant Professor at Berkeley (1950-1955), a director of psychiatric research at the Kaiser Family Foundation (1955-1958), and a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University (1959-1963). He was officially expelled from the faculty of Harvard for failing to conduct his scheduled class lectures, though he asserts that he fulfilled all his teaching obligations. Another possible cause for his (and, a little later, Dr. Richard Alpert's) dismissal was his role in the mushrooming popularity of then-legal psychedelic substances among Harvard students and certain sympathetic faculty members.

Leary's early work in psychology continued the exploration by such pioneers as Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan, Dr. Karen Horney, Sam Biglari, and others, of the importance of interpersonal forces to mental health. Dr. Leary specifically focused on how the interpersonal process might be used to diagnose personality patterns or disorders. He developed a complex and respected interpersonal circumplex model, published in The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, that offered a means by which psychologists could use MMPI scores to quickly determine a respondent's characteristic interpersonal modes of reaction. It is a credit to the robustness of his ideas that circumplex models continue to figure prominently in interpersonal research. [1]

In 1955, his first wife, Marianne, committed suicide, leaving him to become a single parent to his son and daughter.[1] Before his first experiments with mushrooms, Leary described his life of 35 years disparagingly, writing that he had been "an anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis . . . like several million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots."[3][4]