Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Scienceby Benjamin Breen, New York: Grand Central Publishing. 2024. pp. 369. $3000 (cloth). ISBN 9781538722374

Summary

The work of Margaret Mead and her network of behavioral scientists significantly shaped the history of psychedelic science and social experimentation from 1945 to 1960. This period saw figures like Mead and Gregory Bateson explore the potential of psychedelics to alter human consciousness and promote a new culture. However, as the popularity of substances like LSD grew, so did their controversial use, leading to both hopeful and dystopian outcomes in society. The narrative reveals how these efforts ultimately failed to realize utopian visions.

Study at a glance

Abstract

A kaleidoscopic narrative of the history of not only psychedelic science, but also an extraordinary network of behavioral scientists cultivated by Margaret Mead that had a profound impact on the history of the 20th century, Benjamin Breen's Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychiatric Science will prove deeply fascinating to historians, behavioral scientists and general readers alike. Margaret Mead's tireless work cultivating a community of anthropologists, ethnologists, psychiatrists, psychologists—and Breen's exhaustive research documenting the interactions within and at the edges of this network—produce a vivid cast of characters. Figures including Harold Abramson, Gregory Bateson, Walter Benjamin, Lawrence Frank, and Geoffrey Gorer make early appearances. The Macy Foundation, prompted by Mead and organized by Frank, also takes an early interest in psychedelics and changing human potential, hosting the Conference on the Problems of Consciousness in 1954, which Breen argues is as important as the more famous 1953 Conference on Cybernetics. Mead's interest in changing human consciousness using what would come to be called psychedelics goes back some two decades earlier, to her field work with Tulsa Indians using peyote as part of the Native American Church, “Peyote Visions of the North Plains.” At this early date, she recognizes the potential for such use for her research subjects to bend their own cultural and personal consciousnesses in a positive direction faced with the tremendous challenges of colonization, modernity, and the limits placed on human consciousness in 20th century America. Of course, Mead's entire body of work could be described as what we would now call the cultural and social construction of identity, but she becomes specifically interested in drugs as a tool to create a new culture. A culture that would transcend contemporary limitations and allow humanity to evolve beyond the terror of modernity, or as Gregory Bateson, Mead's second husband who would become an important figure in the counterculture of the 1960s put it simply in 1932, to enable building a new world. Geoffrey Gorer was soon to follow in these footsteps. In 1939, after training in anthropology with Mead and Bateson, Gorer, who had also experienced mescaline in Walter Benjamin's London experiments, immersed himself in Balinese trance culture and art, publishing Bali and Angkor. He claimed mescaline as a powerful new tool to create a truly universal science of consciousness. Soon after, however, the Second World War intruded, and with it perhaps the ultimate terror of modernity, atomic warfare. Mead and Bateson wound up working with the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. During the war, both assisted the Committee for National Morale, with Bateson joining the OSS where he would spend the rest of the war developing psychological warfare programs designed to counter the fascist, even modernist, world view. A view he called “man the mechanical puppet.” Later in the war, as defense turned to offense, Bateson regretted joining the OSS, foreshadowing the CIA's disastrous experiments with psychedelics. Despite these OSS connections, after the Second World war there was a dramatic turn by Mead, Bateson, and others to prevent the dangers of a mechanized, atomic world. These efforts included utopian visions of a world state, and a new culture liberating humanity through new kinds of freedom, freedom enabled by psychedelic drugs. For this reason, Breen claims 1945–1960 as one of the most radical eras of social experimentation in history. The newest psychedelic, LSD, played a key role. Humphry Osmond and Allen Ginsberg become well-known in this period, with early LSD researchers including Sidney Cohen, Betty Eisner and Oscar Janiger extolling the virtues of LSD. This work, facilitated by psychotherapy, was aimed at creating new kinds of enlightened consciousness and was claimed to help in treatment of conditions from alcoholism to homosexuality. In the latter case LSD offered both a cure for deviance and a tool allowing self-acceptance. Margaret Mead, despite her continued influence, was also the target of several FBI investigations into her sexuality as a result of the Lavender Scare associated with Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. While Breen does not speculate, the reader is left to wonder to what degree her commitment to utopian imaginaries of human identity, including gender identity, were compromised. LSD, like mescaline before it, was also used a psychotomimetic, creating schizophrenic symptoms and aiding in the analysis of the condition. Osmond enshrines this duality in correspondence with Aldous Huxley, famously writing “To fathom hell, or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.” As LSD became more popular outside of scientific and medical settings, this duality was to help create its undoing in the popular and political imagination. Breen also brings significant research to this turn to dystopia, accounting not only for the debacle of MK Ultra and other CIA funded programs, but bringing new light to the stories of Timothy Leary, John Lilly, and L. Ron Hubbard. Leary emerges here as an academic grifter seeking personal and professional advantage at every turn, indulging in innumerable affairs with students, drinking to excess even by the standards of the times, and promoting the popular use of LSD at any cost. Lilly, famous for his sensory deprivation experiments, conducts language training of dolphins using LSD under horrific conditions. And Hubbard cynically popularizes the new sciences of human consciousness, and his disdain for psychiatric treatment born of his own institutionalization, to create Scientology. By the mid-1960s dream was dead, utopian visions becoming nightmares. Maragret Mead is reduced to a figure of satire in the popular imagination. Gregory Bateson, on the other hand, becomes a sage of the early counter-culture, writing the introduction for Stewart Brand's The Whole Earth Catalog, and speaking out on the dangers of climate change years before anyone else. Like the expanding ripples of pebbles thrown into a still pond, a metaphor for society borrowed from Mead and her early subjects, Breen documents a diverse cast of characters who dreamed of a utopian future in the twentieth century. A future where psychedelic imaginations create new kinds of human consciouness. A future that was not realized yet in which the ripples are still spreading.

Tags