Timothy Leary's mid-career shift: clean break or inflection point?

Timothy Leary, a cultural icon of the 1960s, has been largely overlooked in the history of psychology, partly because his career shift toward psychedelic experimentation and dismissal from Harvard in 1963 made him seem to have left the field. However, examining his full career and intellectual influences reveals unacknowledged continuities with psychology, suggesting he deserves a more prominent place in the discipline's history and that his work poses important challenges.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The psychologist Timothy Leary (1920-1996), an iconic cultural figure in the United States in the 1960s and afterward, has received comparatively scant attention in the history of psychology. This may be due to perceptions that, after a major career shift centering around his experimentation with psychedelic substances and his subsequent dismissal from Harvard in 1963, Leary parted company with the field. While there are several good reasons to adopt this view, examination of his entire career as well as his intellectual ancestry reveals unacknowledged continuities, suggesting that a more prominent place be accorded to him in the history of psychology, as well as to the challenges he poses.