GRGR(3) - Pavlov: Ultraparadoxical

[David Morris]

(The "punchline" is at the end)
from:
http://www.drugtext.org/psychedelics/unger.htm

Drug-Associated Personality Change: A "New Concept" in Psychotherapy

    It is an intriguing historical accident that, on the one hand,
anthropological studies of the Native American Church (Peyotism)
consistently record the peyote-associated reformation of alcoholic and
generally reprobate characters (75), and, on the other hand, LSD has been
increasingly utilized in the treatment of the white man's "fire-water" ills.
LSD was first systematically administered to non-Indian alcoholics in order
to explore a putative similarity between the so-called model psychosis and
delirium tremens. Two independent undertakings along this line, one in the
U.S. and one in Canada, resulted in highly unexpected and sudden "cures"
(76).

    Investigators in Saskatchewan pursued this serendipitous result
aggressively. The outcome, with lately-evolved refinements in technique, has
been an explicitly formulated "new concept" in psychotherapy (77). The
following narrative, pieced together from Hoffer's statements at the Macy
LSD conference, describes the conditions under which the rapid change
phenomenon seems first to have occurred in sizeable numbers:

. . . we have what we call the "businessman's special," for very busy
people, the weekend treatment.... They come in because the police or
Alcoholics Anonymous or others bring them in. They come in on day one. They
know they are going to take a treatment, but they know nothing about what it
is. We take a psychiatric history to establish a diagnosis. That is on day
one. On day two, they have the LSD. On day three, they are discharged.
    Our objective [in using 200-400 gamma doses] is to give each patient a
particular LSD experience.
    The results are that 50 per cent of these people are changed [that is,
they stop drinking or are much improved].... As a general rule . . . those
who have not had the transcendental experience are not changed; they
continue to drink. However, the large proportion of those who have had it
are changed (78).


    The only other investigators to report a "weekend treatment" are Ball
and Armstrong (79). They describe a small series of "sex perverts," at least
two of whom had had, over a number of years, "a variety of forms of
psychotherapy, including psychoanalysis . . . [resulting in] no improvement
whatever." The large-dose LSD experience, however, is said to have had
"remarkable, long-lasting remedial effects" (80).
    MacLean and his co-workers in British Columbia, Canada have reported on
a series which included 61 alcoholics and 33 neurotics (personality trait
disturbance and anxiety reaction neurosis) (81). Each patient was carefully
and intensively prepared for the 400-1500 gamma, "psychedelic LSD-day"—which
was jointly conducted by a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a psychiatric
nurse, and a music therapist. Their follow-up data (median follow-up was for
9 months) were interpreted to yield a "much improved" or "improved" rating
for over 90 percent of the neurotics and 60 percent of the alcoholics, with
just under 50 percent of the alcoholics found at follow-up to have remained
"totally dry" (82). The results of this single LSD session with the
alcoholic cases seem most impressive, in view of the picture provided:

    Sargant has linked along an axis of abnormal "anger, fear, or
exaltation" such "abrupt total reorientations" in personality as attend
religious and political conversion experiences—as well as violent
abreactions in therapy, spontaneous or narcosynthetic. His explanatory
scheme derives directly from Pavlov—in the final analysis, sudden
alterations in behavior are attributed to "paradoxical" and
"ultraparadoxical" brain processes, and the like, induced by extreme emotion
(102).