IVIV LSD?

[Doug Millison]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html
[. . .] Jung soon found himself in opposition not just to Freud but  
also to most of his field, the psychiatrists who constituted the  
dominant culture at the time, speaking the clinical language of  
symptom and diagnosis behind the deadbolts of asylum wards. Separation  
was not easy. As his convictions began to crystallize, Jung, who was  
at that point an outwardly successful and ambitious man with a young  
family, a thriving private practice and a big, elegant house on the  
shores of Lake Zurich, felt his own psyche starting to teeter and  
slide, until finally he was dumped into what would become a life- 
altering crisis.

What happened next to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other  
scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been  
characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the  
underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a  
transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring  
the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was  
then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by  
troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of  
some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own  
words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”

He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation  
with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He  
described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened  
them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava.  
“I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall  
apart.”

Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he  
had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in  
his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick  
streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational  
self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his  
conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to  
show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his  
wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in  
a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually  
induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In  
order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’  
” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I  
knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found  
himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of  
potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by  
both lunatics and great artists.

Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black  
journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing  
in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book  
detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a  
vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking  
place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled  
205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued,  
staggeringly detailed paintings.  [. . .]