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Psychedelic Birth: Bodies, Boundaries and the Perception of Pain in the 1970s

2020; Wiley; Volume: 32; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1468-0424.12471

1468-0424

Wendy Kline,

American Political and Social Dynamics

‘Why is psychedelic culture dominated by privileged white men?’ asks historian Mike Jay, referring to a recent study of psychedelic users who are more than likely to be college-educated white males.1 This appears logical, given the figureheads (such as Timothy Leary) who attained cult-like status half a century ago. Many today continue to view psychedelics as a symbol of the hedonism of the counterculture rather than a form of therapeutic treatment. Yet recent attention to the potential of psychedelic drugs (MDMA and psilocybin) to effectively treat mental health conditions such as PTSD has raised new interest in the history of psychedelics and spiritual growth. Despite the absence of women in the psychedelic narrative, attitudes about gender, pain and the body played a pivotal role in how spiritual transcendence was experienced and interpreted in 1970s America. Historians have remained relatively reticent about psychedelics and spiritual transformation, as they have about many aspects of what may be, according to Beth Bailey and David Farber, ‘our strangest decade’. Unlike scholarship on the 1960s, they argue, ‘historians have been slow to put the 1970s into the narrative of American history’.2 Michael Willard adds that ‘we continue to see the 1970s as the betrayal of the 1960s, as the time when America lost its innocence, or faith, or passion’. Yet many of the visions and goals articulated in the 1960s became reality for more Americans in the 1970s than they had in the previous decade. The challenge for historians lies in ‘figuring out how to take Seventies culture seriously’.3 This is particularly the case when analysing the role of women in the counterculture. As historian Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo argues, ‘hippie women… have long been ignored and marginalized, relegated to the sidelines of both the counterculture and the women's movement’.4 The growing interest in altered states of consciousness in the 1970s is an ideal launching point for exploring cultural meaning in the 1970s, as it embodies the struggle of a new generation to make sense of the physical and spiritual world around them. Two examples of individuals experiencing altered states of consciousness illustrate the intensity and variability of the experience. On 6 March 1973, Antonio, a thirty-two-year-old psychiatrist attempted to describe the unfathomable pain he had just experienced.5 ‘Out of nowhere the most intense pain imaginable started penetrating my hands like a laser beam or a nail’, he wrote. He could feel the ‘terrible, agonizing weight’ of the nail tearing into his flesh. The intense pain, in turn, triggered earlier memories of pain. The first was the severing of his umbilical cord at birth; the second, his circumcision as a medical student. And then, another pain started, one even more torturous. The skin at the edge of his fingernails started peeling off, little by little. The only thing that kept him from collapsing, ironically, was the sheer intensity of the pain; it did not allow room for anything else. ‘It felt as if I was suffering the pain of all mankind’, he reflected.6 Antonio's experience would not be surprising to literary scholar Elaine Scarry, who argued in 1985 that during intense moments of pain the ‘contents of consciousness’ are ‘obliterated’.7 In The Body in Pain, she posits a direct connection between levels of pain and an individual's sense of self. ‘It is the intense pain that destroys a person's self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe’, she explains.8 Pain forces the individual to completely dissociate from the corporeal body, something that Scarry and other academics perceived to be a traumatic experience. Another story of altered consciousness, however, challenges the notion that such dissociation was inherently traumatic. On August 2, 1973, after hours of pain, a young hippie by the name of Ellen found herself transformed. It began with music, as she asked her husband Phil to play the piano, thinking it might help soothe her. ‘While I am not an actual piano player’, Phil recalled, ‘some quiet music did seem to have a calming influence’.9 Ellen began to release the intense pain. ‘Once it started happening’ she wrote, ‘I forgot all about that other stuff and experienced a whole other level of consciousness that seemed eternal and timeless’. She later remembered that ‘the sense of relief and relaxation made it seem like I was melting. I remember my mouth hanging open, drooling, and feeling very warm and psychedelic and light-headed. Laying there, I felt One with everyone in the Universe’.10 Within months of each other, Antonio and Ellen perceived intense experiences of pain in very different ways. Both appeared to be in altered states of consciousness, either because of their pain, or in spite of their pain. What was happening and why? In order to explore the significance of their experiences, we have to put them in historical context. Antonio had swallowed 400 micrograms of LSD as part of a professional study and training programme at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Institute, one of approximately 116 clinical LSD studies funded by the National Institute of Mental Health in the USA.11 In this particular study, conducted at the Spring Grove State Hospital between 1970 and 1975, 108 mental health professionals volunteered to take between one and three high level doses of LSD and record their short- and long-term reactions to the drug. The average age of the volunteers was between thirty-nine and forty-one years of age, and two-thirds of them were either M.D.s or Ph.D.s. Eighty-six of the subjects were male; only twenty-two were female – a result of the decision among the psychedelic research staff to exclude women of childbearing age ‘in the remote possibility that there may be some danger’.12 This decision may have been a response to LSD studies conducted in the late 1960s on pregnant rats and hamsters to test for fetal abnormalities.13 A 1968 report delivered at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology suggested that LSD's effects ‘can be passed down through generations’ but emphasised that the data could not be applied to humans.14 Like many scientists engaged in psychedelic research in the late 1960s, however, they did not want to take any unnecessary risks. As LSD became a recreational drug of the counterculture, scientists rightly suspected that their research was in jeopardy and proceeded with caution. Yet their focus on middle-aged professional men was hardly unusual. It was not until the mid-1980s that a series of laws, policies and guidelines would emphasise diversity and inclusion in research subjects.15 Psychedelic researchers were firmly entrenched in a conservative climate in terms of sex and gender, despite their desire to challenge the traditional boundaries of medicine and science to include insights on personal transformation and spiritual transcendence. Thus, the MPRI professional study focused predominantly on men, though this gender imbalance was not discussed in the findings. The results were positive though somewhat inconclusive as to long-term effects. Two-thirds of the subjects experienced psychedelic ‘peak’ experiences. Antonio was one of them. His was an imagined pain, induced by a drug that altered his state of consciousness on that memorable March day. Ellen, on the other hand, had not taken any drugs during her August episode. Nine months pregnant, her pain stemmed from contractions she experienced while in labour. Though she felt ‘very warm and psychedelic and lightheaded’, her journey into an altered state provided her with a natural sense of pain relief. She was one of 700 hippies who lived in buses, tents, and a few houses on a thousand acres of property just outside of Summertown, Tennessee, in an intentional community known as ‘The Farm’. By 1973, The Farm was already well known, and a remarkable 15,000 visitors traipsed through the property that year alone, some to gawk, others seeking food, shelter, or a place to give birth. Due to the presence of self-trained midwives and a belief in the spiritual and transformative nature of birth (when done outside of the hospital), childbirth on The Farm became its own kind of psychedelic experience.16 Other than their altered states of consciousness, Antonio's and Ellen's experiences appear to share nothing in common. Antonio was part of a predominantly male scientific study conducted in a laboratory setting, while Ellen was one of a growing number of women seeking an alternative to hospital birth. Together, however, their stories suggest something deeper about the quest to infuse two professions – psychiatry and midwifery – with greater spiritual meaning at a time of great social upheaval.17 LSD researchers and hippie home-birth midwives, marginalised by both the mainstream and, later, historians, pushed the boundaries between science and spiritualism, between pain and pleasure. Yet there was something fundamentally different in the way Antonio and Ellen experienced and interpreted pain, even in an altered state of consciousness. Cultural assumptions about gender help to explain this difference. Studies suggest that women both experience and tend to report more pain than men. Yet they are ‘more likely to be less well treated’.18 This was a greater problem in the 1960s, when gender differences were even more pronounced. Prior to the women's health movement and the feminist demand for agency and validity in the doctor's office, the subjectivity of experienced pain seemed to support the assumption that women were indeed the weaker sex. If women were more fragile and emotional, then of course it was ‘all in their head’.19 Without the presence of objective biological indicators of pain – the only type of evidence valued in modern medicine – then subjective, experiential reports were irrelevant. But by the early 1970s, some scholars began to challenge this medical model and the presumed distinction between body and mind.20 As sociologist Gillian Bendalow argues, there was ‘a need to broaden out the definition of pain from the Cartesian proposition which inevitably acts to divorce mental from physical states and tends to attribute single symptoms to single causes’.21 Opponents to the Cartesian model suggested that psychological, cultural, and emotional factors could and did alter pain perception. Sociologist Irving Zola – no stranger to feminism, as he was married to noted women's health activist Judy Norsigian – argued that pain was ‘as much a cultural construct as a scientific one’.22 Anesthesiologist and medical ethicist Henry K. Beecher introduced the notion of a placebo effect, observing that, under certain circumstances, placebos could effectively relieve pain.23 As a result, historian Keith Wailoo notes, pain theory moved ‘deliberately, relentlessly, toward appreciating the power of the subjective, the mind, psychology, and perception in pain and its control’.24 The implications of this shift were enormous. Experiencing pain – whether through the intense contractions of labour or the potentially perilous journey of the psychedelic trip – took on new meaning and value. Pain could be transformative – a process, a spiritual journey, a path toward enlightenment. Yet not all pain was created equal; some voices continued to speak louder than others. As the authors of the Introduction of this special issue note, childbirth became a key focal point in the debate about pain. But natural childbirth advocates, even before the 1970s, stressed the extent to which pain stemmed less from the biology of birth and more from fear. One of the first advocates was Dr. Grantly Dick-Read, who published his first book, Natural Childbirth, in 1933. In that and his later 1944 publication, Childbirth Without Fear, he posited that pain in childbirth was not physiological, but was instead rooted in fear. The solution was not anesthesia but preparation and education. Over 95 per cent of women, he argued, are capable of experiencing childbirth without unbearable pain.25 The most effective way to reduce pain in childbirth without anaesthesia was to control the environment in which labour took place. Creating a setting to reassure labouring women that they were safe and getting them in a relaxed mindset would therefore minimise pain. Childbirth could be painless, even without the use of drugs. A testament to the unusual parallels between psychedelics and childbirth, the ‘set and setting’ principle emerged not from birth reformers, but from LSD research. It was introduced by Timothy Leary in the early 1960s to explain what made psychedelic drugs different from other types of medicine. The actual effect of psychedelic drugs such as LSD depended on two things, Leary explained. First, it was contingent upon the set of the person having the experience – ‘his personality, preparation, intention and expectation’. Second, it relied on the setting – physical, social and cultural (where the experience took place, with whom and in what type of environment).26 An individual's perception of pain and pleasure and the ability to experience spiritual transformation and altered consciousness was entirely contingent upon set and setting, according to psychedelic researchers.27 Thus, if we return to the stories of Antonio and Ellen, we can begin to see the extent to which each believed that they had chosen a mechanism toward spiritual enlightenment through pain. While the vehicle towards transformation differed, the process was surprisingly similar. And they were not alone. Through their stories, and those of other hippie home-birthers (primarily female) and psychedelic psychiatrists (primarily male), we are able to track how two different types of alternative practitioners sought to reshape and redefine their professions. Three themes are apparent in these stories: the fluidity of boundaries, out-of-body experiences, and cosmic unity. They appear in two very different contexts: a hippie commune and a psychiatric hospital. Together, they illustrate a shared desire to find new pathways to spiritual transformation and enlightenment in order to transcend emotional and physical pain. While The Farm was located in Tennessee, its founders were firmly grounded in California's counterculture. Most were followers of Stephen Gaskin, who had been teaching creative writing and semantics at San Francisco State College in the 1960s. By the end of the decade, he began offering a course through the Experimental College called ‘Monday Night Class’, a series of lectures covering everything from meditation to discussions about politics, religion and psychedelics. The course reflected the experimentation and syncretism of the countercultural 1960s. ‘When we first got the class together we were like a research instrument, and we read everything we could on religion, magic, superstition, ecology, extrasensory perception, fairy tales, collective unconscious, folkways, and math and physics’, Gaskin recalled. ‘And we began finding things out as we went along about the nature of the mind’.28 By 1969, this class had grown to several thousand people, many of whom began to see Gaskin as their spiritual teacher. ‘The idea was to compare notes with other trippers about tripping and the whole psychic and psychedelic world’, wrote Gaskin, by then heavily caught up in the San Francisco countercultural scene. Psychiatric research on LSD and other psychoactive substances had been on the increase over the past decade, as scientific studies suggested their therapeutic potential.29 Gaskin and his Monday Night followers also believed in the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, but in a different context. According to Gaskin, psychedelics served as a catalyst to expand human consciousness and attain greater spiritual awareness. Thus, drugs (initially LSD, but then natural substances peyote and psilocybin) were a regular part of Monday night class, as well as Sunday Morning Services (standing meditations) held before sunrise in Sutro Park. According to one follower, ‘Sunday Service was considered an ideal place to trip – a peaceful oasis in time, where the energy was dependably high, the vibes good, and of course, there was Stephen – tripping guide extraordinaire’.30 In 1970, Gaskin was invited to deliver a series of lectures at schools and churches across the country, and over 200 of his followers decided to join him in school buses for this so-called ‘Astral Continental Congress’, a call for a spiritual and social revolution. The Caravan, as it came to be called, generated more and more media attention as its collection of school buses wound their way through forty-two states spreading the inchoate messages of peace, spiritual, and social revolution to students and churchgoers. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Caravan was the eleven births that took place on buses en route. The first birth happened in a parking lot at Northwestern University while Stephen was lecturing inside an auditorium. By the end of the trip, a core group of women, under the leadership of Ina May Gaskin, had become the designated midwives, teaching themselves along the way. At the end of the tour, Gaskin and his followers decided to purchase land in Tennessee and create a commune on a thousand acres. Once settled, Ina May Gaskin and a few other women established a more formal practice of midwifery, consulting the local doctor who regularly delivered the nearby Amish babies at home. As the population grew (up to 1,500 in 1982, with about 14,000 visitors per year), so did the number of births. Over 2,500 babies have been born on The Farm by these midwives, whose favourable statistics (including a 1.8 per cent cesarean section rate) caught the attention of consumers and birth practitioners around the world.31 Many more births have been affected by Ina May's home birthing philosophy than those born on The Farm. Her book, Spiritual Midwifery, a guide to birthing for consumers and birth practitioners published on The Farm, has sold over half a million copies, been translated into six languages, and is still in print. Ellen's story was one of over seventy birth stories in the book that introduced ordinary readers to the concept of out-of-hospital birth. From the very first edition of the book in 1975 to its most recent printing in 2004, these stories have inspired many readers to rethink how and where their children should be born. In contrast to the standard descriptions of the agony of childbirth, birth stories published in Spiritual Midwifery were more likely to focus on the ecstasy. They also utilised the same hippie vocabulary used to describe drug experiences. ‘I laid down on the bed and began to rush and everything got psychedelic’, described Mary of her labour on The Farm. ‘I began having beautiful, rushing contractions that started low, built up to a peak, and then left me floating about two feet off the bed’, she continued. As her contractions intensified, they became more pleasurable. ‘It felt like I was making love to the rushes and I could wiggle my body and push into them and it was really fine’. Whether or not Mary's experience accurately represented a typical birth on The Farm, it became the standard to aim for, and was highlighted in the book as ‘a good description of how to handle the energy of the rushes of childbirth’.32 It was an intensely physical and emotional experience, and thereby an opportunity for spiritual growth. With the right psychic tools, Farm hippies believed, energy could be channeled into pleasure rather than pain. Repeated references to psychedelic states during labour underscored the connection – whether literal or metaphorical – that Farm birthers perceived between the two. ‘I felt higher than I ever had in my life. It was such a heavy spiritual experience, and so much fun. In between rushes I'd laugh at how telepathic it was’, wrote midwife Carol Nelson.33 In the proper setting, physical boundaries between the self/body and the external world could melt away. ‘I was somewhere on the astral plane, feeling all the forces of the Universe, it felt like, pounding my body’, another wrote of her labour, adding that ‘I flashed on wild stallions, thunder and lightning, and the ocean. I felt like my brain and upper body were separate from the rest of me, and were looking down on the action’.34 ‘I found myself in a beautiful place with a green field and a house. It was a place I'd never seen before. I could still tell my body was contracting, but I was detached from it. I told Mary Louise what happened and she said she'd been doing that contraction and had been able to feel it all’.35 Recent studies point to evidence that validates out-of-body experiences (OBEs) as a ‘known and recognizable phenomenon’ rather than illusory. Interestingly, current scholars consider the existence of out-of-body experiences during childbirth as an indication of trauma, rather than as a coping mechanism or an expression of joy. Scholars perceive descriptions of women floating out of their bodies, observing the birth from above, as a form of dissociation or disembodiment, signifying current or past trauma.36 This was not what was being described in Spiritual Midwifery. In this context, birth was truly a communal experience – not just witnessed by others, but felt by others as well. This is part of what made it transformative. ‘We kept passing the energy between us, and Mary Louise knelt near my legs and Carol and Edward were on either side of me’, wrote another woman in labour. ‘I'd rush and the energy would move up their spines and they'd arch their backs and straighten as they'd rush’.37 Birth, in this setting, provided a ‘contact high’ for its participants that could guide them all towards greater spiritual awareness. ‘Maureen's birth was a very psychedelic experience for Joseph and me’, wrote midwife Mary Louise. ‘She seemed to be filling us with her consciousness’.38 Birth provided, in the words of psychologist Abraham Maslow, a peak experience – those ‘powerful moments of clarity, joy, or religious ecstasy’ that he wrote about in his influential 1964 volume, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences.39 Maslow described peak experiences as ‘rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect upon the experimenter’.40 Spiritual birth also strengthened the maternal infant bond, according to its advocates. ‘I couldn't believe the strong bond I felt for my new baby and the overwhelming maternal instinct’, wrote one new mother. She described the first moments with her newborn son as ‘paradise’; she was ‘mindblown’ by his beauty and her love for him. Her description takes on a decidedly psychedelic tone. ‘The trees and the early morning light just flashed and reverbed like a strobe-light, and for several days I would have a flashback at every dawn and sunset. I was ecstatic for two weeks’, she wrote.41 ‘transcendence of the subject-object dichotomy, exceptionally strong positive affect (peace, tranquility, serenity, bliss), a special feeling of sacredness, transcendence of time and space, experience of pure being, and a richness of insights of cosmic relevance’.42 Though he was referring to the experience of LSD subjects, cosmic unity – or ‘oceanic ecstasy’, as Grof sometimes called it – was a prevalent descriptor in Spiritual Midwifery birth stories. ‘We were riding the rushes like a surfer rides the waves’, wrote Edward of his wife's labour. ‘The energy would swell up and Janet's eyes would grow deeper until it seemed like I could look through them like peepholes, and see the vastness of the cosmos out beyond her pupils; endless space’.43 Ellen ‘experienced a whole other level of consciousness that seemed eternal and timeless’ during her labour. ‘Laying there, I felt One with everyone in the Universe’, she wrote.44 Another experienced a sense of cosmic unity after her daughter was born, writing: ‘Her eyes opened right away and it looked like the Universe being unfolded before my eyes’.45 In the countercultural context, then, childbirth became a community event, a source of spiritual awakening and transcendence, and even a psychedelic experience. This phenomenon took root in Northern California as a natural extension of Stephen Gaskin's teachings. As the practice traveled from the hills of San Francisco to the buses on the Caravan and on to Summertown, Tennessee, it gained new meaning and significance. What started as an experiment in alternative birthing became an established set of practices, a blending of spiritual theories, trial and error, and medical advice. It was far from mainstream, though media coverage and the publication of Spiritual Midwifery did put alternative midwifery on the map. More was needed, however, to counteract the claims that what was happening on The Farm was risky and selfish, privileging the desires of the mother over the safety of the child. To understand how alternative birth continued to gain credence, we need to turn to the emerging theories of psychiatry. LSD was first synthesised in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who was searching for a drug to stimulate circulation for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. Initially, LSD was shelved, as animal testing failed to demonstrate any circulatory effects. But in April of 1943 Hofmann mysteriously returned to the drug, intrigued by its chemical structure. This time, he accidentally absorbed some of the chemical through his skin and experienced ‘unusual sensations’, perceiving an ‘uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors’.46 Hoffman's discovery launched a revolution in ‘psychedelic therapy’ as a form of psychiatric treatment. From 1949 to 1966, Sandoz shipped investigational samples under the trade name Delysid, free of charge to researchers and therapists.47 LSD could be used as ‘a kind of unconventional training tool’ that could ‘provide psychiatrists, psychologists, students, and nurses the opportunity to spend a few hours in the world of their patients’.48 The drug, Sandoz argued, could be used to treat schizophrenia and anxiety, as well as ‘to induce model psychoses of short duration in normal subjects, thus facilitating studies on the pathogenesis of mental disease’.49 Stanislav Grof was a medical student working in the psychiatry department at Charles University in Prague when a shipment of LSD first arrived from Sandoz. Grof was intrigued, and agreed to take 150 micrograms of LSD as one of the earliest Czech volunteers for such a study. ‘What happened to me was enormous, and seemed like the beginning of a new life’, he said later.50 Within a few hours of ingesting the drug, his entire conception about the human psyche and the role of psychoanalysis was turned upside down. ‘I couldn't believe how much I learned about my psyche in those few hours’, he recalled. He was ‘hit by a radiance that seemed comparable to the epicenter of a nuclear explosion’. The explosion ‘catapulted’ him out of his body. ‘At an inconceivable speed my consciousness expanded to cosmic dimensions’.51 The timing was fortuitous, for Grof was in the midst of an existential crisis. Like many psychiatrists in Europe and the USA in the 1950s, he was inspired by Freudian analysis. Psychoanalytic theory, he believed, offered ‘seemingly brilliant explanations for a variety of mysterious problems – the symbolism of dreams, neurotic symptoms, the psychopathology of everyday life, insights into religion, sociopolitical movements, art, and many others’.52 The problem was the disconnect between theory and practice. The results of psychoanalysis were extremely limited, he believed, and took massive amounts of time and money. ‘I had great difficulty coming to terms with this situation’, Grof reflected. ‘To become a psychoanalyst, one had to study medicine. And in medicine, if we really understand a problem, we are usually able to do something pretty dramatic about it’. He needed evidence. According to psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, past president of the American Psychiatric Association and author of Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry, this has been the Achilles heel of the profession from the start. Did mental illness lie within the mind, or within the brain? ‘Oncologists can touch rubbery tumors, pulmonologists can peer through a microscope at strings of pneumonia bacteria, and cardiologists have little trouble identifying the yellowish plaques of artery-clotting cholesterol’, he wrote. ‘Psychiatry, on the other hand, has struggled harder than any other medical specialty to provide tangible evidence that the maladies under its charge even exist’, he continued.53 Psychiatry suffered the same challenges that pain did; how was it possible to prove it was real, given its subjectivity and the lack of tangible evidence? Grof agreed. Over the next fifteen years he would personally conduct over 2,000 psychedelic sessions, at first in Prague, and then at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Institute in Catonsville, MD.54 His observations convinced him that Freud's study of human personality was only the tip of the iceberg. LSD had changed everything, demonstrating the inadequacy of the existing theoretical frameworks to explain human personality. Grof proposed what he called ‘a new Cartography of the human psyche’. LSD was a different kind of drug. It was not causing something, per se. Everyone reacted differently, and the experience could be different every time, for every person. Instead, he argued, LSD was a catalyst for psychological processes (an argument also made by Stephen Gaskin). It was not ‘producing artificial experiences by interacting with the brain.