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I BEGAN WORK WITH LSD as a facilitating agent in psychoanalysis in 1959. The work was exciting and interesting and led me to present a paper before this society. 1 This was soon followed by another to the Academy of Psychoanalysis. 2 These papers fell upon the psychoanalytic community with a dull thud. Reprint requests were roughly zero, but I had the good fortune to have my Academy paper discussed by Max Fink.
After a number of comments on my assertions as to what LSD would do, Dr. Fink noted that certain elements I had mentioned were testable by psycholinguistic analysis. He went on to say, "Dr. Dahlberg asserts that the effect of these changes in verbalizations is salutary. This is a most tenuous conclusion, since neither the criteria of efficacy, nor the methods of evaluation, nor the relation to control data are presented. There are at least two major changes in this treatment—the interpolation of a drug, and the extension of sessions … to many hours. Perhaps this latter element alone may be as potent in altering behavior as the administration of the drug." He then congratulated me on my enthusiasm and commended the techniques of experimental psychiatry to my attention.
In a later publication, 3 I cleverly answered one of Fink's points by saying, "The extension of time of the analytic session has been singled out as possibly accounting for some of the effects. However,