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During the last two years this writer has participated in the psychiatric administration of D-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) to more than forty psychotherapy patients and volunteer subjects. Each has submitted subsequently a written account of the episode, as experienced.
This paper deals only with one particular aspect of these protocols—the frequent occurrence of feelings of intense beauty and of creative originality.
The esthetic experience, the absolute conviction of creative certainty that so frequently occurs in our subjects’ responses to LSD, is perhaps one of the most intriguing and provocative of all the problem areas opened up by lsd research.
One subject, a psychologist, Dr. P., writes, “… having always had difficulty with myopia as well as limited color vision, I now found myself describing color and form in a most unusual detail. I was able to look into the heart of a blossom and see the most minute changes and alterations in structure and movement. It was simply a feast of the senses and as I turned to observe people and broader aspects of the scene I was enraptured by a series of tableaus which were similar to paintings… I observed… in another, a Breughel painting in which the colors and shapes astounded me by their clarity… I felt a great surge of perceptual power and said ‘I Breughel them and now I un-Breughel them’.”
Another subject, Miss Z., a young graduate student at U.C.L.A., writes, “… everywhere I looked, the objects and people settled themselves into the symmetry, color and unity of a painting. I looked at the