Prior to joining Harvard, Leary had made a name for himself as an expert in personality testing and theory, combining numerous metrics to develop a model of personality based on people’s situational behavioural strategies. Personality testing was booming in academia as well as in industry, with tests such as the Myers-Briggs, using introspective questionnaires to determine different personality ‘types’, being widely adopted in recruitment and management. But by the end of the 1950s, critics of the personality test grew more vocal, claiming it was a tool for the technocratic age, an unacceptable invasion of privacy and a means of policing nonconformity. William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), about the standardisation of the American workplace and its worker, implored readers to cheat on personality tests. An organisation could ask for labour in exchange for the worker’s salary, wrote Whyte, ‘but it should not ask for his psyche as well.’
During a mid-life crisis and facing wavering faith in his research, Leary’s first psilocybin trip on a visit to Mexico in 1960 was a revelation, offering an experience of selfhood that conventional personality diagnostics seemed unable to account for. Returning to Harvard, he set about reinventing his research under the auspices of the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The project’s board included Aldous Huxley, whom Leary had contacted after reading The Doors of Perception (1954), perhaps the most important postwar text on the psychedelic experience. Here Huxley proposed a theory, developed with the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, that drugs such as mescaline remove vestigial filters on the brain, widening perception and allowing users to transcend the limits of everyday consciousness. Huxley was best known for pointing to the perils of behavioural control in a technoscientific future in his novel Brave New World (1932). Yet, during the 1950s, he also went through his own conversion, as Nicolas Langlitz puts it in Neuropsychedelia (2012), ‘from cynical British intellectual to committed Californian mystic’. For Huxley and Osmond, ‘psychedelic’ drugs such as mescaline, psilocybin and LSD offered potential liberation from a brave new world of mind-manipulating technologies. As Osmond wrote to Huxley in 1957: ‘expand the psyche or become slaves of the machine’.
In ‘How to Change Behaviour’ (1962), Leary set out a vision for psilocybin therapy as a way of countering the rigid modalities of behaviour, or culturally determined ‘games’ that societies imposed. According to Leary and his colleagues, psilocybin allowed its users to experience consciousness as a multitudinous set of possibilities. He later wrote:
The first step is the realisation that there is more: that man’s brain, his 13-billion-celled computer, is capable of limitless new dimensions of awareness and knowledge. In short, that man does not use his head.
In 1962, Leary and several colleagues would establish the International Federation for Internal Freedom, which claimed in its manifesto:
We are aware that cultural structures (however libertarian their purpose) inevitably produce roles, rules, rituals, values, words and strategies which end in external control of internal freedom. This is the danger we seek to avoid.
Leary had entered Harvard trying to understand, map and diagnose the roles, rituals and values that shape interpersonal behaviour; he left arguing for the need to embrace a more complicated vision of selfhood that could not be contained in a series of personality types. The psychedelic experience was a fast-track to ‘jailbreaking the mind’ in a world where, he said, ‘objective science, automation, machine-like conformity, and political thought control’ threaten the survival of the individual.