Originally published in 1964 ‘Green Medicine: The Search for Plants that Heal…’ is written by Margaret B. Kreig. This review is written from the 1st UK hardback edition, 1965. The book explores humanity’s recent botanical investigations in order to discern new sources of medicinal drugs. Kreig was a journalist and science writer and this book … Continue reading
Originally published in 1966, this review of ‘The Varieties of the Psychedelic Experience: The Classic Guide to the Effects of LSD on the Human Psyche’ by Robert Masters and Jean Houston is written from the Park Street Press 2000 edition. The authors, husband and wife, were both founding members of the Human Potential Movement, psychedelic … Continue reading
Originally published in 1957 ‘Mysticism Sacred and Profane – An Inquiry into some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience’ was written by Robert Charles Zaehner (1913-1974). The basis of the book is a refutation of Aldous Huxley’s claim that mescaline is able to produce a mystical experience in those who use the drug; set against a wider … Continue reading
Originally published in 1970 ‘Alice in Acidland – Lewis Carroll Revisited’ was written by the photographer and author Thomas Fensch. Thomas Fensch opens Alice in Acidland (1970) by postulating what the response to Lewis Carroll’s original Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) would have been had the book been published in 1970. Aside from the obvious … Continue reading
Originally published in France under the title ‘Les Tarahumaras’ (1947), ‘The Peyote Dance’ by Antonin Artaud describes the author’s experiences with Peyote and the Tarahumara in Mexico, in 1936. Written over twelve years and covering Artaud’s stay at a psychiatric hospital in Rodez, the book is an important work of drug literature, so far as … Continue reading
The following review of Alethea Hayter’s ‘Opium and the Romantic Imagination’ (1968) has been written by Mark Bromberg, and was originally published in Bellemeade Books. The review is republished on the Psychedelic Press UK by kind permission of the author. One of the most obvious effects of opium addiction on a writer’s powers is that … Continue reading
Originally published in 1963 ‘The Discovery of Love – A Psychedelic Experience with LSD-25’ written by Malden Grange Bishop, is typical, though with its own idiosyncrasies, of the LSD psychotherapy literature that was published in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As the title suggests, the context of Bishop’s single experience was in Psychedelic Therapy … Continue reading
Originally published in 1967 ‘The Private Sea – LSD and the Search for God’ by William Braden is, broadly speaking, an attempt to contextualise spiritual and religious readings of the psychedelic experience in regard to other apparently contingent social movements of the time. William Braden was a journalist who, in writing the book, applied several … Continue reading
Originally published in 1962 ‘My Self and I’, by American Thelma Moss, was released pseudonymously under the name Constance A. Newland. One of a number of books that came out of the psychotherapeutic application of LSD in the 1950s and also, in part, as a reaction to Aldous Huxley’s ‘The Doors of Perception and Heaven … Continue reading
Originally published in Britain, in 1957, ‘A Drug-Taker’s Notes’ by Richard Heron Ward describes 6 LSD sessions the author undertook between 1954-55, under the supervision of a medical psychiatrist only identified as Dr. X. The doctor was studying the effects both on herself and mentally ill patients, which corresponds to what LSD manufacturers Sandoz deemed … Continue reading
