The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Rigenbach.
What I have for you today is a few brief notes on a prominent, or perhaps I should say notorious
libertarian psychologist and a prominent libertarian psychiatrist, along with an observation or
Number two on what fundamentally is the connection between libertarianism and psychology.
The first of our two figures, Timothy Francis Leary, was born October 22, 1920 in Springfield,
Massachusetts.
He graduated from Springfield's once famous classical high school and then embarked on
a five-year undergraduate career that took him to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester,
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York and the University of Alabama, where
he graduated with a B.A. in psychology in 1943.
He then went west, earning an M.A. at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington in
1946 and a Ph.D. at the University of California in Berkeley, California in 1950.
His dissertation topic was The Social Dimensions of Personality, Group Structure and Process.
It is worth noting in passing at this point that of course the social dimensions of personality
cut in two different directions simultaneously.
On the one hand, how one interacts with others is in part a product of one's individual personality
traits.
On the other hand, individual personality traits can be influenced by one's interactions
with others.
This is a topic to which I'll return a little later.
Timothy Leary spent the 50s in the San Francisco Bay Area, first as an assistant professor
at the University of California, then as director of psychological research for the Kaiser Foundation
in Oakland.
At the end of the decade, he went back to Massachusetts and accepted a position as a
Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at Harvard. While in Cambridge, he began to evolve and formulate
a new theory of social interplay and personal behavior as a collection of stylized games.
Under the name transactional analysis, this theory was popularized a few years later by the
psychiatrists Eric Byrne and Thomas Harris in their best-selling books Games People Play and
I'm OK, You're OK.
Then, on a vacation trip to Mexico in 1960, at the age of not quite 40, Leary ate some
mushrooms he had obtained from a local witch doctor and had his first experience of a drug
called psilocybin.
He was never the same again.
He devoted much of the rest of his life to proselytizing for psychedelic drugs, particularly
LSD, which he believed to be one of the most beneficial chemical formulas ever devised
by human beings.
Inevitably this brought him into conflict with the modern prohibitionist American state,
and he spent several years behind bars.
I spent four years in 29 jails and prisons on four continents, Leary told me when I interviewed
him in 1976 for Reason Magazine.
All this for being in a car where someone else had, without my knowledge, less than
half an ounce of marijuana.
Unsurprisingly, such experiences touched off what might be called libertarian thoughts
in Leary's mind.
After many years of observing the political situation, Leary told me, and four years in
prison where you really see how the politics of a country goes, because a prison is the
The Best Place to Understand the General Social Climate
I've come to the conclusion that it's all gangs that control countries, states, blocs,
and so forth.
It's all like the mafia.
The best gang in the world, the most powerful and the most enlightened gangster group that's
controlling territory, is the US government.
They give you more freedom, more latitude and longitude, and I'm very pleased and proud
to say that I'm going to deal with them.
It doesn't mean I agree with them, it doesn't mean I follow all the ins and outs of policy,
but basically it's their turf.
I'm glad to be on their turf and I'll pay them the respect any gang leader demands.
As of the summer of 1976, Leary told me, I'm very much a libertarian.
When this interview ran in Reason in April of 1977, it created a bit of controversy within
from the Libertarian Movement and got Leary invited to deliver the keynote speech at the
1977 National Convention of the Libertarian Party, which was held in San Francisco over
Labor Day weekend of that year.
I was asked to introduce Leary to the assembled multitude, which I did.
Leary stressed his personal commitment to libertarian ideas once again, and he seems
is to have still felt that way a decade later, for in 1988 he held a fundraiser in Los Angeles
for L.P. presidential candidate Ron Paul.
And in 1993, only a few years before his death, when he wrote an introduction to a new edition
of his 1968 book, The Politics of Ecstasy, he listed libertarianism as one suggested
name for what he called the new post-political society that he believed the 60s revolution
created and continues to create in this country.
In the original edition of the book, the word libertarian hadn't appeared, but then it was
rather infrequently used in the America of 1968.
One year after the 1977 National LP Convention in San Francisco, where I had introduced Timothy
and the National LP Convention in Boston, also held over Labor Day weekend.
There I met a prominent libertarian psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz, whose works I had only recently
begun to read.
I think I had read The Myth of Mental Illness, Ceremonial Chemistry, The Second Sin, Heresies,
schizophrenia, psychiatric slavery, and The Theology of Medicine by the late summer of
1978, along with a couple of dozen magazine pieces that hadn't yet been collected into
books.
I had also read an interview with Szasz that had appeared in Reason Magazine.
I met him over a luncheon table at a restaurant not far from Boston's Copley Plaza Hotel.
Also seated around that table that noon were Roy Childs, Joan Kennedy Taylor, and Robert
Nozick, whom I was also meeting for the first time.
I no longer recall whether it was that day in Boston or over another restaurant meal
a few months later in San Francisco, again with Childs and Taylor at the table, that
Szasz told me about three books that had made an enormous impression on him when he was
a young man and influenced the entire subsequent course of his intellectual development.
The three books were Human Action by Ludwig von Mises, Philosophy in a New Key by Suzanne
K. Langer and Mind, Self and Society by George Herbert Mead, who taught philosophy, sociology
and theoretical psychology at the University of Chicago for more than 35 years and is now
widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of social psychology.
Society in a New Key by Langer will surprise no one who remembers Szasz's observation
that bodily illness is to mental illness as literal meaning is to metaphorical meaning.
And Human Action will surprise no one who has noted Szasz's firm insistence over the
years on the sort of society in which every individual is held fully responsible for his
or her actions.
The nature of Mead's influence is less immediately obvious, perhaps especially if one recalls
to mind this classic formulation of Zaza's radical commitment to methodological individualism.
There is no psychology, he famously wrote.
There is only biography and autobiography.
Zaza's own biography shows him born in Budapest on April 15, 1920, the same year as Timothy
Leary.
He moved to the United States when he was 18 and attended college and medical school
in this country.
After a few years in Chicago, he joined the faculty at the State University of New York's
Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse.
This was in 1956.
And essentially, he never left.
He is now Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at what is currently called the State University
of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse.
On income tax day, he celebrated his 91st birthday.
It is now more than half a century since his most famous, or should I say, infamous book
was first published.
A few months after that first publication, in July 1961, Szasz received a letter from
Cambridge, Massachusetts that read,
Dear Dr. Szasz, Your book arrived several days ago.
I've spent eight hours on it and realize the task and joy of reading it has just begun.
The Myth of Mental Illness is the most important book in the history of psychiatry.
I know it is rash and premature to make this earlier judgment.
I reserve the right later to revise and perhaps suggest it is the most important book published
in the 20th century.
It is great in so many ways.
Scholarship, clinical insight, political savvy, common sense, historical sweep, human concern,
and most of all for its compassionate, shattering honesty.
I have already contacted several of my colleagues and intend that everyone I meet will be exposed
to your work.
I am in charge of the first year graduate training at this center, and while I don't
Your text states most eloquently, convincingly, systematically what a group of us here have
been attempting to communicate.
I have in the past published extensively on diagnosis and have come to understand the
rituals and rules of that game.
In the last two years we have been attempting to apply the game conception to behavior change,
treatment or rehabilitation.
We have developed a philosophy, many rules and a new language for real education, that
is, helping people understand their games, planning new games, working out explicitly
the rules, rituals, goals, roles of the games they select.
I wonder if there is any chance that you could pay us a visit. I'll be in Cambridge until
July 25th and after August 23rd. If you are in New England this month, I hope we can expect
a visit. I should also like to invite you to come to Harvard on a consultant lecturer
basis for a couple of days in October, a day of consulting plus a department-wide lecture.
Travel expenses and a consultant fee will be available if you could arrange this trip.
I'll write again in more detail about your book, but in the meantime, please accept my
admiration and gratitude for what you have done for your profession and your times.
Sincerely Yours, Timothy Leary
Fifteen years later, Leary was able to report to me that I've known Thomas Szasz for many
years.
As a matter of fact, I invited him to come to Harvard.
It's the first time he ever came there when he was at Syracuse to give a lecture.
I've been an admirer and a supporter of his ideas for about 15 years.
And Szasz's relations with Leary, so far as I know, were always cordial thereafter.
It is perhaps useful at this point to recall that Leary's early theoretical work as a
psychologist was focused on the social dimensions of personality and that his approach to psychotherapy
stress the extent to which our social behavior resembles the playing of a set of stylized games.
Keep all this in mind as you consider the following passage from the works of Thomas Szasz.
We do not expect everyone to be a competent swimmer, golfer, chess player or marksman,
nor do we regard those who play games poorly as sick.
The activities that comprise being a student, parent, worker, etc. are in many ways similar
to the activities that comprise being a golfer or chess player. Yet we act as if we expected
everyone to play at his own life games competently and we regard those who play poorly at being
Asking Husband or Wife, Mother or Father, as Sick, that is, Mentally Ill.
They often chose somewhat different public issues to speak out on.
Szasz concerned himself with the involuntary imprisonment of non-violent patients in mental
hospitals.
Leary concerned himself with the potential of psychedelic drugs in therapy and in education.
Both men vigorously opposed the war on drugs, and both made memorable contributions to the libertarian tradition.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.