The Taproot Podcast - Part 4: A Psychohistory of American Psychology Part 4: Too Fuzzy, Too Soft, Too Big

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

In 1960, two Harvard professors took psilocybin and accidentally broke the boundaries of American psychology. What happened next is the story of a road not taken. In Episode 4 of Psychotherapy on the Couch, Joel Blackstock explores the wild, lost era of the 1960s and 70s—a brief window when the psychological establishment dared to investigate the "unmeasurable" depths of human consciousness. We trace the divergent paths of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), the CIA’s dark experiments with mind control (MKULTRA) and remote viewing (the Stargate Project), and the "horseshoe theory" of consciousness where neuroscientists and mystics face the exact same unsolved mysteries. But this era of exploration didn't last. We break down how the Reagan Revolution, the gutting of the social safety net, and the creation of the DSM-III brutally slammed this door shut. Discover how American psychology traded the human soul for strict billing codes, managed care, and the illusion of total, mechanical objectivity. If you've ever felt that modern therapy is missing a sense of meaning, spirituality, or depth, this episode explains exactly when—and why—we engineered those things out of the system.   #psychology history, timothy leary, ram dass, psychedelics in therapy, mkultra, cia stargate project, remote viewing, dsm-3 history, reaganomics mental health, history of psychiatry, psychotherapy podcast, consciousness, terence mckenna, mental health crisis, cognitive behavioral therapy, adam curtis style, sociology, cultural critique, taproot therapy, 

It's very simple You're soft Laughing on There's the most You're singing something in me Your Great mistake It's very simple Gestalt will emerge

They will come to the surface Or is the most important Gestalt will emerge first We don't have to dig alafroid Into the deepest unconscious We become aware of the obvious Obvious. We understand the obvious. Everything is there. And the neurotic is a person who doesn't see the obvious. Hey guys, it's Joel, and welcome to Part 3 of the Psychohistory of American Psychology.

In 1960, two professors at Harvard University began giving psilocybin to graduate school students. Their names were Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. They had impeccable credentials. Leary had developed the Leary Interpersonal Circumplex. and I'm still used today as a diagnostic tool, and Alpert was a promising young faculty member with appointments in four departments. And they were not fringe characters. They were establishment figures.

What happened to them over the next decade would prefigure everything that followed an American psych, the opening towards something larger, the institutional backlash, the exile to the margins, the commodification of what remained, and ultimately the foreclosure of questions that the field was not equipped to answer.

It would be similar to the falling out between Jung and Freud, similar to what the Woont lab did to William James, and also similar to what would happen in the 1980s with the biomedical and cognitive behavioral revolution. Tim Leary would become a countercultural icon, a fugitive, a prisoner, and eventually a character of himself, remembered mostly as the man who told America to turn on, tune in, and drop out. He was a serious figure at one point, but now he's not associated with anything serious. He's just kind of like the LSD guy that people are going to roll their eyes on. And, you know, Richard Alpert would go to India. He had meet a guru, and he would change his name to Ram Dass,

and spend the rest of his life teaching psychology that academic departments couldn't really accommodate. And their divergent past revealed something that's sort of interesting, as an extended metaphor for the 1960s and 70s in retrospect. You know, American psychology was reaching towards something, but it couldn't grasp it, and the tools were inadequate at the time to be able to explain what it was. You know, maybe they always will be. And the institutional structures were hostile towards whatever that thing was. And the questions being asked exceeded the methodology that was available at the time to be able to measure and answer them.

And yet those questions didn't go away. They went underground. And they emerged in strange forms in CIA. research programs and consciousness institutes funded by wealthy seekers and the work of independent researchers operating outside academic respectability in a counterculture that would be absorbed and commodified but never fully extinguished in America that built during this time and this episode is about the road not taken it's about a psychology that almost left the couch and became part of american life and it's about a phenomenon that is maybe too soft or too fuzzy or too big to measure

too complicated, too layered, and one that blinds us when we look at it. And what happens when a field is defined by excluding everything that it can't measure. It's about tension between subjective and objective discovery and the possibility that this tension is not a problem to be solved, but a polarity to be held. And it's also about how all of this was swept away when the Reagan Revolution arrived, when the social safety net was gutted, and when managed care captured mental health, and when psychology retreated into the narrow efficiency

that would define the next four decades. But before we follow Leary and Alpert on their divergent quests, we need to understand something about the apparatus that they were born into. We need to understand what made American psychology so hostile to what they discovered. And for that, we need, again, the tools given to us, by the historian Theodore Porter. I go into businesses every day, and it's been my experience. These machines can be a metaphor for whatever's on people's minds.

Because they're afraid of computers? Yes. This machine is frightening to people, but it's made by people. People aren't frightening? It's not that. It's more of a cosmic disturbance. This machine is intimidating because it contains infinite quantities of information, and that's threatening it, because human existence is finite.

But isn't it Godlike that we've mastered the infinite? The IBM 360 can count more stars in a day than we can in a lifetime. But what man laid on his back counting stars and thought about a number? No, Porter has spent his entire career studying a paradox that explains a lot about American psychology. In his work, Trust in Numbers, Porter asks this question. Why do some disciplines rely so heavily on quantification while others don't? And the intuitive answer is that quantification reflects scientific maturity, that fields become more nuanced, they become more numerical as they become more rigorous. That's the guess.

But Porter's research in his books, which I'd recommend reading him, especially trust in numbers or numbers in the asylum, they're really good books. But he makes a very good case that quantification is not the practice of strong discipline. because there's a self-evidence that makes them not really need the numbers. You can see things that may not be quantifiable, but if you can see them, you can agree on them. And, you know, these disciplines that are confident in their knowledge don't do what psych and softer sciences do. And it's the practice of weak disciplines, desperate for legitimacy, to actually quantify things or overly quantify them, exclude things that can't be quantified. And when a field lacks internal consensus, when its practitioners do not.

trust each other's judgment when external authorities question you know validity of field that's when numbers become necessary numbers are what you reach for when you have nothing else to offer metrics and so consider the contrast you know physics does not need elaborate numerical systems to convince people it's real you know physicists can point to the bomb or to the rocket or to the electrical grid and the results speak but psychology has been fighting for legitimacy since William James established the first American laboratory in 1875. It's never achieved consensus on basic questions. What is mental illness?

What causes it? What heals it? The competing schools, you know, as we looked at in episode two, they gave incompatible answers that were based on the psychology of the founders and the psychology of the followers. And so psychology has reached again for numbers, for instruments for the appearance of precision that conceals the absence of understanding. You know, the IQ test was one instrument, and the symptom checklist would become another, and the neuroimaging studies and the genetic screenings and the hunt for biofactors,

biomarkers, you know, the outcome measures and treatment protocols of all of these are attempts to produce the appearance of scientific rigor in a field that has never achieved that thing. And this is not a condemnation, it's just an analysis. And the diagnosis matters because it explains what happened when American psychology in the 1960s encountered a phenomenon that truly exceeded its ability to measure. And when Leary and Alpert began their psilocybin research, they weren't rebels. They were part of the apparatus. They were doing exactly what the apparatus had trained them to do.

Science. They were designing studies. They were collecting data. They were publishing results. And the problem was that the data collected didn't fit the framework. that psychology had built to contain it. But these people were studying something. They wouldn't stop studying.

And so they had to be put outside of the system. And so the psilocybin experience, you know, people who were taking these mushrooms that Leary had encountered in Mexico, you know, it wasn't measurable, but it was still profound and had a measurable effect, even if it wasn't predictable and even if it wasn't,

allowed. And I'm not really a user of psilocybin. I'm writing a history of the profession. I'm not really into that. If you are, that's fine. But I don't want to make it sound like this episode is about making a case that psychology should have retreated into psychedelic drugs or into sort of a belief in supernaturalism and magic. That is a misunderstanding about these guys. And that's part of why I'm doing the series like this. You know, so but Porter's Insight, you know, at this period, it tells us exactly how that apparatus would respond. It would exclude what it could measure, and it would define the unmeasurable as not our business,

and it would protect its fragile legitimacy by narrowing its scope, which every time psychology encounters a problem of reproducibility or the field to agree on something, it tries to solve that with bureaucracy and exclusion, which hasn't really worked. And it's something that I think we're starting to see at the top levels of academia fall apart. It doesn't really affect the boots on the ground people like me.

We still have to do the old thing. But this is what happened to every attempt to expand psychology beyond the narrow ban that insurance companies would eventually reimburse and that academics preferred to study as a kind of scientism, but not really a science. And that weakness that measures becomes this weakness that excludes. And the story begins, as many American stories do with a substance. In 1960, you know, Tim Larry is on vacation in Coronavaca, Mexico, when a colleague introduces him to psilocybin mushrooms. And the experience, which Leary would later write, was the deepest religious experience of his life.

And he was essentially an atheist and died an atheist, but he saw, you know, a religious experience. And he returned to Harvard convinced that he had stumbled onto something that psychology couldn't ignore. It was going to change the world. I've been a psychologist for 15 years. Right. I've come to the sorry conclusion that psychology wasn't doing much to solve the emotional or the mental problems of the human race, and particularly the American people. So I went to Mexico, and a friend of mine who was an anthropologist told me about a method

which had been used by the Indians in Mexico, the medicine and the priests, before the white man came. They used mushrooms. They're called sacred mushrooms. and he told me that they grew. They still grow in the mountains near Mexico City. So one afternoon, a sunny Saturday afternoon, six years ago, he brought over a bag of these mushrooms, and I ate seven of them. And I learned more about psychology, about the human mind,

about the human situation in the five hours after eating these mushrooms. And I had... They had a five-hour effect. Five-hour effect, yeah. I learned more in those five hours than I had learned... studying, doing research in psychology, and treating people as a psychotherapist. And Larry wasn't a mystic. He was a clinical psychologist with, you know, reputation for rigorous research. And he has inter-personal circumplex and a lot of other metrics that he had were respected

as this tool for mapping personality dynamics in an article about that on our blog. And he understood, you know, the scientific method. And he believed that psilocybin's, you know, the experience of that could be studied systematically. That was actually one of the ways that Leary was able to control his experience in prison is when he was arrested, he had written the intake forms, the psychology screening. And so when he was taking it as a prisoner, he knew exactly what to say to get what he wanted. This isn't a biography of these guys. It's only when they're relevant. So I'll try and curb my asides.

But, you know, that Harvard psilocybin project began in 1960. And the methodology was really unusual. Leary believed that set and setting, the mindset. set of the participant in the environment in which the experience occurred were as important as the substance itself. We thought this is the mechanism of action here is not just the drug. It's the in the measurable effect of the environment. And so this meant that the controlled laboratory environment might actually distort the

phenomenon being studied. It also meant that researchers should take the substance alongside their subjects to understand from the inside what they were observing, you know, from the, outside. So it meant that if you hadn't taken psilocybin, they didn't think you should research it because it was giving these people an experience that you had to have subjective experience with to understand. It was taking you into a part of the subcortical brain tearing down, you know, we think these sensory gates that filter out all of these things that we are not supposed to experience and and opening them up.

And there was no way to explain to someone what that was like. It could only be experienced in order for it to be studied. So that's epistemologically radical, you know, like William James. This standard scientific methodology required observer detachment. Leary was arguing that certain phenomena could only be understood through participation and that the observer had to become the observed. And Richard Alpert joined the project and, you know, he quickly became Leary's closest collaborator. They became friends, but a friendship that always had a profound rivalry. They thought different when they were interested in the same thing. And the early results were pretty striking.

You know, prisoners, which is a population that there's a lot of money going into how to manage them, how to make it cheaper to manage prisons. When they receive psilocybin in supportive settings, you know, they showed this dramatically reduced recidivism. They would actually benefit from the time in prison where they had been treated with psilocybin and they wouldn't come back. And divinity students who were studying theology experienced a new profound way to end. interact with religious literature, not just their own, but across all culture. You know, some kind of breakthrough where they said that they had heightened understanding of what it was that they were studying across many religions. And, you know, something was happening that the, you know,

excess, the existing psychological framework couldn't really explain or had a hard time talking about. But the institutional resistance was immediate and fierce. And by the night, By 1963, Leary and Alpert had been dismissed from Harvard. And the official reasons were procedural, failure to meet classes, giving substances to undergraduates. The real reason was that they had crossed a line. You know, the academy couldn't tolerate. It was kind of a, yeah, you broke a rule that we didn't think we have to write down because we hadn't really thought of it. But now that you've done it, this is against the rules and you're fired, you know, type thing.

And they were suggesting that consciousness itself could be transformed. at the root or the source, you know, what William James would call the stream, mouth of the stream. And that exceeded any therapeutic invention at the time, was kind of what they were asserting. They were suggesting that the boundaries of the self were more permeable than psychology assumed.

And if you took psilocybin in a beautiful field while somebody is singing and there's a drum circle and you're reading poetry, you're going to have a different experience than if you took psilocybin, same person, same drug, in a dirty dungeon in a basement with a, you know, flickering, you know, mercury vapor light or something. The environment was relevant. And these suggestions threatened a lot that American psychology was building in the 60s.

The field had spent decades establishing its scientific credentials. And if it rejected William James' radical empiricism in favor of behaviorist objectivity, then it had to be taken seriously by other sciences. And now two Harvard professors were claiming that you had to eat mushrooms to understand the mushroom. And this thing looked kind of like a cult. And so Porter would recognize this immediately. You know, a weak discipline can't afford heresy.

So a field desperate for legitimacy can't tolerate members who undermine that legitimacy. And so the immune system had to activate. You know, the ego itself in the mind is kind of an immune system that represses all of this other information about ourselves. But bureaucracy is sort of the immune system of organizational wholeness. It seeks to have large systems have entropy by sort of cleaving and pruning things that are divergent. And that's just the nature of the thing. It's not really good or bad. Sometimes it has a bad effect, but it's just an amoral, inevitable process of a large system. And, you know, the exile of Leary and Alpert,

that's inevitable. But their exile did not make those questions, away and only pushed them outside of the institution. So what happened next revealed these two poles of response to the unmeasurable or the unquantifiable. And these two poles would define the fault line in American psych for the next 60 years. You know, Leary became a prophet. He got exiled from Harvard and he established research centers in Mexico and then at Millbrook and a state New York and the research grew increasingly informal. The boundaries between experiment and lifestyle increasingly blurred. You just sort of became a hippie. And Leary became a celebrity, a spokesperson for

the counterculture, a figure who embodied the excesses of the era. You know, this voice telling and everyone turn on, tune in, drop out, captured something real about alienation. It gave people ability to turn alienation and rejection into a choice or a lifestyle. And it also represented an abandonment of the systemic inquiry that had characterized his early work. You know, Lerie became more interested in performance than in research. And he became a showman, kind of like Fritz Perils, to sell modality. And he lost credibility with people who are concerned trolling, you know, because of that. And more interested, he did become more interested in provocation. than an understanding. And I think that is where he left the scientific community. But before that, the scientific community left him. And, you know, he ran for governor of California, which is kind of a joke. He got arrested repeatedly. He escaped from prison. He fled to Algeria, then Afghanistan, then Switzerland. And he was eventually recaptured and spent years in federal custody. You know, he'd be a great person to show up in like a Metal Gear solid video game or something, you know, crosses that timeline.

but the in locations but you know the timeline of his death in 1996 you know leary had become this cautionary tale the establishment pointed to him as proof that psychedelic research led nowhere good that the counterculture remembered him fondly i guess but they couldn't point any lasting contributions and his early insight that consciousness could be systematically transformed had been lost in the noise of his later celebrity in the chaos of the culture and this is one path you know trying to remain within the Western scientific framework, trying to find a way to make the unmeasurable, measurable, and failing. And Leary failed partly because of his own excesses, but also because the framework itself

couldn't accommodate what he was trying to study. And he kept reaching for legitimacy in a system designed to exclude what he discovered. And Richard Alpert, you know, took the opposite path. In 1967, after years of psychedelic experimentation that had left him feeling empty, you know, He didn't get the same thing out of it as Leary. He didn't think it was the point. He eventually traveled to India, and he met a guru named Niem Kiroli Baba, known to his followers as Madraji.

And the guru gave Alpert massive doses of LSD. And then he sat unchanged. And this is, you know, we only have out Richard Alpert as a source for this. He was just smiling for hours, and he said to him something like, You know, yes, in the old days, we knew how to make medicine like this out of herbs, and those have been lost. I never had gotten to experience this thing. You know, he's talking about psychedelics.

But when you've really mastered yourself, these don't really do that much for you. He said something like that to Richard Alpert purportedly. Richard Alpert, or later Romdaz has told that story a lot in different ways. But his message was clear. It was just whatever the substance could access, this man had already accessed it. And so it wasn't overwhelming to him. It didn't look like when you, you know, dosed somebody else who had never taken LSD. So Richard Alpert is really interested.

He stays in India. And he studies yoga and meditation, and he receives this new name, Ram Dass, or Servant of God. And when he returned to America in 1968, he was no longer a psychologist in any recognizable sense. He's a spiritual teacher. And his book, Be Here Now, published in 1971, became one of the most influential spiritual texts of the era. It sold two million copies. It introduced millions of Americans to concepts from Hindu philosophy, karma, Dharma, the illusion of the separate self. It offered a psychology that was explicitly spiritual, that made no distinction between mental health and spiritual development.

And it saw this goal of human life as awakening from the dream of separation. The dream that we are all separate from each other was just that, a dream, and that one could awake into a way. world where they were connected again. And this was a psychology that was too big for the discipline. You know, it couldn't be contained in a clinical manual and it couldn't be tested in the laboratory. You know, it made false claims about the nature of reality that, you know, exceeded anything empirical research could verify or falsify.

I think I said it made false claims, but it made grand claims that were not falsifiable. They weren't objective that were all connected. Okay, how do you prove that? And it worked, you know, for a million. of people. They read Ram Dass and they found something that they needed. And the book addressed the existential questions that Irvin Yalom, existential therapist would later identify as the core concerns of human existence. Death, freedom, isolation, and meaningless. It offered an answer that Western psychology wasn't even looking at the question yet.

Ram said to Hanaman, what are you, monkey? And Hanaman answered, when I don't know who I am, I serve you. When I know who I am, I am you. And, you know, this is this other path, you know, abandoning the Western framework entirely, adopting a new worldview that had no place in American psychology. Instead of becoming a celebrity in psychology, you know, granted a meteorore. one. You know, Ramdaa succeeded in reaching people, but he couldn't change the discipline. His work influenced millions of individuals, but had no impact on the training programs,

the diagnostic manuals, the reimbursement structures. And both paths led away from the institution itself that was supposed to be containing the thing, psychology, in America. And neither produced a psychology that could be taught in graduate programs. It was a knowing, not a learning. And it was a feeling and a being, not a list of information. Alpert was brilliant. I mean, he had placements at almost all these colleges

in the Ivy Leagues. I mean, he held positions there. He published. He was rich. And when he was taking psychedelics, he didn't find what Larry found. felt empty. And that is kind of the tragedy. The divergence between Leary and Ram Dass is not a story of right and wrong paths. It's a story of a discipline that could not hold both. It could not

integrate subjective and objective and are in outer measurable and meaningful, you know, that had to choose a side that Porter would have predicted, the side that could produce numbers, even if the numbers don't mean anything or aren't connected to reality is going to win. So let's return to that framework of the American suburb. And we need to look at German philosopher Peter Slaughterdick. Slaughterdique developed what he calls spherology, a theory of the space that human beings create and inhabit. Human beings, he says, are not fundamentally individuals. We are fundamentally relational, and we exist within spheres of shared breath,

shared attention, shared meaning. And the original sphere is the womb, the intimate space of complete envelopment. birth is this first catastrophic, you know, spherical event, this throwness or, you know, ejection from the original sphere into a world that must be re-sfeared through family, through community, through culture, through religion. We're building this, you know, boom around ourselves. In his first book, you know,

spheres, he says that, you know, Neolithic Dolman where these giant stone containers, you know, to get the earth to contain us again. There's a little, you know, Aristotelian geometry, you know, in Slaughter Deek. And throughout human history, you know, Slaughter Deke says that people lived within great spheres that organized existence. The sphere of the village. The sphere of the church.

The sphere of the nation. Their physical and metaphorical containment structures that say this is you and this is where you stop and the world ends. This is where you gently, you know, go into chaos, your sense of order and chaos is out there and order is in here. And these spheres provide meaning, connection, protection from overwhelming vastness of existence. All those things that Irvin Yalom talks about, being the core problems with being a human. They tell you who you are, where you belong, and what your life is for.

And modernity is characterized by this progressive collapse of these spheres. The Reformation shatters Christendom. The Industrial Revolution shatters the sphere. of the village. The world wars shattered the sphere of national community. And what remains is what Slaughter Deke would say is foam. This countless tiny individual bubbles that are still connected to each other. You know, each person's struggling to maintain their own microenvironment, their own immunity, their own protection from the overwhelming outside. That's where he goes. In the the spheres trilogy, the first book is called spheres, and the second book is called bubbles,

and the last book is called foams, and they kind of go through this development of history and psychology of history. And, you know, now if we look at post-war America through this lens, the suburb was foam architecture. Each house is a bubble. Each family is its own sphere, And the great shared spaces of the city, the Agora, the plaza, the park, the church. They're replaced by the private lawn, the television set, the automobile, you know, that transported you from one bubble to without ever entering shared space. And the psychological crisis that Leary and Alpert encounter was in Slaughterdeke's terms, a crisis of spherical collapse. You know, the shared meanings that had once organized existence were fragmenting, and each individual was increasingly responsible. responsible for generating their own sphere, their own meaning, their own protection, you know, like foam.

They're connected, but they're atomized. They don't really know that they're connected. And the psychedelic experience, you know, whatever else it was, was an experience of sphere-breaking. Ego dissolution is the collapse of the personal bubble, the mystical unity that subjects, you know, reported when they were experiencing, the reentering the larger sphere of dissolving the isolation of the foam, rejoining something vast. A lot of these case studies where people take LSD or psilocybin in the 60s, I don't think you could give people LSD or psilocybin.

Some things would be similar. But that experience of connection, I think, was what was missing. And that's why it was experienced as the spiritual thing. There is a sense of connection. You know, you get when you read case studies about psychedelics or ketamine, which is, I guess, is sort of a psychedelic. A lot of that is context dependent and, you know, like they were noticing. And some of that context is, yeah, are you in a dirty dungeon or are you out in a pretty field, you know, with hippies with flowers in their hair?

But some of that is time, the culture that you're in. And this was the culture that they were in at that time. You know, the human potential movement in Eastland, the encounter groups and the commune experiments, these were all attempts to rebuild spheres. Even some of the weirdness, you know, like the big rituals and touching and, you know, group sex that, you know, people got upset about. It was this longing for that connection again, you know, not endorsing or judging any of that. I just think that's why it happened. You know, and to create these, you know, shared spaces where people could breathe together, practice together, mean together. You know, they were trying to re-sphere a culture that they were watching collapse

into foam. And they faced a technology that was more powerful than any other, you know, at the time. The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena, the video drone. The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television. Your reality is already half-video hallucination. If you're not careful, it will become total hallucination.

You'll have to learn to live in a very strange new world. Walter Ong, he's a Jesuit scholar of media ecology, I guess, you know, he's a he writes about this transformation of meaning and language through technology. And, you know, Ong distinguishes between three types of conscious states that correspond with different communication technologies, the changed human cognition and consciousness over time. You know, primarily orality is this consciousness of cultures without writing. You know, in oral cultures, knowledge is communal. It's stored in memory.

It's transmitted through performance, through embodied ritual. You know, the self is porous. It's embedded in a community defined by relationships rather than interior states. And literacy transforms consciousness. The written word is private. It's individual. It's detached from the communal voice. And the litter itself is bounded.

It's interior. It's capable of private thought that can't be shared. You know, I always was like shocked in graduate school when they were telling me like how long it took for people to learn to like read or not graduate school. Sorry, bachelor's degree at Swanee. But like how long it took people to like learn to read silently. That was like a thing that people, they didn't understand that they could do that. Like for, you know, a while. People would have like a lectern in their room until like the 10th century because they would just sit there and like read aloud if they needed to read something.

And that was just the way that you did it. Literacy is transformed. It transforms consciousness is part of what Walter Ong is talking about. And, you know, television introduced something new, this secondary orality. You know, like primary orality, television is communal. It's participatory. It's voiced rather than written. It addresses you.

It speaks to you. Unlike primary orality, it is produced by this distant center and received passively. by scattered individuals. But it feels like it's a connective tissue because we're all watching the same show. The viewer is addressed as part of a community, Good Evening America. But that community is imaginary.

The viewer sits alone in their bubble receiving the same voice, having the illusion of shared experience while actually experiencing isolation. And it's not that TV is like all bad, but it was a new invention that functioned differently, you know, at this time that it does now. You know,

something like the show, Madmen, totally different than anything that TV was doing in the 1950s and 60s. And this is this perfect technology for foam. It maintains the fiction of the sphere while actually fragmenting it. And each bubble receives the same transmission. It believes itself to be part of something larger, but it can't actually interact with the other bubbles. And these shared experiences become simulated. But what the reality is, is isolation.

And you have to understand that, like the metaphor of the engine. to understand psychoanalysis. You have to understand that to understand the revolutionary psychology of the 1960s. But man, you're never going to get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell.

We'll tell you that Kojak always gets the killer and that nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker's house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry, just look at your watch at the end of the hour he's going to win. We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true.

But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You're dressed like the tube. You ain't like the tube. You raise your children like the tube.

You even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs. In God's name you people are the real thing. We are the illusion. Television trained attention in specific ways. An eruption became normal. Every 12 minutes there's a commercial break. Emotional arcs are compressed.

You know, every problem resolves in 30 minutes. Every conflict ended with a laugh track. The sitcom always begins where it ends. Passivity was rewarded. You don't have to do anything. You just receive. And so there's a psychological bleed into the way people think about material conditions.

And the consciousness that emerged from television was perfectly adapted to what would come in the 1980s, which is managed care. It expected a quick resolution. It accepted passive reception of expert opinion. You know, it needed the patient to just sort of receive what the master was telling them. It wasn't participatory.

And it was trained to receive interruption without complaint. The subjective was totally written off. It doesn't matter how you're feeling. You're doing these things. That's the goal. Manage care over. Therapy done. And it learned that it had, you know, all problems had solutions and that all solutions

were quick and that some would, someone else would, you know, would provide them. The New Age movement is pulling people towards solving their own problem in a community, but in an individualized way, whereas the culture is pulling them into having somebody else to solve your problem. Externalize. Therapy became this sort of external thing where the therapist helped you. not the therapist taught you to help yourself and so what you know when the reason I mentioned own and Slaughter Deek is that it helps us see that the collapse of the

spheres and the rise of television are not separate phenomenon they were the same phenomenon viewed from different angles the technology and the consciousness were co-evolving and Americans were being trained through their media environment to accept the atomization that managed care would require again I don't think these are conspiracy theories I don't think there's like one person doing it. I think there are people noticing when it benefits them that sometimes didn't stop it or accelerated it, much like today. You know, you couldn't really just scheme in a room and come up with this world. It's incentive structures that get put in place and then

reinforced. And, you know, the bigger psychology that Leary and Alpert glimpsed was the psychology that would have required sustained attention. Leary couldn't even sustain his own. And Alpert went so far inward into deep relationship, into genuine community, that his psychology wasn't communicated. It wasn't on TV. And not because, you know, it was wrong, was it thrown out? But because the nervous system of Americans was being rewired in ways that could not accommodate what these guys were calling for. And so the exile of Leary and Ram Dass reflects this broad pattern that continues through psychology, the systematic exclusion. a phenomenon that can't be easily measured.

Why should we do this if you can't even give us a paper telling us that it's a good idea? You know, we can't look at the hollowness of the world and decide that, you know, isolation is bad, meaning it's good, community is good. We can't just rely on any of these things to be self-evidencing phenomenon. We have to have you prove it to us, and it looks like you can't. Consider what the psychedelic research is pointing at, though. You know, it was suggesting that consciousness has depths that normal waking awareness doesn't access. The same thing that Freud said that got him kicked out of the medical establishment.

You're not in control of your life because there are deep forces beneath you, and I can't even explain those to you. You have to experience them for yourself. A lot of people are going to say, screw you. I'm not going to believe that or do that. You know, you can't prove it, man. It suggested that the boundaries of the self are not fixed, but that they can expand. to include experiences of unity with others, with nature, with something that the subjects often describe as divine, which is why it looks like a culture. The hippies look like they're crazy.

And a lot of them were, by the way, you know. It was suggesting, though, that this single experience, you know, could produce lasting personality change that would take you somewhere that you wanted to go, but you didn't know that you wanted to go there yet. this promise of therapy at its best, psychology working well, that it can solve a problem you don't even know you have. That's scarier to psychology than let me figure out how to solve the problem that you think you have right now by telling you what to do. And these, you know, suggestions weren't totally irrational.

You know, they were not unscientific in any fundamental sense because that did happen when you gave people psilocybin. They would say, hey, I didn't realize that I never admitted to myself that I have this problem that I just solved. But how do you do a study for that? You can prove that it's happening. But the way that psychology wants to operate is that the problem has to be identified before the study, which makes this whole mess of subject and object, you know, causation and effect, um, goal, you know, completion.

It makes it not work. Um, these, these things are too soft for the, psychology that was emerging in the 60s. And now, you know, they require subjective report. They could not be easily quantified. They required unconscious informed consent. And they pointed towards questions of meaning and value that the behaviorist revolution had explicitly excluded from the discipline and would continue to exclude further as that discipline evolved. my friend Adam O'Brien in New York, he says that when you're treating dissociation, people can't know what you're going to take away from them.

They want the symptom to go away, but they don't know what's on the other side of the symptom, which is you have to dissociate for a reason. There's something there that you don't want to know, that you don't want to feel, and that you kind of have to talk to them until you have unconscious informed consent because they can't understand what's going to happen, but you have to sort of let them understand a process intuitively so that they can consent to it because everyone says that they don't want to associate until they figure out why they dissociate it becomes hard to treat them so you know that's where i got that phrase so i want

to attribute it but you know the problem was not that you know these phenomena existed so this is this reoccurring pattern when psychology you know encounters these things it doesn't say are our tools inadequate are our questions wrong you know is this phenomenon real or is it just uh not important Or is it just hard to even describe? But over time, this became a ton of information that is relevant to psych. Like mystical experience, not our business. Send those guys to religion. The sense of meaning and purpose.

Not our business. Send them to the philosophy department. Well, I mean, Lord, you're not going to find any of it there. You know, the body's role in psychological suffering. That's not our business. Send them to a chiropractor. You know, the social and economic determinants of mental health, not our business.

Send them to sociology. or do a research study in a think tank in D.C. We just couldn't even bother to talk about how that might affect things that we're doing in here. This is a therapy room. You know, each exclusion narrowed the field, and each narrowing made psychology more respectable as a science and more defensible to the authorities who approve of things like that. But each narrowing left more of the human experience outside of psychology itself,

which is what psychology is. And so by the time the DSM3, arrived in 1980. The exclusions had just become definitive. Psychology would concern itself with observable symptoms. It would not concern itself with meaning, with spirituality, with the body, with society. It would just help people function in the way that the largest group of people thought was the right way to function. And it would not ask what the functioning was for or who was doing the asking. In 1970, Romdos published Be Here Now. And he says, you know, psychology is, is spiritual development.

Millions of Americans find this meaningful, but it had no place in academic psych. The departments had no use for it, and the journals wouldn't publish anything about it, and the questions that it raised were simply not the field's business. So in 1975, you've got the influence of Jung and the mystics and drugs and psychedelics, and the CIA is studying remote viewing, you know, with the Monroe Institute. They're trying to get out-of-body experiences to be,

investigated so that you can see the phenomenon that's at the edge of the measurable. Maybe we can weaponize it. We can use it to spy on people or we can use it to get information that will let us know where to put, you know, nukes or protect nukes, whatever. And maybe we could see the future. Where's the nuke going to fall? You know, and this conclusion was not that these phenomenon didn't exist, which is interesting when you read that report.

Because I always just assumed that they said this is BS. But they said that this stuff happened. And we have experiences that we can't explain that certain things make more likely to happen. But it's not going to have any impact on anything that we do because you can't control it. You can't figure out what causes it. You can't figure out how to make it happen. It's just something that we think probably happens that is not really useful to the defense industry. And it's not really interesting to mainstream psychology.

So those sort of even further fringe questions about, you know, is magic? real, basically were ignored. And so here's what connects these two stories, you know, because both point to the same reality that American psychology is refusing, that Leary and Alpert are discovering. There's these deeper layers of consciousness and experience that don't fit into the top levels of objective or eco-consciousness. We try and cram our understanding down from those top layers and say, yeah, I'll acknowledge them if you speak the language of the top of the brain, but they don't, and they remain there. It was a, I think, a extension of what Freud was finding out.

People don't want to find out that they are not really the architects of their own lives. Well, they are, but there's a deeper layer to themselves. It's the real architect that has to be dealt with. The architecture is more complicated than we want it to be, because it's more complicated than we can easily study. You know, Freud said that. Jung said that. And every depth psychologist in the Western tradition, which is most of who was working in psychology at this time, knew that. And there are layers beneath waking awareness that respond to things in our environment,

layers that respond to our, you know, built environment, layers that respond to material reality that are hard to isolate to a specific mechanism of action in a study. And these layers control us, but they're still there, even though they're hard to isolate. And they still motivate us. And they shape our choices, even when we don't name them. And, you know, both Ram Dass and the CIA researchers discovered from opposite directions that these layers can be healed the people who took psilocybin with tim leary and then integrated the experience noticed something changed they were no longer you know controlled and motivated in the same ways and something had shifted at a level deeper than cognitive understanding and the people who did spiritual retreats with ramdas noticed the same thing

the practices worked the change was real they could not necessarily explain the mechanism but the outcome was observable a lot of times they couldn't even explain what they knew. They just said, I have a higher knowledge and I feel better, which is sort of hard to quantify. And this is and always will be part of psych, no matter how much we choose to look away from it. There is a mystification of these things. People sometimes think you have to embrace this metaphysical woo-ness to take any of these ideas seriously. But that's not true, because neurology is taking them seriously now. These are relatively hard sciences if we just let them be hard, but assume we can't measure the hardness of it, I guess. You know, if we apply the same rigor that we apply it to anything else,

it would fall apart too. If you said, well, we can't really study quarks because we don't think that they're there. You've got to prove it to me before I'll study it. Then you couldn't have physics. Physics can't operate on that language any more than an accurate and scientific psychology can. And if we do not require that every finding, you know, be reduced to the single mechanism of action, the single causation that we're looking for before we cause the causation, then we can't study it. And here is a truth that the efficiency apparatus still can't tolerate. Some things can be comprehended without being studied.

And some things can be studied that cannot be comprehended or reduced to a mechanism of action. And that always will be psychology. Call it a hard or soft science. But the contemplative traditions, you know, they comprehended something. about consciousness through direct investigation. They didn't need fMRI machines to discover that the self is constructed, that attention can be trained, that suffering arises from grasping. The consciousness is actually more of a filtering mechanism for experience than the creation of it. You know,

they discovered these things through systematic first-person inquiry, and their discoveries have been replicated by millions of practitioners across thousands of years. And the CIA researchers studied something about consciousness through third-person methods, they found effects that exceeded chance, but they couldn't be controlled. And they could not reduce those findings to a mechanism. And so the findings weren't really real through a group of people trying to weaponize psychology.

And both paths pointed towards the same conclusion. Consciousness has depths that exceed what the ego can access or the laboratory can measure. And working with those depths produces change, even when we can't explain how. And this is the bridge that American psychology refused to build. Hippies are very interesting to the young. They like music.

The word love is used by them a lot. Their diversions might seem to be harmless enough, were it not for one thing. In a very aggressive and evangelical way, they praise the effect on the mind of hallucinatory drugs, particularly the drug LSD. The drug is what holds their... subculture together. And the drug is extremely dangerous. In such cases, when excessive anxiety and tension are interfering with rehabilitative efforts, Valium, diazepam, can help the transition

back to work, back to a more normal life. Within days, the typical patient feels significantly calmer, better able to cope with his condition, more open to rehabilitative measures. patients taking Valium should be cautioned against driving, drinking, or operating dangerous machinery. Valium, for the response you know, want, and trust. So in the same era, you have two substances flooding the American consciousness that are drugs. Valium, it was the most prescribed a drug in all of America, every drug, by 1978. And LSD became a Schedule I controlled substance and deemed to have no medical use and a high potential for abuse. use. And both substances altered consciousness, both affected the nervous system, and both produced

experiences that exceeded, you know, normal waking experience. But why did one become a pillar of American psych, and the other one became a federal crime? And I think the answer lies in the direction, you know, the same directional split between Freud and Jung, between William James and the wound lab, between CBT, the biomedical model, and, you know, the semantic and depth-based traditions. Valium points up, it suppresses, it dampens, it points you back to the ego what you already think you are, and it pushes the deeper layers of consciousness further away from awareness, which sometimes is a good thing that is helpful or needed. You know, it does not reveal anything new about the psyche, though. It simply takes the existing psyche and makes it quieter,

more manageable and more compliant. So it gives you the ability to turn off a pathological anxiety at the same time as a healthy anxiety, never to examine them and sort between them. And the same is true of alcohol. Most sedatives of that class work pretty similar to a time released alcohol in the brain. And, you know, like Milltown before it, you know, these tranquilizers become huge. And, you know, LSD, however, it points down. It reveals, it amplifies small anxieties, small awareness and truths, and it brings deeper layers of consciousness into awareness. And so it shows you what's underneath the ego, underneath the daily management, underneath the constructed self. and this is terrifying for a culture that is built on suppression.

That's unacceptable to an apparatus that is built to manage, not really to change. And I'm not telling you to go out and do LSD. I'm not even advocating it for to be legal or part of therapy. I'm just trying to explain why this direction, null split and repeat happens over and over in psychology and why I think it does. You know, the substances or the techniques that point up, the systems that point up, they help you function and they help you comply, and they help you continue participating in the economy and showing up for work and managing your household and consuming products.

And they don't threaten the social order because they suppress the parts of the psyche that might question that order. The substance is the point down are dangerous. They reveal what the culture cannot afford to see. And they show you the layers beneath the managed self. And they make you ask questions that the apparatus has no answers for. Why am I living this way? What is life for? What have I been suppressing an order to do?

function. And I don't think that this is a grand conspiracy theory where a bunch of people got behind and made up plan for America like the Illuminati and rub their hands and smoked cigars or something. I think it is very telling when people were told, hey, this is something that can show you another layer of self that can take you down. They can teach you that actually what you are right now is maybe not what you want to be and maybe not all you are. And that was just an open door a couple times in American history. People said, no, collectively, they were afraid of that, which tells you what's in the basement. So it wasn't, it was a collective and cultural decision. And this is not really just about pharmacology. It's about epistemology. It's about what kind of knowledge a culture

can tolerate. And here is, you know, the point with Lerian Ram Dass, you know, they were consciousness researchers and they were stumbling on the same layers of psychology that it still has trouble accessing now or an ambivalent relationship about what to do with. But those same layers, that you know that we talked about in the DSM series and we'll talk about you know again more deep data on this but the DSM wants to say that symptoms and this is the diagnostic statistical manual of mental health disorders that wants it wants to tell you that you know symptoms create a diagnosis you have these symptoms check check check and therefore these symptoms equal that diagnosis but

maybe there are layers that are sort of symptom counting that we can't see like environment genes subcortical processing, deep memory, culture, associations, learned behavior about how to express an emotion, and that these things are sort of tied together in chains that penetrate and unite layers and have to be understood as processes. That's always going to be a threatening way to look at psychology. But in my experience, a lot of the better therapists, that's sort of what they're doing. You know, those layers can be separated. They could be made into categories that help us understand the functioning of the brain, not just as a woo-woo.

culture concept, but is a neurological concept. You know, something like autism that is incredibly neurodevelopmental. I think is different from something like a dopamine disorder that is genetic and something like PTSD that maybe you have a little bit of a precedent for trauma manifesting in this way, but the environment is still giving you the thing. The DSM still doesn't want to do that. We've talked about that before. We'll talk about it again. But Demp psychology was always pointing at those relationships. And it's one of the reasons why it really, it really remained French. You know, Jung pointed towards that cybernetic systems thinkers when they were fusing things with these modalities at Eastland that became very popular in mediocre, but never

really caught on or changed anything. And from a top level, you know, ego consciousness, you know, you can't really see all of what you are. From the top, everything just looks like symptoms. Somebody comes in and they say, I do this, I do this, I do this. And they all just look like things someone does. Depression looks like depression, whether it's subcortical dysregulation, responding to environmental toxicity, filtered through genetic vulnerability, or whether it's just deep memory surfacing through present circumstances, or whether it's ego level meaning making. I see something on the news that changes my worldview. Those all are going to look like depression or anxiety. And when you really look at the story the symptoms are telling, you know,

looking at symptoms is not a bad idea. Depression and anxiety are sort of compensatory mechanisms because they almost never co-present alone, but we keep them separate as a diagnosis. When you start to look under the hood, all of these things start to not work. And Jung knew that. The archetypes and the complexes and the shadow and the anima, it may not be the preferred language of everybody,

but they're metaphors, their lenses meant to see these things in the subcortical regions of the brain from the ego's perspective. And from the ego, they all look like moods, like inexplicable attractions or repulsions or just the way I am. You have to understand them as layers, as structures operating beneath awareness, even if you don't like Jung's language. You have to have one that lets you speak the language of a part of the brain that does not speak in language,

that does not understand time. And better therapy modalities sort of make room for that. Therapists and modalities that don't really have an incentive structure that put you on that path still will kind of figure it out and develop their own language. I mean, I've seen that happen. A lot of the models I like, you could find a bad practitioner doing it. A lot of the models of therapy that I don't like, you could find a great practitioner doing it because people learn these things as a perennial philosophy. And so you have to start to understand those layers of feedback, the nested loops, the way that information flows through those levels that each has their own logic.

And from the outside, all you see is behavior. From the inside, you can see which layer is producing the behavior and what its relationship is to the other layers. You know, Freud discovered that, and he used a different language than Jung. And the psychedelic researchers discovered this about consciousness, that there are depths. The ego is, you know, surface phenomenon. And beneath it are layers that contain information, memory, patterning. And the ego can't directly access them. You know, Freud took, you know, a fairly early attempt that was okay to make those metaphors in an ego-super ego.

he ascribed the motivation of all of them to being about sex because, you know, Victorian culture is kind of repressing sexuality and also because he knew about Darwin and natural selection. And Jung says, no, no, no, maybe the early origin of all behavior was just to pass on genes, but I think that there's more to the system now. I think that it needs meaning. I think it needs things other than that. Freud couldn't see that.

I mean, Freud's model works if you take away a lot of the assumptions you made that are not right. And, you know, the failure to account for those layers would echo forward through decades of poor conceptual validity in the I-Sim diagnoses. The manual never really controlled for these things. It never treated them as dynamic forces that might be related at multiple layers or levels. And it simply counted symptoms from the top and then called that a diagnosis. It looked at behavior more than it looked at what the person was experiencing. And when the reckoning finally came, you know, Thomas Encel in 2013, he announced that the NIMH would no longer fund research based on the DSM categories

because the categories did not correspond to the biological or psychological reality that you might have expected, you know, the field to find by this point. The experiment was not going to be given any more money because it continued to get worse. We can talk about a little bit more about why that is in the DSM episode. But, you know, models existed. Like the hierarchical taxonomy of psychopatology or high-thensual. top, you know, that was a dimensional approach. And it could have treated these forces as what they are, you know, dynamic interacting, operating at multiple levels simultaneously. It could have been a way

to finally see what the symptoms, the symptom counting couldn't see, to see the relationships between the symptoms. But even when the NIMH is throwing away the DSM and saying that we've given you all of the stuff, your methodology is flawed, you're not getting better, you're getting worse, even they don't pick the direction that would have responded to the criticism that they were leveling and taking the profession in the right way because these are the tendencies of bureaucracies. There's the tendency in the system of American Psych

not to ever go in the direction that might make it work. You know, the NIMH did not adopt Ha-TOP. It didn't adopt anything that would have required psychology to grapple with any of these ideas. It proposed its own framework, Ardok, which promised to ground diagnosis in neuroscience, but which years later

has produced no diagnostic categories. And they forced us to use Ardok about 10 years by their own omission before it would be ready to go, at least four until it was serviceable. And no new treatments, no new way of time meeting patients. Ardoch is not, email me if you know,

it hasn't really produced anything different than the DSM. And the pattern repeats the apparatus and counters its own limitations. It acknowledges briefly that it doesn't work, and then it fails to adopt anything they would actually take it to a deeper level of understanding. The system, the microcosm, you know, reflects the macrocosm. And, you know, we could have had a bigger psychology,

a psychology that left the couch and became part of American life, a psychology adequate to the questions of, you know, the humans were actually asking, existence, meaning death, the nature of the mind, maybe a shared language for a culture. You know, instead we get the DSM3 and we get Reagan at this point in history that I'm talking about. Those questions continue to not happen. And so to understand, you know,

why the bigger psychology never emerged, you have to look at what happened to America in 1980. But to understand the 1980s, you have to understand what America rejected in 1980. We are at a turning point. Two paths to choose. One is the path I warned about tonight. The path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest.

Down that road lies a mistaken idea freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interest, ending in chaos, and immobility. It is a certain route to failure. All the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path. The path less traveled, and that would have made all the difference. And July in 1979, Jimmy Carter did something no American president had done before or has done since. He goes on television and he tells Americans that the problem was not just the economy. The problem was not that gas lines or inflation or hostages or it was a spiritual problem,

essentially a mythological one and existential problem. He points to a deeper layer. In a nation that was so proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does. but by what one owns. Carter was trying to offer Americans a different myth. During a material recession,

you know, during a genuine crisis of resources, and in confidence, he asked the country to find meaning somewhere other than infinite stuff, somewhere other than unlimited consumption. And he was pointing towards the same things that we've been talking about, somewhere where we could have found meaning,

not telling us what it was. And he was suggesting that the emptiness Americans felt could not be filled by the next person. just the next tank of gas, the next upgrade. It was the most psychologically sophisticated thing that an American president had ever said, and it acknowledged the crisis that was not merely economic, but was existential. And it suggested that the solution was not more growth, but different values. And America utterly rejected it. The speech was immediately labeled the malaise speech, and though Carter never used that word, it was mocked and dismissed and treated as evidence

that Carter was weak, and that he didn't understand what Americans wanted. They wanted oil during the oil embargo. And what Americans wanted, it turned out, was something, was someone who would tell them that they could have everything. And someone who would restore the myth of infinite abundance, bring back the hero myth in an inflated way, and someone who would make them feel good. In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. This podcast is not about the psychology of American politics, but where they overlap and, it is relevant now is this would mark a trajectory that continues to the current day.

One is the aesthetics, not really the material reality of politics. Americans would start to measure how good does this person make me feel. Not really what are they doing? And part of that was because there was no longer anything that people in American government could do about these systems, which leads me to my second point. You would have people who ran on attacking government. the government would say everyone doesn't like it and so because you don't like it you should elect me to be part of government to I don't know fill in the blank and that is something that

also continued and instead of looking at that from kind of a right left perspective look at it from just kind of a material perspective of power they're sort of telling on themselves like there's not anything that we can do for you but we can make you feel better we can express the emotion that you are feeling so that you feel connected to us and therefore this is your sense of connection even when that is a sense of anger at the job that I hold even when that is a sense of anger at the ship that I am steering um which is a strange in layered development you know Reagan was an actor he wasn't a politician um he wasn't a politician that even learned to act he was an actor who learned to politic and he understood the camera he understood timing he understood that television was not about

argument but about feeling, not about policy, but about presence. And before politics, Reagan had been a spokesperson for General Electric. He was used to speaking on behalf of bureaucracy of machines. And for eight years, he toured GE plants and gave speeches at civic organizations, laundering corporate talking points into folksy wisdom. And he put a human face on a company. He was an avatar in that way, and he made the interests of capital feel like common sense. He translated the agenda of the powerful into the language of the every man. And this was a myth that worked a whole lot better than what Carter had offered and tried to do. And this is what America went for.

Reagan didn't argue that the safety net should be cut. You know, he made you feel that cutting it was actually freeing you. He made the people who were having their benefits cut feel good. And he didn't argue that the regulation protected corporations at the expense of workers. He made you feel that regulation was oppression and deregulation was liberation. And he didn't argue that greed was good. He made you feel that greed was just another word for ambition, which was your right for the American dream for the morning in America.

And the medium was the message here. Television rewarded confidence over complexity. Feeling over analysis, presence over policy. And Carter had tried to use television to tell Americans something difficult. It didn't work. It's kind of a diode in that way. Only certain feelings can flow through the TV. Only certain concepts.

The medium limits you. Reagan understood that television was not for difficult things. Television was for making people feel good and appearing like a TV show. And Reagan made people feel very good. The Reagan administration did not merely change economic policy, changed the fundamental relationship between Americans and their institutions. It changed when Americans believed that they could expect from their society. And before Reagan, there was a social safety net.

You know, it was fraying and maybe inadequate, some would say, but it was still there. you know, unemployment insurance, food stamps, housing assistance, mental health services, you know, they were all funded by the Community Mental Health Act. And the assumption was that society had some responsibility for members, that taking accountability for people who couldn't take accountability for themselves actually made the whole country run better. And that was a assumption that was dying.

You know, the market could now solve all problems. The collective action through government was sometimes necessary. And, you know, Reagan's revolution attacked that assumption. The problem was not the market failure. The problem was government itself. The solution was not more services. The solution was fewer services. The safety net was not protecting people.

He clocked that the American people had a distrust of their government after Vietnam, after multiple things. And so he basically ran on saying, government is bad. You shouldn't have one. So put me in charge. And this was not presented as an attack on the vulnerable. was presented as liberation. You'd be free from government's interference.

You'd succeed or fail on your own merits. And, you know, immediately all of these things were cutted and continued to be as that myth took off. In the mentally ill, flooded the streets and the prisons. And a phenomenon that I traced in episode three as, you know, trans institutionalization. Social services were cut across the board. And the assumption of collective responsibility gave way to this assumption of individual responsibility. An American psychology adapted because it had to.

If the government would no longer fund mental health care, then private insurance would have to fill the gap. And if private insurance filled the gap, it would demand efficiency, measurable outcomes, short-term interventions, diagnostic codes that justified reimbursement. Because those were the accountability metrics that Reagan talked about government with.

And they were the ones that private companies that provided a public service could now talk to you in that language. And it was acceptable for a service that you pay for to tell you that you couldn't have what you wanted because it was telling you in a way that was now allowed. And so the managed care revolution that I'll talk about in the next episode was not just this internal development within psych. It was a psychology that was just adapting to an environment that it was shaping a bigger bureaucracy that it inhabited. And the bigger psychology that would have left the couch engaged with questions of meaning. spirituality, collective trauma, and the weirdness of consciousness was economically impossible in this new world.

And every one of those things is in you all the time if you just have the guts to look for them. That's enough. I thought I was allowed to defend myself. You're not allowed to lie. I'm not lying. You see those faces up there? They're no different than you are. They just happen to see something inside themselves.

I said that's enough. Here, I'll show you. Dad? Yeah, but... It's okay, Dad. Just listen for a sec. I know you miss her. I mean, you told me you did. But maybe it's not just the cooking or the cleaning that you miss.

Maybe it's something else. Maybe you can't even describe it. Maybe you only know it when it's gone. Maybe it's like there's a whole... It's like there's a whole piece of you that's missing too. This behavior must stop at once. But see, that's just the point. It can't stop it once because it's in you and you can't stop something that's inside you.

It is not inside me. Oh, sure it is. No, it is not. In the book Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pension describes the zone. This space where the normal rules have broken down, where the structures that organized reality have collapsed, where anything might be possible precisely because nothing is enforced. And the zone exists in the aftermath of World War II,

in the rubble of destroyed systems, and the gap between what was and what would be. The zone is terrifying and liberating an equal measure. It's where people discover things about themselves that they could not have discovered in the managed world. And it's also where people get lost, where they're exploited, where the absence of structure becomes its own kind of trap, and it's a violent place.

You know, pensions paranoia is not the paranoia of a problem. conspiracy theorist he's writing in the 70s about the 40s because he knows what will happen in the 40s and that's the point of the absence that came before the time he's living in you know it's something deeper than paranoia though you know the recognition that systems exceeded individual comprehension anytime they do that no one can be in charge of them because the outcomes they produce become structures rather than intentions or you know the horror of that world that he was telling us was coming and would continue to entrench itself is not that someone is actually controlling everything. The horror is that no one is controlling anything, and yet the system keeps producing the same

outcomes anyway. The Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tatovsky made a film in 1979 called Stalker that explores the same territory. You know, in it a guide leads two men, a writer and a scientist, into a forbidden area called the zone. And the zone is a place where the normal rules do not apply, where reality becomes plastic. Where at the center, lies a room that grants your deepest wish. But the zone is dying. It's been sealed off. It's been militarized and contained. And the men who remember it when it was alive are old and they're marginal. And the pilgrimage to the room is nearly impossible now. And the room itself, when they finally reach it, may no longer even work. And both Pension and Tartovsky were diagnosing something about institutions

and about the same times. You know, the zone is any space where genuine transformation was once possible. The church was once a zone. The university was once a zone. The therapeutic relationship was once a zone. The government was once a zone. But what happens to zones? They become simulacra. The form persists, but the function disappears. And the institution continues to reproduce its aesthetic while losing its actual capacity for transformation. And this is what happens when the system becomes larger than what we can comprehend. Because we can't comprehend it, we are no longer controlling it. It is controlling us. the same way that these deep processes of the deep mind that psychology had set out to task, it was being controlled by these in the external world, you know, this copy of the microcosm and the macrocosm. And, you know, Gene Baldriard would say that a simulacra is this self-copying original. It's a copy of something that has forgotten what it was supposed to be copying, or where the original never existed. And on that note, Xerox machines arrived in 1980, and they became the perfect metaphor. Now you could make copies of copies. Each generation is slightly degraded

until no one remembered what the original looked like. And the institution becomes a copy of itself, reproducing forms that once had meaning, but now serve only to perpetuate the institution's existence. American psychology in the 1980s was becoming a simulochrome. The forms of therapy persisted, the 50-minute hour, the diagnostic assessment, the treatment plan. But the function, the actual transformation of consciousness, was the exception if you found it, the rule. And the encounter with the unmeasurable was being hollowed out. What remained was a bureaucratic process

optimized for billing rather than healing. And all of this was built in the world of the label. The zone of the human potential movement and the zone of psychedelic research, the zone of genuine encounter between therapist and client, all these were being militarized, contained, and reduced to

protocols, labels, and boxes. And the guide who remembered when the zone was alive was retiring or dying. And the young therapists being trained, had never known anything else. And this is what happens when a weak discipline responds to pressure by narrowing. It loses adaptive capacity. It becomes capable of changing form but not function. And it can produce new diagnostic categories, new treatment manuals, new billing codes, but it can't actually do anything new because the zone is dead, broken, or forgotten. And a structural

trap emerged that would continue to define psychology for the next 40 years. Two career paths diverged. One path led inside institution. You would be respectable, you would publish papers and receive grants and sit on committees, they wrote the diagnostic manuals, but to say inside, you had to accept these assumptions. And you couldn't question them or you weren't allowed inside. You couldn't question whether the DSM categories corresponded to reality. You know, the emperor was signing your paycheck. And the other path led outside, you know, people like Thomas Zavs and Peter Breggen, Gabour Mote, or Bessel van der Kolk. And these people could see more clearly because they rejected the assumptions that required credibility, but they could never really have credibility because they

is rejected the required assumptions that you had to have to get it. And they could write books and they could sell millions of copies and they could become pop culture figures and maybe get a VA pilot started and a special on NPR about how it was going to revolutionize things. But the system would just absorb their critiques without responding to them. And that is that structural trap. And those who see it, you know, can't act on it. And those who can't act on it can't see it. And those who can't act on it can't see it. Robert Spitzer, who led the DSM-3 task force, eventually came to regret what it built. Alan Francis, who led the DSM-4, spent the last years of his career warning about the monster that he helped create. But their regrets came too late, and they didn't matter, even though they came from the people who had authored the book.

They had clarity only after they lost power. By the time of the five, the system had learned very well from their example. The DSM-5 design process was completely secretive. They never wanted another Spitzer, and they never wanted another Francis. And so warring committees were set to fight with each other. It was the largest committee in the history of the book. And they would change nothing fundamental. They would publish a book that was not finished, and they would call it progress.

And they would have so many NDAs and so many protections from the press that we would never know any of the changes or any of the process. No one was allowed inside. It was total secrecy. And the task members were bound to silence. No singular voice would ever be permitted to emerge with a vision for what the manual should be, or what the process did wrong, or what could change. And no character would be allowed to form, who could later regret, acknowledge, or deconstruct the system's failures. And no one outside could hear the multitude of voices that went into making it.

And the disagreements, the compromises, the moments where someone says this does or does not respond to clinical reality, we know about for the two, the three, and the four. We don't for the five. I could make some good guesses, but the better criticisms were overruled, and all of this got sealed away. And the manual would arrive as this monolith that was authorless, inevitable,

and beyond critique, because there was no one left to critique it. And this is a system that cannot change, a system that by design is built not to change while doing the performative rituals of pretending that it can. A system that cannot change is in direct conflict with what psychology is supposed to be. Because what psychology is supposed to be is about pointing towards change itself.

That is the whole point. That is the only point. People suffer and they come to therapy and they want to change. And the therapist's job is to help people change. Everything else, the diagnostic codes, the treatment manuals, the billing procedures, all of it is supposed to serve that single purpose. And when the system that organizes therapy cannot itself change or reorganize itself, When it has evolved mechanisms specifically to prevent anyone from changing it,

then the system has betrayed its own purpose, and it has become an obstacle to the very thing that it was created to enable. So looking back at the trajectory of the 1960s and the 1980s, we can see the closure happening in real time. In 1962, two Harvard professors began investigating the transformation of consciousness, and they are expelled. In 1970, Ram Dass publishes Be Here Now. Millions find it meaningful.

Academic psychology does nothing with it. In 1980, the DSM3 appeared, codifying the exclusions that had been building for decades, and psychology would concern itself with observable symptoms and nothing else. In 1981, Ronald Reagan takes office, and the conditions that might have supported a bigger psychology are dismantled. And the ghosts of the era still haunt us. The psychedelic research has returned, but belatedly. The mindfulness approaches are watered down versions of what Ram Dass was teaching in 1970,

and the question about consciousness remained unanswered. But here's the question that matters. most. The question that psychology forgets. Can people change? The point of psychology has to be re-centered on change, even if that change is not measurable, even if it exceeds the methodology, even if it points down into layers the efficiency apparatus would rather suppress. And this is what the new language we are seeing now. The new language we'll talk about in the TikTokification episode gets exactly wrong. When we say that people can't change because of a diagnosis, we have have inverted the purpose of psychology because it isn't astrology. We've made the label more real

than the person. We've used the apparatus to foreclose the very transformation that the apparatus was supposed to enable. And the consciousness researchers were stumbling on the same layers that psychology still struggles with now, the same layers that we talked about in the DSM series, environment, genes, subcortical processing, deep memory, top level ego function, the relationship between these parts. And these layers can be separated, they can be understood, that they can be used to meet people where they actually are to help them understand what they can change, how much change is possible, and then help them get there. But from the top level, the ego level, where the DSM operates, you can't see which layer is producing the symptom.

You can't see where to intervene. Everything just looks like behavior and everything just looks like something someone does. The cybernetic movement discovered this about systems. You can't understand a conflict system by measuring outputs. You have to understand the layers of feedback, the nested loops, the way information flows through levels that have their own logic. And Freud discovered this about the psyche. Jung discovered it. The psychedelic researchers discovered it. There are depths.

There is ego. There is a surface phenomenon of ego. But beneath it are layers that contain information, memory, patterning. That ego cannot directly access or can only access through metaphor or disembodied, you know, experience that is outside of ego. through a bridge. And these layers can be revealed. They can be worked with and they can be healed. But that healing means change, not adjustment, not management, not symptom suppression, actual change.

An actual transformation of these patterns. That is what reduces suffering. And this is what got lost when psychology chose rigor over change, when it chose precision over depth, when it chose to be taken seriously by the other sciences over addressing the full scope of human life. It started to prefer science-flavored capitalism or scienceism instead of actual science, just looking at what worked. And the consciousness researchers were pointing towards something. You know, we don't know what we lost by not following where they pointed, but we only know we didn't follow them. And the questions that were abandoned, but they're still here.

And those consequences are everywhere. One consciousness. One consciousness. And that's the way in which the world could write itself. Start with your peace, your love, your compassion, and go from there. And then love everything. Let's all walk each other home. And because psychology deferred these issues of meaning, it left Americans vulnerable to worse answers,

consumerism, base forms of tribalism, petty quarrels around identity, property ownership, nuclear family of salvation, and the myths of the market. These myths were the ones that would take over and become the collective language of the culture, television, mass media, algorithm, mass consumption. Walter Ong saw that secondary orality would stimulate community while maintaining isolation, but he did not see how far that would go. The television trained attention for interruption. The internet fragmented it further, and the smartphone completed the process.

The nervous system is now fused to a device that delivered dopamine hits by optimizing machine learning that created the sensation of connection while actually deepening isolation. The filled every gap where meaning might have emerged with content decided to prevent the questions from being asked. When the algorithm learned what the deep layers wanted, they learned with the hunger for meaning how to exploit that. and they learned that outrage was engaging, that fear was engaging, that tribal conflict was engaging, and they learned to feed the starving layers junk that would keep them hungry because they had been abandoned by the mainstream of academic psych. And this is what the consequence of that abandonment meant. It wasn't psychology that caused these things.

And a lot of its choices, its hands were being forced by a culture that it was struggling to survive with it, struggling to be funded in, you know, at a public or private level. But these forces shaping American life were larger than any single discipline. And psychology could have been a counterweight. It could have been a place where Americans learn to recognize what the deepest layers actually need and to distinguish between genuine nourishment and junk food for the soul. It could have taught us to tell our ego from our soul, but it's a lesson that the field never even looked at.

Instead, it taught symptom management. It helps people function in a system that, making them sick, and it adjusted them to conditions that no human being should have to tolerate. And it became, as we'll see in the next episode, an instrument of efficiency rather than a practice of liberation. And the deeper layers did not stop wanting. They cannot stop wanting. They are built to want, meaning, connection, identity, purpose, belonging. But if we don't acknowledge them, if they remain unconscious, then they remain vulnerable to cooperation, to exploitation.

And these are not optional features of human consciousness. They are the architecture. You could ignore them, but they will not ignore you. And when psychology refused to address them, when it drew a line in the sand and said, this is not our business, did not make them go away. It simply guaranteed that it would be exploited by forces that have no interest in human flourishing.

The myth of the market was happy to fill that void. So were algorithms and so are demagogues. Unfortunately, psychology was not. Never made the new I can taste the factory The rain, the loosened screws Cold machines Where humming's your soft, sad, laughing on

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