Betty Eisner's first LSD trip

[Chapter One, "Initiation into Infinity," pp. 4–7 of Betty Eisner's typescript memoir, dated August 7, 2002, as she distributed it online. The quotations are from her own report on the October 1955 LSD session; she was the first subject of the UCLA study run by Sidney Cohen and Lionel Fichman, whose name she spells "Fishman." The LOOK magazine article she recalls is "Step into the World of the Insane" (1954).]

“I could feel my tongue getting thick, and I couldn’t answer questions quite properly. It felt as though the messages were all coming into the switchboard, and messages were going out all right, but that the switchboard was congested and the two weren’t coordinating. As though the operator had something else on her mind or too much to do, and was just letting things get all jammed up” (from LSD session report, October 1955).

The point of the Cohen-Fishman study was to compare the functioning of an individual under the drug and in his individual state. For this a battery of psychological tests were devised to measure the functioning of the individual as himself and after having taken the drug. In order to accomplish this, there were a number of tests chosen for measuring different aspects of the person: general intelligence, psychological functioning, psychological makeup, maturity, and general functioning ability as shown by the difference between the drug and non-drug states. Drug dosage was assigned according to body weight of the subject. Comparisons were made between the drug and non-drug states to get insights on the drug being tested. In this battery, the individual tests had been given in some of the psychological tests like the “Draw a Person” (DAP), where the individual draws a picture about how he feels about himself and other people. The description of the drug experience continues.

“Then I saw the color of the wall waxing and waning – ebbing and flowing. The extraordinary character of light and color…There was a third-dimensionality to color – and a constant change. And there would be a symphony of variations on what ordinarily is a plain brown wall…This was interesting – how dimension and color all were mixed up in that they were all part of the whole pulsating ebb and flow, and it took enormous effort to try and separate things out sufficiently to describe accurately what was happening.”

“Just before the colors hit and the curtain started down between sections of my brain, I had that wonderful relaxation which I had known before – the awe-inspiring relief, the letting go of psychological barriers which has come to be identified in my thinking with the relaxation of the ego. I could feel myself being drawn into a mystical experience – the sense of unity with all things in the universe… But as I felt the relaxing of the self boundaries, there was this flood of grateful tears which I stopped because of the three men present…”

Searching through the accordion-pleated files of time for the context of that experience takes me back to 1955, to the beginning of LSD research in the western United States and to my own first knowledge of the drug. There was that notice on the UCLA Psychology Department requesting a graduate student for a doctoral thesis on the effects of a new and unusual drug. In the recesses of another fold of memory from who knows where or when, came:

“I’ll bet that research is about LSD!” (There had been an article in LOOK magazine.) I yearned to apply to Sidney Cohen, M.D., the author of that request, but I couldn’t; I had almost completed the work for my own infertility studies, and the time loss was much too great for my own dissertation on infertility. Next best was to send a friend, and one was handy, Lionel Fishman. He hadn’t seen the notice, but was very interested. However, before telling him the details, I extracted his promise that I be the first subject if indeed the research were on LSD. Lionel, or Fish, as we called him, talked to Dr. Cohen, signed on with enthusiasm, and didn’t forget his promise. After Dr. Cohen and Fish had their own trial experiences with LSD, I indeed became their first research subject. The original quotation at the beginning of this was part of the report on the LSD session. I remember my intense interest in their study, but I didn’t have much time to kibitz, as I was dragging myself out of bed at 4:30 a.m., trying to finish my dissertation. I had passed the write [sic] doctoral exams at UCLA the spring of 1955, the same year that my son arrived to join his three-year old sister. (I figured that gave me an M.A. at least twice over – at school and at home.) I was pretty far along on my dissertation, too, as I remember, at the point of getting judges to categorize the Rorschach responses of the women who couldn’t get pregnant as contrasted to women who had at least two children and no difficulty getting pregnant. At the same time, I was doing that pre-sunrise scene in order to write on the dissertation. I was in no position to add any other activities. But I did add just one – serving as subject for the Cohen- Fishman study. Lately, just recently, all I could remember of that first LSD experience was that I was constantly being interrupted in my LSD experience in order to take tests. In the Draw-a-Person I remembered the courtly French cavalier type I drew for the man. (In contrast, my report – thank heaven for the necessity to write a report:

“I wanted to draw Little Lord Fauntleroy…I didn’t want to put it down. But my honesty made me do it, although my defensiveness changed it into a courtier at the time of one of the Louis’. That way it was more acceptable.”)

With the Draw-a-Person, one first draws the way one sees oneself. I had just remembered the courtier more strongly. Also, as I first remembered, the woman I drew was in a hoop skirt, I remembered this from the same period. (Ah, memory! The actuality of the first figure I drew, a woman, was quite different, thank heavens for records!)

“I drew an old-fashioned little girl – and at the same time I really didn’t want to – knowing I was drawing myself. And I came up with a little girl where the head didn’t belong to the body. The legs were all grown up but the head was a vapid child’s head. And the dress was of the Victorian era.”

It was a terrible experience to reveal oneself so clearly, and it was also humiliating to be asked to perform tasks when I couldn’t concentrate; I couldn’t think; and the tasks seemed meaningless and irrelevant. For instance:

“It was the word association test, and I was completely set to cooperate and to give associations. But with the first word I realized that it was impossible. There was no association present at all. It was as though the word had been released into a great bubble of space-time and hung suspended there. It had no relationship to anything. And since it was completely irrelevant, I couldn’t even attempt to find a word to go along with it. It would be like trying to answer a question on color with a bar of music.”

“I tried to tell them what it was like – it was as though I was in the middle of a wide wonderful pasture – free and green and full of sunlight, and something was going on back at the fence that they wanted me to do. I was in the pasture, but the word association test was part and parcel of the fence – which is only an artificial barrier with no real intrinsic meaning to the freedom of the pasture. It was trivial, and there was no association of any kind, so I begged off. It was almost impossible to see how intelligent people could expect to find meaning to life (which was the pasture) in contemplating designs of the fence. And suddenly I saw the difficulty. Life is the warmth and the flowing and the three-dimensionality – but it comes overwhelming to a man who must compress it into one dimension and flatness and barrenness in order to deal with it. And this necessity to deal with it comes when he tries to go somewhere. It is the motion of trying to go – trying to get some place is the difficulty – it is the cause of the descent from Eden. Because the minute that one tries to go someplace or to “be” someone or something, then one is not content to let things be. In our ardor to “be” something, we lose personal life – and must content ourselves with this poor, flat, tawdry imitation… the illusion had become a reality.”