March 10, 2004

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Altered states

by Sue Dremann

Stanislav Grof lay on a gurney with wires attached to his head. It was 1954, and the young Freudian psychiatrist was doing his residency at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague. The wires were part of an experiment, for which he had volunteered.

But Grof was already becoming disillusioned with standard psychoanalysis, having seen patients who had been in therapy for 20 years without any appreciable results.

"I was beginning to regret not having pursued my interest in animated movies," said Grof, a devotee of early Disney-animated films.

As it turned out, however, the research project changed his career profoundly, Grof recently told an audience at the 2004 Conference for the Association for Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto. It opened his mind to "non-ordinary states" of consciousness, which he now considers the psychology of the future.

So what was the experiment? The research project had him and other medical staff taking LSD as a way for them to experience the psychoses of their patients and gain insight.

When Grof later became chief of psychiatric research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and associate professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, he further explored non-ordinary states and charted what he considers a new cartography of the human psyche.

Non-ordinary states of consciousness -- including body-transcending experiences -- can get a person in touch with areas of the human psyche generally ignored in modern psychology, said Grof, now in his 70s.

It may not be as far out as it sounds -- and people don't have to take drugs to change their consciousness either. People who meditate or practice breathwork as a part of the discipline known as "mindfulness" are already familiar with altered consciousness. Other practices, including mystical and shamanic rituals, also bring non-ordinary consciousness.

Grof calls his therapy "holotropic (moving toward wholeness) breathwork." Patients are guided into altered states through accelerated breathing, evocative music and other Eastern disciplines, along with Western psychology. When in an induced state, patients get in touch with deeply hidden experiences or traumas -- some of which occurred before or during birth, according to Grof, and others that are part of what psychologist Carl Jung called the "collective unconscious."

One of many examples of unrealized experience involved the case of a Czech woman who had a fear of heights. During holotropic sessions, she recalled that as an infant, she had been tossed high in the air in a game of catch by drunken Soviet soldiers, who had bunked in Czech homes during the post-World War II occupation, Grof wrote in his book, "Psychology of the Future."

As she confronted her fear, subsequent sessions brought a vision of an angel who carried her through the sky suspended from a rope. When she was ready to let go, she transcended her phobia.

How exactly this works is unknown, but Grof theorizes that the symbols that appear during non-ordinary states may be a kind of personal mythology of the original trauma, feelings, and ultimate resolution -- a personal language that communicates to the patient.

A young woman suffering from nausea and bulimia began to confront her eating disorders after her holotropic breathwork session produced the vision of a little demonic man with a green tongue who lived in her stomach. She felt this figure represented the psychodynamics of her eating disorder. It expressed her experience and made it recognizable.

"The man's green stretched-out tongue seemed to be of special importance; it was a very apt and graphic representation of sickness and revulsion," Grof noted.

Dr. David Spiegel, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, agreed that the consciousness study is an emerging field in psychiatry.

"There is much we can learn about consciousness and how it can regulate our moods," he said.

Previously, psychology was limited to studying and altering behavior, but psychologists are starting to look at some of the more vague and shadowy areas of the human psyche, such as cognition, Spiegel said.

He currently engages in research on hypnosis as an altered state.

"It can alter the perception of pain, but some research is also looking into brain function and the way we take in information," he said. The use of magnetic resonance imaging and other technologies will also figure into the future of psychology, he said.

Grof, calm and silver-haired, said there is a need for mainstream psychology to accept the relevance of non-ordinary consciousness, to take therapy to the next level.

"The closest non-ordinary state that is currently acceptable in modern psychology is the dream. Every other change of consciousness is considered pathological," he said. "There is no distinction between the spiritual and the psychotic in modern psychology."

"Psychiatric literature contains numerous discussions of what would be the clinical diagnosis for many great figures in spiritual history. St. Teresa of Avila is dismissed as a severe hysterical psychotic ... (and) even Jesus and Buddha have been viewed as suffering from psychoses because of their visionary experiences and 'delusions,' " Grof noted in his book.

How big of a change could happen in the field of psychology if therapy using non-ordinary states became mainstream?

According to Grof, it could lead to a revolution as profound as physics has seen in the last three decades. Special Sections Editor Sue Dremann can be e-mailed at sdremann@paweekly.com.

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