The Tripper from West Point
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"Probably most people don't know that he was ranked as one of the leading clinical psychologists in the country. He created, in fact, a seminal mathematical formula which is still in use,
and which allows clinical psychologists to assay personalities efficiently, saving them an enormous amount of time."
-- G. Gordon Liddy
"His impact has been profound on America and, really, world culture. I hope people see how much of that effect has been positive in the sense of creating a more interesting, more involved,
more interactive planet. In his early work as a psychologist, he really changed the whole notion of how you approach the human personality. He introduced an idea that has now been seamlessly incorporated into how we think about the self, which is that th
e self is relational, something that happens in the field of interaction between selves. Prior to Tim, that was just not a concept and it's really important."
-- John Perry Barlow
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He was born Timothy Francis Leary in Springfield, Massachusetts, 1920, the only child to Cap't. Timothy Leary, US Army, and his wife, Abigail. Young Tim did most all the right things as only children often do and in 1940 was enroll
ed as a cadet at West Point. A year later, however, after admitting that he had taken part in a drinking party on a troop train, he was ousted. It wasn't the first time his honesty got him into trouble, and it wouldn't be the last. If anything, the incide
nt was an omen of things that would come.
After West Point, Leary decided to become a psychologist. He earned his
Master's degree in social work from Washington State University, and then
attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he
fit in with the emerging radical intelligentsia, challenging the contemporary
theories of personality. While his career was moving into the fast track, his
personal life stopped one morning in 1956 when he and his two children, Jack
and Susan, found his wife, their mother, had committed suicide.
In 1957, he published "The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality," an academic
text that was deemed by the Annual Review of Psychology as "the most important
book on psychology" that year. His work gained him renown and in 1959 Leary
joined the faculty at the Harvard Center for Personality Research.
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In his quest to unravel the mystery of human personality -- to discover how and why we are the way we are, Leary seemed destined to buck traditional psychology in an even more significant way. As fate would have it, the doors of perception opened for him at the start of the sixties -- 1960 to be exact -- during a trip to Mexico. At the suggestion of an anthropologist, Leary took an unexpected detour, a journey to the center of his own mind on magic mushrooms. In those moments, Timothy Leary's life changed again. It was then, he later wrote in "Flashbacks," his 1983 autobiography, that he realized "the brain can be reprogrammed."
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