While being famous as a counter culture and LSD guru Timothy Leary, was at least by trade a psychologist.
Did he actually achieve anything that mainstream psychologists, who don’t wear tie-dye and smell of patchouli, would consider new or ground breaking?
He came up with the Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness, but I don’t think it ever gained wide acceptance in the psychological community.
It would appear that he achieved a level of success, and was well-regarded at the time (that is, prior to his LSD-guru-dom) for his research. He’d be a footnote in a text somewhere.
From his wiki article:
Now that I’ve dropped out
Why is life dreary, dreary?
Answer my weary query,
Timothy Leary theory!
Manchester England, England . . .
– Hair
This doesn’t really answer your question, but the prominent pro-LSD types these days do not “wear tie-dye and smell of patchouli.” They’re plain ol’ researchers, psychologists, psychiatrists and the like, and, as is their wont, they perform real and serious research, without all the “counter-cultural” baggage Leary carried around with him.
The results over the last decade or so are pretty neat. The stuff shows real promise.
Wonderful article here, on the state of modern (American) research into psychedelics.
Here’s the thread-relevant bit, mentioning Leary:
It’s definitely worth reading in its entirety, though.
Thanks Steken, for that link!
No problem! Great read, no?
I’ll admit to tearing up a couple of times. When the cancer patients, in the midst of their trips, “see” their cancer… That was real strong stuff, I think.
Timothy Leary’s dead.
No, he’s outside looking in.
Has it gained any such acceptance, I wonder? The article doesn’t say one way or the other.
No. At least nothing that current psychologists find relevant or useful.
I don’t think that the “tie-dye and patchouli” was meant to be part of a legal description, or for a peer-reviewed
journal…
I won’t accept any articles for my psychology publication unless the paper is tie-dyed and stinks of patchouli. If it doesn’t, we know it isn’t a local author.
Is the implication of that model that alcoholics operate on a toddler level? Coffee addicts and smokers are mentally young children?
You missed my larger point: The pro-LSD faction ain’t all hippies no more. Read the article.
Isn’t that obvious? 
gulp
puff
Yes, just inviting discussion. So Leary is basically saying that the establishment with their martinis and cigarettes are immature children, and the pot-smoking anti-establishment are the real adults.
Another idea here is that the establishment is left-brain thinking and the freethinkers are right-brained. But the traditional psychology places emotions in the right brain which doesn’t agree with Leary’s assignment of Neuro-Emotional Level 2 to the left-brain hive. (Modern psychology states that the dichotomy is a myth.)
Very interesting, thanks for sharing.
You missed my fucking point: the phrase quoted was a fucking joke*. A FUCKING JOKE. *
Fucking Joke explanation fucking ensues:
Tie dye clothing and the patchouli popularity originated in the late 1960s, early 1970s, as part of the hippie movement. The world has moved on from those as well as the blacklights and the Nehru jacket. Any reference tying the aforementioned products with drugs is by necessity a joke, since, everybody knows (Operative Phrase) that patchouli and tie-dye clothing, and blacklight posters, and Mod Jackets and Peter Max posters, and love beads, and peace signs and hippie vans with murals on the sides, and love-ins and Twiggy, formerly (Operative Word) linked with LSD have gone into oblivion. The humor juxtaposes everybody’s knowledge of same with today’s modern attitudes and understanding of the TD&P and LSD usage in times past. See also: Birkenstock.
In short, my post was because I, and probably everybody else in the world since the Ford Pinto was created, knows that it isn’t only tie-dyed and patchouli wearing hippies that use/study/sell/wtf LSD.