Break on Through: Betty Eisner's Problematic Use of Psychedelics, Groups, and Control for Integrative Experiences

ABSTRACT

Betty Eisner represents a prominent figure in the “golden age” of psychedelics research, as well as a cautionary tale about questionable therapeutic practices, exercising authority and control, and the misuse of psychedelics during the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. Situating her work and the consequences of her problematic practices in the counterculture, the Human Potential Movement, and integrative experiences helps provide some context for the decline of the first wave of psychedelics research and the more cautious and conservative approach to the second wave of psychedelics research. Some of the dangers associated with figures like Eisner, and consequently the first wave of psychedelics, may help explain the slower development of group therapy approaches and the inclusion of social context in the second wave focus on psychedelic‐assisted psychotherapy.

1. Introduction

Psychedelics research has resurged since the early 2000s amounting to a second wave, or what has been called a “psychedelic renaissance” (Sessa 2012), following the first‐wave or “golden age” of psychedelics research in the 1950s and 60s (Pollan 2019). The first wave of psychedelics research ended with the criminalization and prohibition of these substances due to concerns over the proliferation of recreational use of substances in the psychedelic movement and the American War on Drugs (Falcon 2021; Hall 2022; Plesa and Petranker 2022). Nevertheless, the first wave research showed promising efficacy for psychedelic psychotherapy, alleviating end of life anxiety, mood disorders, and alcohol dependence, among other therapeutic uses (Carhart‐Harris and Goodwin 2017; Lowe et al. 2021; van Amsterdam and van den Brink 2022). The current second wave research is predominantly focused on the therapeutic uses of psychedelics, with the FDA calling MDMA and psilocybin “breakthrough therapies” (Aday et al. 2020) for a host of disorders in combating what has been described as an ongoing mental health crisis by the World Health Organization (2017).

The liberatory rhetoric of the second wave psychedelics industry is guided by a neoliberal paradigm focused on medicalization and individualized therapy that often ignores the systemic inequities at the root of the mental health crisis (Plesa and Petranker 2022). This seemingly staunch empirical focus on medicalization and individual psychedelic‐assisted psychotherapy may be compensatory for the myriad problems documented during, and after, the first wave of psychedelics research, some of which we discuss in this article. As such, it is possible that group therapy and socially contextual approaches to psychedelics have been slow to emerge in the second wave research due to the cautionary tales exemplified in the first wave research and the concurrent countercultural movement in the 1960s.

We look at Betty Eisner's (1915–2004) psychotherapeutic work with psychedelics, integrative experiences, and her relationship to the Human Potential Movement as an example of a problematic attempt to create meaningful therapeutic groups, integrate psychedelics, unorthodox and dangerous methods, and other substances into her practice, and to account for the social matrix of her clients in the therapeutic process. This serves not only as an account of problematic practices that culminated in the death of one of Eisner's clients and the subsequent revocation of her license, but also as an extreme example of the dangerous practices during the first wave psychedelics research that has potentially residual effects in second wave research, constraining the possibilities for exploring group psychedelic‐assisted psychotherapy and including the social context as a relevant factor to a client's mental health and therapeutic outcomes.

2. Eisner and the Decline of the Golden Age of Psychedelics

In the 1950s, LSD was easily available to researchers who were willing to experiment with it and publish their results. In fact, it was so widely available that by 1959, it was the topic of nearly 1000 scientific publications from all over the globe (Hofmann Library Collection n.d.). Most of these publications dealt in the pharmacology of LSD, but the late 1950s was also an era of peak productivity for therapists who worked with psychedelics. Their work evolved into a new social phase as they began to look beyond their independent clinics and consolidate theories and methods across international boundaries. However, as the 1950s turned to the 60s, psychedelic substances became increasingly difficult for researchers and therapists to acquire. Thanks to over‐eager psychologists and inventive home chemists, experiences that were first kept to quiet psychiatric clinics and literati living rooms were becoming cheaply available in dance halls around the country (Dyck 2012). In 1966, Sandoz issued an international LSD recall to protect themselves from liability (Sessa 2012; Snelders and Kaplan 2002). The recall hamstrung researchers, but did nothing to curb the flow of home‐brewed LSD (Dyck 2012; Eisner 2002). In 1966, the State of California outright banned LSD for recreational as well as research use (Tendler and May 1984). The United States federal government followed suit in 1968 (Tendler and May 1984). In 1971, the United Nations held the US‐led Convention on Psychotropic Substances, which culminated in international restrictions on the distribution of various drugs including LSD (Bewley‐Taylor 2003; Langlitz 2013). These injunctions stamped out all legal LSD psychotherapy in the US, and reduced the availability of LSD in Europe to just a few clinics (Langlitz 2013).

Several authors have examined the tensions between psychedelic researchers and the social bodies that held competing constructions of LSD. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (Lee and Shlain 1985), one of the first comprehensive journalistic investigations into the history of LSD, addresses two forms of public responses to the 1960s’ counterculture movement that emerged within psychedelic scholarship: Some psychologists–most famously Timothy Leary and Ram Dass (or Richard Alpert, as he was known before 1967)–took front row seats in the revolution, offering their purported expertise in the human mind to help people channel their psychedelic insights into source material for personal growth; Others, such as Sidney Cohen, halted their therapeutic use of psychedelics. To tamp down the heating rhetoric, they instead emphasized the potential harms of unchecked LSD use among youth, and posed LSD as a strict tool of science and medicine. Sessa (2015) describes how the sociopolitical bias against psychedelics did not necessarily end psychedelic research, but rather, created a niche for research that verified their harms. Melting into the public corpus of sensational journalism and urban legends about hallucinogen‐related psychosis, violence, and self‐harm, these new studies contributed to the reconstruction of psychedelics as one‐dimensional public dangers.

Dyck (2012) notes that yet another ideological camp of psychedelic researchers emerged to contest scientists who discredited LSD on the basis of its perceived social danger. In 1967, a group of Canadian and American researchers established the International Association of Psychodelytic Therapy, an organization designed to publicly combat misinformation with medical science. Ultimately, the organization could not effectively counterbalance LSD's increasingly negative publicity. In Neuropsychedelia, Langlitz (2003) describes the history of isolationist politics that kept Swiss psychedelic researchers slightly more insulated from sociopolitical interference than their international colleagues. Although Switzerland signed onto a US‐led United Nations resolution to prohibit all hallucinogen use in 1971, the Swiss government broke ranks with the UN and gave the Swiss Association for Psycholytic Therapy license to research and practice for a brief period in the 1980s.

In general, these texts present scientific responses to psychedelic science as diverse, but tending to affirm the status quo. Rather than reexamining the relationship between psychedelic science and politics, law, and broader society as these writers have done, this article will show where psychedelic research stood in relation to the larger field of psychotherapy. More specifically, we position Eisner's therapeutic practices in relation to the countercultural therapeutic practices that were proliferating in the 1960s. With changing laws, Eisner replaced her psychedelic work with group therapy, bodywork, and other unconventional techniques that therapists were developing for the purpose of connecting people with their more honest, creative inner selves. The social context within which Eisner administered these techniques likewise became increasingly important to her, and she cultivated them deliberately under the rubric of the “Matrix.”

Although her approaches were initiated or greatly influenced by eminent humanistic psychologists of the time, the psychology profession became critical of them by the 1970s (Grogan 2013). Following the death of a patient in 1976 and the consequent revocation of her clinical license, Eisner's history contours the development and downfall of the controversial practices that characterized the cutting edge of psychotherapy in the countercultural era. Experimenting with concoctions of dubiously legal drugs, placing bodies under exceedingly strenuous physical conditions, and explanatory frameworks that took stock in past life memories and extrasensory perception, Eisner, it can be argued, is an extreme example of 1960s’ countercultural psychotherapy.

3. Eisner's Beliefs, Values, and Work

Psychology meant new things in 1960s America. According to Grogan (2013), by the 1950s, psychologists established authority in a range of areas of American society, from media and politics to education and industry. In large part, however, their services were used to rubber‐stamp the social status quo with the approval of a scientific institution. In this period, the role of the clinical psychologist was to help a client correct personal problems that caused them to conflict with social norms (see also Napoli 1981; Lunbeck 1995). The majority of clinical psychologists adhered to a notion of deviance based on an American interpretation of psychoanalysis, wherein unresolved conflicts manifested as some form of inability to meet social standards of normal behavior. Grogan draws on depictions of psychoanalysis in popular 1950s magazines such as Life and Scientific American to show that the psychoanalytic process was communicated as an austere method of introspection one would suffer through to achieve marital and vocational success (See also Hale 1995). In the age of behaviorism and the adoption of animals as models of human determinism, a contingent of psychologists experimented with how environments could be restructured to control individuals’ and communities’ behavior for specific ends (Rutherford 2009).

American psychology in the 1950s enlisted healthy, happy humans to be stewards of the dominant social order. Grogan's book, Encountering America (2013), describes the emergence and appeal of humanistic psychology as a rejection of psychological theory that prized conformity. Abraham Maslow (1908–1970), a founding figurehead in humanistic psychology, had a grander idea of what it meant to be psychologically healthy (Herman 1995). He expressed his vision of psychological health in diametric opposition to his peers: Rather than conformity, healthy individuals cultivated independence and creativity; rather than aspiring for normalcy, they strove to achieve more than what society had already promised them. Along with pioneering humanistic psychologists Rollo May (1909–1994), Gordon Allport (1897–1967), Carl Rogers (1902–1987), and many more, Maslow ushered in a new form of psychology that treated society as the sick element, and whose utopian goal was to heal society by producing individuals who modeled independence, creativity, and cognitive flexibility (Grogan 2013; Herman 1995).

We contend that the humanistic notion of “the integrative experience” was the pivot point around which Eisner organized her therapeutic methods. Building off Carl Jung's (1875–1961) notion of psychic integration, the integrative experience described the process by which a person came to confront their darker depths, understand that they constituted a part of the person's wholeness, and release the psychic energy that was otherwise used for their repression (Jung 2014; Gelber and Cook 1990). The concept was difficult to articulate within the scientific modes of reasoning that Eisner's peers in psychiatry expected, but was self‐evident for the Californian psychospiritual community whose truth compasses were more oriented toward phenomenological than positivistic data. Whether it was reached through LSD, religious practices, or spontaneous mystical episodes, an integrative experience was interpreted to reveal the possibility of complete self‐acceptance, empowering clients to transcend traumas that inhibited their personal growth. Eisner found new ways to help her clients recognize and transcend their traumas as a private practitioner in the 1960s and 70 s, a time when psychedelics were besieged by mounting legal and professional limitations (Davidson 2017).

In a legal examination regarding the death of one of her patients in 1976, Eisner described her occupation as follows: “I have now a specialized practice, the practice I really care about, a group of people who really want to change all the way down, in other words, to remove all the barriers to the fulfillment of their creativity” (1978, p. 13) The basis of this practice took root in the late 1950s. At the VA hospital, psychiatrist and Eisner's supervisor Sidney Cohen selected the types of patients he and Eisner would see, many of whom represented a psychiatric population and exhibited severe mood disorders, alcohol dependence, and episodes of psychosis (Eisner 1978). Cohen's objective was to help his patients restore a degree of autonomy that would allow them to reintegrate with their communities. This aim was reflected in his and Eisner's outcome measures, which required corroboration of patient progress from family and community members (Eisner and Cohen 1958; Cohen et al. 1958; Cohen and Eisner 1959). When Eisner began her private practice, she picked up a rather different clientele. From 1957 until the early 1960s, her office was located a few streets away from Beverly Hills (Eisner 1978), near popular clinics serving a connected community of artists, actors, and writers whose reasons for seeking LSD therapy were equal parts therapy, creative inspiration, and social kicks (Dobkin de Rios and Janiger 2003; Siff 2015; Novak 1997). Eisner also attracted affluent patients who worked in the creative and intellectual industries (Eisner 1978). According to Eisner, most of her patients were “clinically normal”, had never been hospitalized for mental illness, and were of above‐average intelligence. They were people who could already be described as sufficiently functional by societal standards, but had certain “character disorders” that prevented them from fulfilling their innermost dreams (Eisner 1978).

People came to Eisner, sometimes traveling long distances, specifically for drug therapy (Eisner 2005; Eisner 2002; Eisner 1978). She charged $100–$125 for private sessions that used LSD, Ritalin, and a hyperventilation‐inducing mixture of 30% oxygen and 70% carbon dioxide called “carbogen” (D.S 1977). Eisner and her pharmacopoeia worked to tear down the psychological barriers that patients built between their self‐perception and their potential. Her notion of “integration” unambiguously resembled a state that Maslow called the “peak experience,” wherein people realized the true extent of their abilities, felt an inextricable connection to the world, and came away motivated to apply themselves in ways that would prolong their peak functioning (Nicholson 2007; Grogan 2013; Maslow 1968). Maslow even described the sensation of the peak experience as a feeling of being “more integrated” (Maslow 1968, p. 104). Revealing another juncture with Eisner's area of practice, Maslow believed that most spontaneous peak experiences happened by luck, but was hopeful that the responsible application of psychedelics could make peak experiences widely accessible (Nicholson 2007; Grogan 2013).

Maslow's hope was Eisner's mission statement. During drug‐induced integrative experiences, ordinary clients would become aware that each moment was an extravagant sensory feast, and that they were free to imbibe in each passing moment when they were liberated of intrapsychic drama. Sessions were spent exploring these dramas so that patients could live them out, fully experience their emotional valence, and release the energy that the mind had to use to keep the dramas repressed. However, truly resolving psychic conflict required sustained commitment to behavioral change, and the drugs and sessions themselves did not sufficiently motivate patients to align their actions with their insights. The insights were so multitudinous, and each one seemed so significant, that patients had difficulty manifesting them in the context of their daily grinds. In Eisner's words, “if you change a person very fast and put them back into the original environment, either the change is lost or they are under an enormous amount of stress from the environment which created the problem in the first place” (1978, p. 14). An integrative experience itself was not enough to sustain change. Eisner (1978) solution was to provide clients with a new social environment that supported their initiatives to change– what she would later dub a social matrix.

She established a supportive environment using group therapy. In 1964; Eisner (1978) delivered a paper at the First International Congress of Social Psychiatry in London titled “Psychedelics and People as Adjuncts to Psychotherapy,” where she introduced the idea of “people‐potentiated therapy” During her term at the Brentwood VA hospital, she noticed accelerated progress in patients who received treatment from a male‐female therapist dyad compared to those who sat with a single therapist (Eisner 1978). She originally grounded this phenomenon in Jungian theory, reasoning that the presence of both a male and a female helped the patient better project archetypes of either sex. As she continued to experiment with LSD and Ritalin in private practice, Eisner started to invite her experienced clients of either sex to sessions with new clients. Strangely, patients’ rates of progress were related less to the sex of her accomplices and more to their number, a finding that was especially evident for patients whose complaints were more severe (Eisner 1964b). Eisner (1964b) hypothesized that drug‐experienced individuals acted as models of “the open unconscious, the dedication to growth, the capacity for empathy, … and welcoming of other levels of consciousness” (p. 7) that resembled the integrative experience.

Eisner's realization that people could be used to potentiate the integrative experience had lasting ramifications for her career as a therapist. Starting in 1960, she began holding LSD sessions with a consistent group of 10–15 individuals. Her clinical notes indicate that all participants were given LSD–anywhere in the range of 25–100 µg, depending on experience–while Eisner herself took amphetamine or methamphetamine pills. As the drugs took effect, Eisner led the group members through a variety of expression exercises. In one exercise, participants “blew out” their hostility by smashing cardboard boxes (Eisner 1960a, 1960b, 1960c). Eisner watched participants blow and interpreted the statements they made about authority, their parents, or God through their actions. In another exercise, group members took turns sitting on Eisner's lap and opening up to her while she attempted to manifest an open, loving, nurturing archetype (Eisner 1960a, 1960b, 1960c). Sometimes, physical contact alone was enough to flood participants with a sense of connection with humanity and the cosmos (Eisner 1960b). A third exercise was called “eye therapy,” “eyeballing,” or “eyeball plunging” (Eisner 1960a, 1967). Eisner and a client locked eyes, and what happened next was anybody's guess. Some clients convulsed and contorted; others hallucinated distortions onto Eisner's face; others felt that they traveled backwards and forwards in time with Eisner. In all cases, eye therapy was designed to elicit a reaction that was not cued by therapist suggestion, and was therefore an authentic statement from the untouched self.

Eisner's exercises started off by placing an individual member at the center of the group, or at least at the center of her own attention. However, she frequently let the exercises take on lives of their own, spinning them off into newly improvised activities, requesting participation from the group, and even handing over control to different members of the group if she felt that someone else was better equipped to lead an exercise at a given moment (Eisner 1960a, 1960b, 1960c). This ad hoc ethic inevitably led the group's energy to diffuse throughout Eisner's Santa Monica home, where she hosted group sessions. Sessions were long—sometimes lasting throughout the night—and clients ended up mingling, engaging in therapeutic activities and analyses of their own, and sometimes, forming romantic and sexual bonds (Eisner 1960a, 1960b, 1960c, 1961). The interpersonal bonding feature was central to Eisner's belief that group therapy was more exploratory than personal therapy. The more familiarity clients felt with their group, the more comfortably they could access and expose their depths in a social space. This was especially because the group rendered depth as the performance of taboos such as hostility, sexuality, and traumatic memories.

In the context of their closeness, an experiential approach to the taboo led to sessions that often overstepped the bounds of the ordinary client‐therapist relationship. In some sessions, Eisner invited clients to spit on her as an opportunity to comprehend the depth of their hostility and the degree to which it was intertwined with sexuality (Eisner 1967). Delivering a paper called “The Importance of the Nonverbal” at a 1964 international LSD conference in Amityville, New York, Eisner (1967) outlined exactly how she used spitting to help patients discharge hostility. She described the session in which she conceived the method: a patient “had been looking at pictures of his grandmother and aunts, and at the sight of one aunt, he started choking. Given a towel he choked, spit, and vomited into it for some time without apparent relief. Suddenly the therapist [Eisner] had an idea—she ordered him to spit on her face” (1967, p. 8). The suggestion shocked the patient, but he proceeded to spit “as hard and fast as he could, until he burst into tears and fell back on the bed, sobbing out the release he felt” (Eisner 1967, p. 8). As she kept reprising this method, it took on several formal qualities. She had patients tightly grasp her shoulders to give them “the strength to keep spitting as hard as [they] can” (Eisner 1967, p. 9). Due to the intimate nature of this position, Eisner could use patients’ changing grips and hand positions to gauge “the extent of [their] fusion of hostility and sexuality” (Eisner 1967, p. 9). Patients were instructed to spit “until there [was] a breakthrough” (Eisner 1967, p. 9), meaning Eisner sometimes had to withstand their spitting for over an hour. She kept glasses of water on hand for patients whose saliva gave out before their rage (Eisner 1967). To symbolically resolve hostility at the end of a spitting session, Eisner invited the patient to wipe her face clean with a towel.

Whereas spitting exposed how hostility was driven by unresolved sexual conflict, Eisner also employed physical contact‐based techniques to explore the degree to which hostility mediated patients’ sexual relationships, and to model the distinction between sexuality and universal love. Like spitting, these techniques arose spontaneously before taking on formal features. Reporting on an overnight peyote session held in 1961; Eisner (1961) described receiving the intuition to lie down face‐to‐face with a client who had isolated himself behind a couch. She manifested an “open and loving” state and encouraged him to experience closeness stripped of its sexual overtones. As therapeutic as she believed the process was for her client, Eisner also experienced a breakthrough in her understanding of how her own body facilitated therapy. She wrote, “I was a real channel of love that day … I could help people get love and sex together without their being skewed into the sex with frustration from lack of ability to act” (Eisner 1961). The same night, she tried the technique with several clients, one of whom experienced love, seduction and aggression so simultaneously that Eisner (1961) had let him writhe on her, suck her breast, and spit at a fellow member of the group before he himself gave up on the possibility of breakthrough. As with spitting, this technique entered the group arsenal. A 1964 session record shows that with time it grew more nude, more aggressive, and more sexually explicit. In addition to revealing the intertwining of sexuality and hostility, nude contact put a lens on a client's relationship to masculinity and femininity, and on the group's hierarchy of patriarchal dominance (Eisner 1964a). It, too, exemplifies the way that Eisner leveraged group dynamics to accelerate access to similar sorts of insights that LSD so readily brought to conscious awareness.

4. Eisner's Work and the Human Potential Movement

How did Eisner's therapy ever get so extreme? Eisner left few records of her contemporary influences in psychology, so it is difficult to know the degree to which her theories and methods were self‐authored. However, she was practicing group therapy at a time when the practice was gaining national fame, and her methodology shared some overlap with a form of group therapy that humanistic psychologists were exploring. In the 1950s, humanistic psychology began to consolidate as an alternative to the mechanistic explanations of subjectivity that psychoanalysts and behaviorists advanced (DeCarvalho 1990; Koch 1971; Rogers and Russell 2002). This form of psychology was structured around the belief that human behavior was not merely limited to adaptation to stressors and traumas; at peak psychological functioning, it was oriented toward the realization of a person's creative potential. According to the maverick humanistic psychologist Sigmund Koch, group therapy was the ordinary humanist psychologist's trademark technique for empowering clients to realize their potential (Koch 1971).

In the 1960s, Carl Rogers adapted the group model to client‐centered therapy, reasoning that the addition of more people to a therapy session invited more sympathy and positive contact into the room (Grogan 2013). Rogers began experimenting with the group method with colleagues at the University of Chicago, where he taught psychology in the 1940s and 50s. Rather than moderating group discussions, they developed a “group‐centered leadership” approach, wherein a therapist led by encouraging the group to determine the course of discussion themselves (Kirschenbaum 2004). By the late 1950s, their experiments birthed the “encounter group,” a therapy group designed to teach people about themselves through interaction with others (Kirschenbaum 2004; Grogan 2013).

Rogers considered encounter groups “the most significant social invention of the century” (Rogers 1968, p. 16). Amid Cold War tensions, he believed that training American society to value open communication, self‐reflection, and authentic interpersonal relationships could mean the difference between world peace and Armageddon (Rogers 1968). And for a short while, it looked like America was ready to be reprogrammed. Throughout the mid‐to late‐1960s, encounter groups proliferated across the United States, and even made it to the UK and Canada (Cooper 1975). However, the historiography of the encounter group movement overwhelmingly points to California as the source of the movement's vitality. Some of the well‐known humanistic psychologists that lived and worked in California included Rollo May, James Bugental, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and William Schutz (Grogan 2013). These psychologists’ teachings converged at the Esalen Institute, a “human potential” retreat center that leaned over the coastal cliffs of Big Sur, California (Kripal 2007; Goldman 2012; Grogan 2013).

The human potential movement was an interdisciplinary effort to bring the goals of creativity and individuation to the forefront of culture. Unsurprisingly, it was a leaderless movement, but its prominent figures included leading humanistic psychologists, as well as California's public intellectuals (Grogan 2013; Gelber and Cook 1990; Stolaroff 2005). California, and particularly Esalen, was the crucible in which encounter groups became alloyed with the human potential movement. Esalen was founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Richard Price, two men who studied psychology at Stanford University in the 1940s and, like Eisner, joined the Bay Area community of seekers that gathered around Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, syncretic mysticism, and growth‐oriented psychology (Goldman 2012). After Price became a psychologist and Murphy returned from a religious journey through India in the late 1950s, the two joined to lease a ramshackle 120‐acre hot springs facility at Big Sur and transform it into a luxury retreat for psychospiritual exploration. Their plan was in no small part influenced by Aldous Huxley. Circa 1961, Murphy and Price met with Huxley to solicit his public endorsement for the launch of a human potential seminar center targeted towards creative intellectuals (Goldman 2012). Before providing them access to his social network, Huxley instructed them to meet with Gerald Heard and learn how he ran his spiritual retreat Trabuco College (Goldman 2012). He also sent them to observe a holistic weight loss center in Baja California, Mexico, where they took LSD and learned how human potential principles could be deployed to manage physical health (Goldman 2012). Huxley's field trips signaled the fact that the two men belonged to a lineage of practitioners who connected psychological health with spiritual practices (Goldman 2012).

Esalen largely began as an intellectual endeavor. Guests lodged at the facility for multi‐day seminars that involved reading and discussing the works of scholars of consciousness evolution such as Maslow, Heard, and Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo Ghose (Grogan 2013; Wood 2008; Murphy 1967). Price required his staff to read Maslow's Toward a Psychology of Being (1968) and geared many workshops towards therapists who wanted to learn about humanistic psychology but did not attend universities that taught the nascent field (Grogan 2013). Heard, Willis Harman, Myron Stolaroff, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and other staples of the human potential scene were invited to lecture and facilitate workshops on topics ranging from philosophies of mind to the mystical applications of drugs (Grogan 2013). Like the Sequoia Seminar, Esalen sold an intellectual approach to self‐improvement, but cemented its intellectual position in the direct, personal experience of self‐transcendence.

It was after several years of operation that Esalen tipped its scale from teaching human potential verbally to viscerally through modified practices of humanistic psychology. Certainly, psychedelic drugs had a prominent presence on the retreat grounds, but Murphy and Price came to see their rampant use as an aspect of human debasement more than of human potential and did what they could to stomp them out (Grogan 2013). In 1967, Murphy and Price brought in psychologists William Schutz, a group leader at the National Training Laboratories (the birthplace of the encounter group predecessor known as the “T‐group”), and John Heider, the Ivy League legacy son of gestalt psychologist Fritz Heider, to take up residence at Esalen (Grogan 2013). Bored of the demure, industry‐focused psychology of their Northeastern upbringings, Heider and Schutz used their carte blanche to electrify the encounter process. If encounter groups were designed to acquaint people with themselves, then encounter leaders had a duty to illuminate the furthest recesses of their clients’ selves. Therefore, if some procedure had the potential to ramp up the emotional intensity of a session, then Heider and Schutz tried it. Their clients got nude. They fasted in extreme temperatures. They wrestled each other, yelled at each other, and expressed their sexual desires for each other in the most explicit possible terms (Grogan 2013). In embodying extreme states of anger, lust, shame, and physical discomfort, session participants were expected to gain insights about themselves that would not have been possible under ordinary circumstances (Grogan 2013).

Sexuality, nudity, and other subversive explorations of catharsis may have been the norm at Esalen, but they were not exclusive to it. Psychologists who drew influence from or found kinship with Esalen and materialism‐critical psychologists such as Maslow were emboldened to experiment with flamboyant techniques (Weigel 1977). In 1967, Hollywood‐based psychologist Paul Bindrim devised a procedure explicitly called nude psychotherapy (Nicholson 2007). Noticing that Esalen clients became comfortable with group nudity towards the end of their retreats, Bindrim attempted to induce the confidence to be emotionally self‐disclosing by frontloading nudity at the outset of his marathon sessions (Nicholson 2007). Like Eisner and the psychedelic therapists, he tried this with the intention of accelerating the therapeutic process (Nicholson 2007). With the same goal in mind, other therapists in the 1960s tried to condense the productivity of encounter retreats into 2‐day‐long “marathon” sessions (Weigel 1977). They forced near‐constant interaction between a group of 8–15 clients to rapidly erode their socialized courtesy and encourage uninhibited communication. Although the marathon encounter had its origins in mid‐1960s California, by the 70s, it had spread throughout the United States and was being implemented in prisons, schools, and corporate offices (Weigel 1977). Even Maslow himself, at the time the president of the APA, endorsed nude psychotherapy and other countercultural efforts to recover the pre‐social self (Nicholson 2007; Smith 1990). Psychology was smitten with a notion of authenticity that opposed conformity. Just like Eisner's therapy group, seekers of countercultural psychology ached to behave and emote in ways that unsettled polite society—the more disruptive, the more existentially significant (Nicholson 2007). Using nudity, marathon therapy sessions, disrupted group dynamics, and psychedelics, psychologists provoked their clients to transcend the stifling effects of culture and access the dormant dreamers that waited inside.

5. Eisner and Integrative Experiences

Eisner's no‐holds‐barred approach to group therapy may have seemed extreme, and indeed there were times it drastically overshot contemporary standards of therapy etiquette. But looking at the larger context of group therapy in 1960s’ California, Eisner's approach appears to have tapped into a cultural moment of willingness to test the limits of the human capacity for authentic expression. Taking Esalen as the site at which the encounter group method experienced its most rapid and public development, Eisner began her journey into human potential‐based group therapy ahead of the curve. Esalen was only founded in 1962 and began exploring encounter groups in earnest in 1967, whereas Eisner built human potential philosophy into her therapy as early as the 1950s. Nonetheless, Eisner was close to Esalen in proximity, philosophy, and social network. Looking at how her therapy continued to evolve from the mid‐1960s into the 70s, connections to Esalen abound. As Sandoz, the psychology profession, and the law began to restrict the psychotherapeutic use of LSD, Eisner adopted several nondrug strategies for reproducing the psycholytic effect. Although we have not found much direct archival evidence for their connection, it is surely no coincidence that they appeared at Esalen around the same time. This section describes the way that Eisner's work came into communion with the culture of Psychology associated with the Human Potential Movement, just as the culture of psychedelic science was waning.

Eisner (2002) encountered trouble acquiring LSD almost as soon as she began working with it. Under the auspices of the Brentwood VA hospital, LSD was easily obtained through Cohen's credentials, but when she completed her research contract with Cohen in the spring of 1958, she learned that Sandoz had been tightening their LSD distribution policies. Before the late 1950s, Sandoz required applicants to pledge that they would formally research and publish on LSD (Siff 2015). Profiteering psychologists took advantage of Sandoz's leniency and collected trivial data to create the façade of research (Novak 1997). By 1958, Sandoz restricted LSD distribution to psychiatrists with institutional affiliations (Eisner 2002). In the same year, Eisner (2002) “psychological associations” (p. 81) restricted psychologists’ use of experimental therapy adjuncts to hospital settings. As LSD entered the 1960s, its nonmedical use became widespread, and psychologists who failed to replicate the unparalleled success being claimed in California and Saskatchewan began to question its true therapeutic value (Sessa 2015; Lee and Shlain 1985). By 1967 psychedelic research was subject to stringent federal regulations, by 1968 LSD possession was outlawed, and by 1969 it was banned even for medical research (Lee and Shlain 1985).

As psychedelics became increasingly associated with countercultural rebellion, conventional psychotherapists began distancing themselves from psychedelics, even before the drugs became legally prohibited. Eisner (2002, 2005) herself claimed to have stopped using LSD in therapy entirely by 1964. Instead, she used Ritalin, a drug that kept her clients as lucid and open to the therapeutic process as low‐dose LSD, but did not itself induce an integrative experience. Although Ritalin was more commonly administered in an oral form, Eisner preferred intramuscular Ritalin injections, which she had been administering to patients via her medical supervisor Dr. Marion Dakin since 1961 (Eisner 2002). However, when it too was removed from the market in the early 1970s due to its abuse potential, it took her several years to find ketamine, her next psycholytic drug of choice. Introduced to the market in 1970, ketamine was considered a highly effective anesthetic drug, albeit with unintended psychological effects that resembled those brought on by psychedelic drugs (Hansen et al. 1988). Eisner learned of these effects through the work of Salvador Roquet, a Mexican psychiatrist who became interested in the psychospiritual properties of mind‐altering substances through his interactions with Mexican indigenous shamans (Yensen 1973). In 1974, she established contact with Roquet, and began administering ketamine in her own practice (Eisner 2002). Eisner also looked to explore nondrug methods of inducing the psycholytic state. In part, she honed in on a set of methods that were collectively known as “bodywork,” wherein techniques such as hot mineral baths, a guided practice of screaming known as “cathartic blasting,” and a form of holistic massage called “rolfing” were used to bypass the psychic defenses of the verbal mind and bring unconscious conflicts to the surface (and in some cases, to even resolve them). All of these techniques were strongly associated with Esalen, a place that provided residencies for famous bodyworkers like “rolfing” inventor Ida Rolf, led the charge in promoting the “primal” and catharsis‐based therapies, and drew people in with its natural hot springs (Kripal 2007; Goldman 2012; Edgar and Williams 2021).

There was one more key resemblance between Eisner's practice and the Esalen environment. Earlier, we described that near the beginning of her career, Eisner learned that therapeutic gains were far more sustainable when they were enacted in a supportive environment. The retreat aspect of Esalen was contrived to allow attendees to undergo a shared experience, establish distance from their ordinary routines, and support their experimentation with new personas (Goldman 2012; Kripal 2007). With Eisner, what began as a special therapy group in 1960 resembled a commune by the 1970s. In 1970, a group of clients rented a home together in Santa Monica, forming a “therapeutic community” (Eisner 1997, p. 215) that remained intact outside of sessions (Eisner 1977). Eisner (1977; 1978, 1997) encouraged the practice, eventually acquiring four homes and an apartment complex to house up to 40 members and their families. Dictating her clients’ living situations allowed Eisner to eliminate aspects of their ordinary environments that inhibited their growth.

Eisner would eventually refer to her specially contrived environment as a “matrix,” a term that the German group psychoanalysis pioneer S.H. Foulkes coined to refer to the new networks of meaning that clients created when they interpreted their problems with the help of a group (Roberts 1982; Eisner 1964a, 1978). She took the concept of the matrix beyond the microcosmic therapeutic environment: it was also “that environment from which the subject comes, such as family and living situation; the environment the subject is living in while having sessions; and the environment to which a patient returns after successful therapy” (Eisner 1997, p. 215). Her version of the matrix was intended to complement the existing focus on “Set and Setting” in the psychedelic experience (Johnson et al. 2008; dos Santos et al. 2018). “Set” refers to one's mental state, indicating openness and acceptance as predictors of positive outcomes, while “Setting” refers to the direct physical environment, stimuli, and other people in the space (Aday et al. 2021; Fadiman 2011). Eisner expanded her matrix to include every environment that clients could find themselves in, and she strove to control as many of them as possible. Thus, she scheduled vacations with clients, made time for leisure outside of sessions, and staged theatrical productions with them as the cast (Eisner 1997; Eisner 1977). Clients even claimed that Eisner (1977) reserved the power to determine who lived in which house, to the point that she would split up families if she considered it a clinical necessity. This was presented as being fair because she, too, occasionally lived in the commune houses (D.S 1977; Eisner 1977).

6. The Death of a Patient and the Costs of Human Change

In Eisner (1978) perspective, the highly‐involved therapy group she cultivated in the 1970s was the furthest she had yet gone in her quest to help clients explore their creative potential. Neither her clients nor her profession entirely shared this perspective. On November 14, 1976, a patient had died during a group session that involved Ritalin, mineral bath therapy and cathartic blasting (Morgan 2009). The exact circumstances under which the patient died were ambiguous and could only be roughly stitched together in a complicated legal inquest that solicited the testimonies of Eisner; patients both present and absent at the session; expert doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists; the coroner; and colleagues that testified to Eisner's ethical and professional integrity. After 2 years of hearings with the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance (BMQA) and the American Psychological Association (APA), Eisner's clinical license was permanently revoked (Davidson 2017). Though the investigation could not assemble a definitive account of the patient's death, its records present an opportunity to examine the tensions between Eisner's conceptualization of the integrative experience and the ethical mires she stepped into as she attempted to cultivate a therapeutic matrix for her clients.

According to Eisner (1978) recollection, her client's passing was not because her methods were unreasonably risky, but because the client's insubordinate behavior during the session put him in unnecessary danger. For one, Eisner claims that he disregarded her bathtub safety protocol, and at one point, violently attempted to turn over and submerge himself while proclaiming his intention to drown. Additionally, he possibly snuck more Ritalin than Eisner had allotted, something he was noted for doing in past sessions. Meanwhile, client affidavits painted a contradictory picture. One member stated that the client who passed was in terrible shape from the minute the group had arrived, and that for over a half hour, the group was made to treat his worsening condition by chanting at him, passing energy to him through their hands, and verbally assuring him that “he didn't have to die, he'd worked through the problem” (S.D. 1977, p. 2). She suspected that the group had indulged Eisner's dubious methods because Eisner had socialized them to accept her judgment unequivocally, lest they be reprimanded for acting “out of authority” (S.D. 1977, p. 3). When Eisner finally suggested someone call a paramedic, she reportedly back‐peddled and instructed clients to perform CPR for another 10 min while she thought about how they could best represent the situation in the inevitable police report (S.D. 1977). Another client corroborated this narrative. He recalled, “Someone questioned if it would not be best to call the fire department for help. Dr. Eisner's response was ‘of course you know there will be an investigation.’ No one dared commit that heresy. A little while later, Dr. Eisner decided to make the call for help, and even then expressed the feeling that everything would be alright” (Krouscop 1977, p. 2).

The coroner's report described the first responder arriving at a scene of “15 to 20 people ranging in age from their late teens to late 50's, standing around the victim holding hands [in what appeared] to be some type of occult ritual” (Carpenter 1977). Although the client's death may have been the cause for the official accusation against Eisner, the strange circumstances of his death prompted the BMQA to take on a general examination of Eisner's unorthodox practices. She came under scrutiny for using drugs with little recognized psychotherapeutic use (Koons 1977), unethical therapeutic practices (Goldstein 1977), and for using her expert status to cultivate a coercive, authoritarian personality (Deyonge 1977).

Another expert witness testimony came from a clinical psychologist and consultant for the National Institute of Mental Health who specialized in drug and family research. He was equally condemning. In preparation for his testimony, the witness researched available evidence for the therapeutic efficacy of Ritalin, ketamine, and carbogen, but found no instance in which any of these drugs has been shown “to assist the attainment of personal insight” or provide “relief from patients’ emotional problems” (Goldstein 1977, p. 4). In his opinion, the use of experimental drugs whose utility only Eisner could access was part and parcel with the “cultist” (Goldstein 1977, p. 6) environment she had established around herself. The witness wrote, “effective group and family therapy is based upon the notion that the ethical therapist operates to assist patients to achieve a sense of personal autonomy and worth” (Goldstein 1977, p. 3). Reading patient testimonies, he found only “sadistic treatment” (Goldstein 1977, p. 4) and an inculcated sense of “self‐denigration and humiliation” (Goldstein 1977, p. 3) that consolidated Eisner's power over her patients.

As clients reported their experiences in Eisner's therapy groups in their affidavits, a variety of violations of client autonomy came out of the woodwork. The mildest of the bunch was a series of mandatory sessions Eisner was reported to hold every Friday night (Deyonge 1977). The sessions began with short check‐ins from the group members, but the meat of the session consisted of Eisner, clad in a black leotard, reading aloud from a book she was writing that had no direct consequence for individual clients’ growth (Deyonge 1977; D.S 1977). One client estimated she was grifting a total of $300–$400 from the group at each one of these sessions (D.S 1977). The violation of trust here was financial, but it only begins to describe the degree of control she exercised over her clients. According to the affidavits, Eisner micromanaged every aspect of the lives of the 40–50 clients who lived in the group houses, some of which were owned by Eisner and her family (D.S 1977). She relentlessly inquired and advised on their occupations, education, large purchases and investments, friendships, and sex lives (D.S 1977). To maintain clients’ commitment to the group, she sometimes separated families between the homes, or threatened to evict non‐compliers entirely. Living in the group houses was at times enjoyable, but residents could not escape the condition of being in constant therapy. Since everyone lived together, Eisner had a take on any one person's activities from each resident's perspective (D.S 1977).

Eisner purported to demand such intense loyalty to her vision because she saw the barriers that stood between her clients and their potential, and the only way to dismantle the barriers was to trust the person who could see them. Clients described group membership as a process of developing “blind obedience” and “accepting her reality as the only reality there was” (D.S 1977, p. 2). With such a large group sharing and protecting Eisner's reality, she was able to behave in ways that clearly transgressed the ethical obligations of a psychotherapist. Clients of one house claimed that she ordered them to restrain a housemate to a plastic‐covered bed for days to weeks, freeing her only twice a day for meals and denying her bathroom time (Deyonge 1977; T.D. 1977). The house obliged because she threatened that any dissent would undo years of the restrained client's therapy (T.D. 1977). Further staking her authority, Eisner pressured her clients to cease seeking medical care, convincing them that their physical ails were psychogenic and best treated by her. To distance them from the medical community, she brought in a family physician once a year to conduct extremely superficial checkups (T.D. 1977). In affidavits, clients contended that Eisner did this to obfuscate her ethical indiscretions from medical authorities (T.D. 1977). She chastised patients who wanted medical treatment for post‐session injuries, despite the seriousness of their complaints. Several patients suffered broken ribs after being aggressively “rolfed” under the dissociating effects of ketamine (Deyonge 1977; T.D. 1977). Others were injured in a treatment called “containment,” whereby Eisner and other clients sat on and asphyxiated a targeted client to the point of unconsciousness (T.D. 1977). In an effort to obscure the dubious conditions under which she administered drugs, Eisner instructed clients to exclusively refer to ketamine therapy as k‐sessions, and deceitfully snuck patients LSD whilst claiming it was a migraine medication called Sansert (T.D. 1977).

In the end, client and expert criticism mainly targeted Eisner's effort to control more of her clients’ social conditions than was justifiable under the jurisdiction of conventional psychotherapy. In the psychology of the 1970s, psychologically healthy individuals were constructed as agents that could navigate the clash of social duties in ways that allowed them to retain the sense that they were the agentic sources of their choices (Lerner et al. 1983). At least under the guidelines of the BMQA, therapists were expected to counsel on clients’ interpersonal relationships to the extent that their interventions remained supported by up‐to‐date scholarship on the “determinants of emotional disturbance” (Goldstein 1977, p. 6). Conversely, Eisner's decision to intervene on the level of the social matrix was perceived to be driven more by her intuition and personality, which made clients vulnerable to an inordinate degree of exploitation. According to one expert witness, Eisner's persuasiveness, charisma, and credentials helped her shift “the context of the therapist‐client relationship from a scientific practitioner‐client one to a spiritual‐religious cultist one, which [explained her] peculiar hold upon her clients and the domination… both social and economic” (Goldstein 1977, p. 6). Eisner was attempting to make the argument that the matrix was a fundamental condition in people's lives; that people were socially constituted all the way down, that social conditions flavored their suffering and wellbeing in ways that ordinary therapy rarely addressed, and that meaningful change in personal conditions required corresponding changes to the social. The argument seemed to have fallen on deaf ears, because the expert testimonies contained no indication that the Psychology profession was ready to accept the role of the social to any extent that brought an ordinary client's social life into the fold of therapeutic intervention. However, it certainly did not help that Eisner's exemplar for the matrix was riddled with unambiguous abuse of her role as a therapist.

7. Conclusion

The valuable insights gained from Eisner's work allow us to perform an archaeology of errors that resulted in her license being revoked and her idea about the importance of the social matrix eventually being ignored, especially when she had fabricated a social matrix for her community expressly to exercise coercive control over the lives of her clients. It is possible to distinguish here between the use of a social matrix as an interpretive lens into the contextual conditions of a client's life and relations compared to the deliberate construction of a matrix as a microcosm for social control. The former allows us to contextualize set and setting beyond the immediate psychedelic therapeutic intervention, while the latter is conducive to cult‐like rituals that implicitly reduce the personal autonomy of participants. As an interpretive lens, the social matrix helps situate a client within their social world, which often contributes to the extant factors in their mental health conditions. Together with set and setting, the triad including social matrix may offer a more robust approach to psychedelic therapies, especially those in group settings.

Despite the critiques of encounter groups indoctrinating clients with the ideology of the Human Potential Movement (Lieberman et al. 1972; Yalom 1971), advocacy for ethical and responsible group therapy remained (McLachlan 1972; Yalom 1970). Second‐wave psychedelics research has been slow to readopt group therapy (Trope et al. 2019), with a focus instead on individual psychedelic‐assisted psychotherapy, however, some contemporary studies using group psychedelic‐assisted psychotherapy have been promising (Anderson et al. 2020) and advocacy for the effectiveness of group, over individual approaches, to psychedelic therapies for combating the mental health crisis has been initiated (Gasser 2022; Gross 2021; Hendricks 2020). Specifically, the triad of set, setting, and social matrix in group psychedelic‐assisted psychotherapy has been argued to allow possibilities to emerge for collective meaning making and solidarity, which can find resistance to systemic inequalities in the shared social world that has exacerbated the ongoing mental health crisis (Plesa and Petranker 2023). Eisner's legacy serves as an example of the dangers in the history of behavioral science, which ought to be cautionary but not preclude the possibility for safely integrating groups and social context into psychedelic‐assisted psychotherapy.

Data Availability Statement

No data were created or analysed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.