Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) was an American psychologist and counterculture figure who became famous for advocating psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, during the 1960s.

Richard Alpert: An American psychologist who collaborated with Leary at Harvard before becoming the spiritual teacher Ram Dass. Alpert shared Leary’s early psychedelic research and later took a sharply different spiritual path.
Set and setting: The psychological state and physical and social environment that shape a psychedelic experience. Leary emphasized preparation and surroundings as determinants of how a psychedelic session unfolded.
Harvard University: A private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1636. Leary taught and conducted psychedelic research at Harvard before the university dismissed him in 1963.
Psychedelic movement: A cultural and intellectual movement exploring psychedelic substances as aids to perception, spirituality, or social change. Leary became one of the movement’s most visible advocates during the 1960s.
Humphry Osmond: A British psychiatrist who researched psychedelic drugs and coined the word “psychedelic.” Osmond explored similar substances through a more clinical framework than Leary’s public advocacy.
Aldous Huxley: An English novelist and essayist whose writings explored consciousness and psychedelic experience. Huxley’s advocacy of psychedelics helped shape the intellectual climate Leary entered.
Psychedelic therapy: The supervised use of psychedelic drugs within a therapeutic process. Leary’s early research treated psychedelic sessions as potential instruments of psychological treatment.
Harvard Psilocybin Project: A research program at Harvard that studied psilocybin’s effects on human experience in the early 1960s. Leary and Richard Alpert led this program, which brought their methods under institutional scrutiny.
Counterculture of the 1960s: A broad social movement that challenged prevailing norms in the United States and other countries during the 1960s. Leary’s slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out” became associated with this counterculture.
Sidney Cohen: An American psychiatrist who studied LSD and later warned about its risks and uncontrolled use. Cohen’s caution about LSD contrasted with Leary’s increasingly expansive claims for it.

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Alan WattsRelated: Leary’s psychedelic experiments drew on ideas about consciousness also discussed by Watts.