Laura L. Koppes (Ed.). Historical Perspectives in Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007. $75.00 (paper). ISBN0-8058-4440-6

✍ Scribed by Frank J. Landy

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 275 KB
• Volume: 43
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5061
• DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.20264

✦ Synopsis

Were they not authenticated, the amazing coincidences and fantastic twists in the life story of Timothy Leary (1990Leary ( -1996) ) could be mistaken for the plot of a Dickens or a Tom Wolfe novel. Consider this bare outline: The son of an alcoholic dentist father and a doting and pious Irish Catholic mother, young Timothy spends much of a troubled childhood worrying about when and in what condition his father will return home from his alcoholic binges. Then, abandoned by his father, the boy shows academic promise and gains appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. There, heavy drinking and a refusal to inform on upperclassmen lead to his being formally "silenced": a terrible punishment in which no one is permitted to speak with him outside of classes, or even to sit next to him in the mess hall. After resigning from West Point, Leary discovers and begins to excel in academic psychology, first as an undergraduate at Alabama, then as a Master's student under Lee Cronbach at Washington State University, and finally as a PhD candidate at Berkeley. His research culminates in The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, a system of psychodiagnosis along Sullivanian principles that quickly becomes part of the standard reading list for clinical psychology students, and leads to an appointment at Harvard. There, he and his colleague Richard Alpert (later to rename himself Baba Ram Dass) discover the psychedelic effects of magic mushrooms and their synthetic equivalent psilocybin, and gain notoriety by promoting the drugs' usefulness in educational, religious, and criminological settings. Dismissed from Harvard for abandoning his classes, Leary becomes a counterculture hero and famously urges young America to "Tune in, turn on and drop out." He establishes a commune in Millbrook, New York, which is harassed by the zealous young prosecutor G. Gordon Liddy, later to become famous himself as a Watergate burglar. Caught in a Texas drug bust, Leary is imprisoned in California but breaks out with help from the radical Weather Underground group and flees to Algeria, where he comes under the protection of the infamous Black Panther, Eldridge Cleaver. Rearrested a few years later and incarcerated in Folsom Prison, he is befriended by the prisoner in the adjoining cell, who happens to be the notorious murderer Charles Manson. After collaborating with the authorities, Leary is released and goes on a joint lecture tour with Liddy, himself recently released from prison following his Watergate conviction. Leary remains off and on in the spotlight for rest of his life, and following his death, friends send his ashes into space orbit.

I approached Robert Greenfield's extensive fleshing out of this outline with a degree of personal as well as professional interest because, although I never really knew Tim Leary, I did meet him. As a new graduate student at Harvard in 1962, my first supervisor was his colleague and friend Richard Alpert. Alpert was fired along with Leary in the spring of 1963, but the 6 months when I worked for him were long enough for me to get some sense of both men. Although their psychedelically inspired projects seemed grandiose and were coming under increasingly harsh criticism from other Harvard faculty members for their lack of rigor, they had at least a superficial appeal as possible ways to break away from a narrow behavioristic psychology. Alpert was personally congenial and kind to me and Leary, from a distance, seemed a very appealing figure. With his flashing smile and a hearing aid that lent him an attractive air of vulnerability, his eloquent encomiums to the inevitable "psychobiological