Psychedelic Birth: Bodies, Boundaries and the Perception of Pain in the 1970s

‘Why is psychedelic culture dominated by privileged white men?’ asks historian Mike Jay, referring to a recent study of psychedelic users who are more than likely to be college-educated white males.1 This appears logical, given the figureheads (such as Timothy Leary) who attained cult-like status half a century ago. Many today continue to view psychedelics as a symbol of the hedonism of the counterculture rather than a form of therapeutic treatment. Yet recent attention to the potential of psychedelic drugs (MDMA and psilocybin) to effectively treat mental health conditions such as PTSD has raised new interest in the history of psychedelics and spiritual growth. Despite the absence of women in the psychedelic narrative, attitudes about gender, pain and the body played a pivotal role in how spiritual transcendence was experienced and interpreted in 1970s America. Historians have remained relatively reticent about psychedelics and spiritual transformation, as they have about many aspects of what may be, according to Beth Bailey and David Farber, ‘our strangest decade’. Unlike scholarship on the 1960s, they argue, ‘historians have been slow to put the 1970s into the narrative of American history’.2 Michael Willard adds that ‘we continue to see the 1970s as the betrayal of the 1960s, as the time when America lost its innocence, or faith, or passion’. Yet many of the visions and goals articulated in the 1960s became reality for more Americans in the 1970s than they had in the previous decade. The challenge for historians lies in ‘figuring out how to take Seventies culture seriously’.3 This is particularly the case when analysing the role of women in the counterculture. As historian Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo argues, ‘hippie women… have long been ignored and marginalized, relegated to the sidelines of both the counterculture and the women's movement’.4 The growing interest in altered states of consciousness in the 1970s is an ideal launching point for exploring cultural meaning in the 1970s, as it embodies the struggle of a new generation to make sense of the physical and spiritual world around them. Two examples of individuals experiencing altered states of consciousness illustrate the intensity and variability of the experience. On 6 March 1973, Antonio, a thirty-two-year-old psychiatrist attempted to describe the unfathomable pain he had just experienced.5 ‘Out of nowhere the most intense pain imaginable started penetrating my hands like a laser beam or a nail’, he wrote. He could feel the ‘terrible, agonizing weight’ of the nail tearing into his flesh. The intense pain, in turn, triggered earlier memories of pain. The first was the severing of his umbilical cord at birth; the second, his circumcision as a medical student. And then, another pain started, one even more torturous. The skin at the edge of his fingernails started peeling off, little by little. The only thing that kept him from collapsing, ironically, was the sheer intensity of the pain; it did not allow room for anything else. ‘It felt as if I was suffering the pain of all mankind’, he reflected.6 Antonio's experience would not be surprising to literary scholar Elaine Scarry, who argued in 1985 that during intense moments of pain the ‘contents of consciousness’ are ‘obliterated’.7 In The Body in Pain, she posits a direct connection between levels of pain and an individual's sense of self. ‘It is the intense pain that destroys a person's self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe’, she explains.8 Pain forces the individual to completely dissociate from the corporeal body, something that Scarry and other academics perceived to be a traumatic experience. Another story of altered consciousness, however, challenges the notion that such dissociation was inherently traumatic. On August 2, 1973, after hours of pain, a young hippie by the name of Ellen found herself transformed. It began with music, as she asked her husband Phil to play the piano, thinking it might help soothe her. ‘While I am not an actual piano player’, Phil recalled, ‘some quiet music did seem to have a calming influence’.9 Ellen began to release the intense pain. ‘Once it started happening’ she wrote, ‘I forgot all about that other stuff and experienced a whole other level of consciousness that seemed eternal and timeless’. She later remembered that ‘the sense of relief and relaxation made it seem like I was melting. I remember my mouth hanging open, drooling, and feeling very warm and psychedelic and light-headed. Laying there, I felt One with everyone in the Universe’.10 Within months of each other, Antonio and Ellen perceived intense experiences of pain in very different ways. Both appeared to be in altered states of consciousness, either because of their pain, or in spite of their pain. What was happening and why? In order to explore the significance of their experiences, we have to put them in historical context. Antonio had swallowed 400 micrograms of LSD as part of a professional study and training programme at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Institute, one of approximately 116 clinical LSD studies funded by the National Institute of Mental Health in the USA.11 In this particular study, conducted at the Spring Grove State Hospital between 1970 and 1975, 108 mental health professionals volunteered to take between one and three high level doses of LSD and record their short- and long-term reactions to the drug. The average age of the volunteers was between thirty-nine and forty-one years of age, and two-thirds of them were either M.D.s or Ph.D.s. Eighty-six of the subjects were male; only twenty-two were female - a result of the decision among the psychedelic research staff to exclude women of childbearing age ‘in the remote possibility that there may be some danger’.12 This decision may have been a response to LSD studies conducted in the late 1960s on pregnant rats and hamsters to test for fetal abnormalities.13 A1968 report delivered at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology suggested that LSD's effects ‘can be passed down through generations’ but emphasised that the data could not be applied to humans.14 Like many scientists engaged in psychedelic research in the late 1960s, however, they did not want to take any unnecessary risks. As LSD became a recreational drug of the counterculture, scientists rightly suspected that their research was in jeopardy and proceeded with caution. Yet their focus on middle-aged professional men was hardly unusual. It was not until the mid-1980s that a series of laws, policies and guidelines would emphasise diversity and inclusion in research subjects.15 Psychedelic researchers were firmly entrenched in a conservative climate in terms of sex and gender, despite their desire to challenge the traditional boundaries of medicine and science to include insights on personal transformation and spiritual transcendence. Thus, the MPRI professional study focused predominantly on men, though this gender imbalance was not discussed in the findings. The results were positive though somewhat inconclusive as to long-term effects. Two-thirds of the subjects experienced psychedelic ‘peak’ experiences. Antonio was one of them. His was an imagined pain, induced by a drug that altered his state of consciousness on that memorable March day. Ellen, on the other hand, had not taken any drugs during her August episode. Nine months pregnant, her pain stemmed from contractions she experienced while in labour. Though she felt ‘very warm and psychedelic and lightheaded’, her journey into an altered state provided her with a natural sense of pain relief. She was one of 700 hippies who lived in buses, tents, and a few houses on a thousand acres of property just outside of Summertown, Tennessee, in an intentional community known as ‘The Farm’. By 1973, The Farm was already well known, and a remarkable 15,000 visitors traipsed through the property that year alone, some to gawk, others seeking food, shelter, or a place to give birth. Due to the presence of self-trained midwives and a belief in the spiritual and transformative nature of birth (when done outside of the hospital), childbirth on The Farm became its own kind of psychedelic experience.16 Other than their altered states of consciousness, Antonio's and Ellen's experiences appear to share nothing in common. Antonio was part of a predominantly male scientific study conducted in a laboratory setting, while Ellen was one of a growing number of women seeking an alternative to hospital birth. Together, however, their stories suggest something deeper about the quest to infuse two professions - psychiatry and midwifery - with greater spiritual meaning at a time of great social upheaval.17 LSD researchers and hippie home-birth midwives, marginalised by both the mainstream and, later, historians, pushed the boundaries between science and spiritualism, between pain and pleasure. Yet there was something fundamentally different in the way Antonio and Ellen experienced and interpreted pain, even in an altered state of consciousness. Cultural assumptions about gender help to explain this difference. Studies suggest that women both experience and tend to report more pain than men. Yet they are ‘more likely to be less well treated’.18 This was a greater problem in the 1960s, when gender differences were even more pronounced. Prior to the women's health movement and the feminist demand for agency and validity in the doctor's office, the subjectivity of experienced pain seemed to support the assumption that women were indeed the weaker sex. If women were more fragile and emotional, then of course it was ‘all in their head’.19 Without the presence of objective biological indicators of pain - the only type of evidence valued in modern medicine - then subjective, experiential reports were irrelevant. But by the early 1970s, some scholars began to challenge this medical model and the presumed distinction between body and mind.20 As sociologist Gillian Bendalow argues, there was ‘a need to broaden out the definition of pain from the Cartesian proposition which inevitably acts to divorce mental from physical states and tends to attribute single symptoms to single causes’.21 Opponents to the Cartesian model suggested that psychological, cultural, and emotional factors could and did alter pain perception. Sociologist Irving Zola - no stranger to feminism, as he was married to noted women's health activist Judy Norsigian - argued that pain was ‘as much a cultural construct as a scientific one’.22 Anesthesiologist and medical ethicist Henry K. Beecher introduced the notion of a placebo effect, observing that, under certain circumstances, placebos could effectively relieve pain.23 As a result, historian Keith Wailoo notes, pain theory moved ‘deliberately, relentlessly, toward appreciating the power of the subjective, the mind, psychology, and perception in pain and its control’.24 The implications of this shift were enormous. Experiencing pain - whether through the intense contractions of labour or the potentially perilous journey of the psychedelic trip - took on new meaning and value. Pain could be transformative - a process, a spiritual journey, a path toward enlightenment. Yet not all pain was created equal; some voices continued to speak louder than others. As the authors of the Introduction of this special issue note, childbirth became a key focal point in the debate about pain. But natural childbirth advocates, even before the 1970s, stressed the extent to which pain stemmed less from the biology of birth and more from fear. One of the first advocates was Dr. Grantly Dick-Read, who published his first book, Natural Childbirth, in 1933. In that and his later 1944 publication, Childbirth Without Fear, he posited that pain in childbirth was not physiological, but was instead rooted in fear. The solution was not anesthesia but preparation and education. Over 95 per cent of women, he argued, are capable of experiencing childbirth without unbearable pain.25 The most effective way to reduce pain in childbirth without anaesthesia was to control the environment in which labour took place. Creating a setting to reassure labouring women that they were safe and getting them in a relaxed mindset would therefore minimise pain. Childbirth could be painless, even without the use of drugs. A testament to the unusual parallels between psychedelics and childbirth, the ‘set and setting’ principle emerged not from birth reformers, but from LSD research. It was introduced by Timothy Leary in the early 1960s to explain what made psychedelic drugs different from other types of medicine. The actual effect of psychedelic drugs such as LSD depended on two things, Leary explained. First, it was contingent upon the set of the person having the experience - ‘his personality, preparation, intention and expectation’. Second, it relied on the setting - physical, social and cultural (where the experience took place, with whom and in what type of environment).26 An individual's perception of pain and pleasure and the ability to experience spiritual transformation and altered consciousness was entirely contingent upon set and setting, according to psychedelic researchers.27 Thus, if we return to the stories of Antonio and Ellen, we can begin to see the extent to which each believed that they had chosen a mechanism toward spiritual enlightenment through pain. While the vehicle towards transformation differed, the process was surprisingly similar. And they were not alone. Through their stories, and those of other hippie home-birthers (primarily female) and psychedelic psychiatrists (primarily male), we are able to track how two different types of alternative practitioners sought to reshape and redefine their professions. Three themes are apparent in these stories: the fluidity of boundaries, out-of-body experiences, and cosmic unity. They appear in two very different contexts: a hippie commune and a psychiatric hospital. Together, they illustrate a shared desire to find new pathways to spiritual transformation and enlightenment in order to transcend emotional and physical pain. While The Farm was located in Tennessee, its founders were firmly grounded in California's counterculture. Most were followers of Stephen Gaskin, who had been teaching creative writing and semantics at San Francisco State College in the 1960s. By the end of the decade, he began offering a course through the Experimental College called ‘Monday Night Class’, a series of lectures covering everything from meditation to discussions about politics, religion and psychedelics. The course reflected the experimentation and syncretism of the countercultural 1960s. ‘When we first got the class together we were like a research instrument, and we read everything we could on religion, magic, superstition, ecology, extrasensory perception, fairy tales, collective unconscious, folkways, and math and physics’, Gaskin recalled. ‘And we began finding things out as we went along about the nature of the mind’.28 By 1969, this class had grown to several thousand people, many of whom began to see Gaskin as their spiritual teacher. ‘The idea was to compare notes with other trippers about tripping and the whole psychic and psychedelic world’, wrote Gaskin, by then heavily caught up in the San Francisco countercultural scene. Psychiatric research on LSD and other psychoactive substances had been on the increase over the past decade, as scientific studies suggested their therapeutic potential.29 Gaskin and his Monday Night followers also believed in the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, but in a different context. According to Gaskin, psychedelics served as a catalyst to expand human consciousness and attain greater spiritual awareness. Thus, drugs (initially LSD, but then natural substances peyote and psilocybin) were a regular part of Monday night class, as well as Sunday Morning Services (standing meditations) held before sunrise in Sutro Park. According to one follower, ‘Sunday Service was considered an ideal place to trip - a peaceful oasis in time, where the energy was dependably high, the vibes good, and of course, there was Stephen - tripping guide extraordinaire’.30 In 1970, Gaskin was invited to a series of lectures at and the and over of his followers to him in for this a for a spiritual and social The as it to be more and more attention as its of their way through states the of and social to and the most remarkable of the was the that took place on The first birth in a at while Stephen was an By the end of the a of women, under the of Gaskin, had the midwives, teaching along the the end of the Gaskin and his followers to in and a commune on a thousand Gaskin and a few other women a more of the who delivered the at As the to in with about visitors per did the number of Over have been on The Farm by these midwives, a per cent caught the attention of and birth practitioners around the Many more have been by than those on The book, a guide to for and birth practitioners published on The has over half a been into and is in Ellen's story was one of over birth stories in the that introduced to the of birth. the very first of the in to its most recent in these stories have many to how and where their be In to the of the of childbirth, birth stories published in were more likely to focus on the They also the hippie to describe drug experiences. ‘I down on the and began to and everything got of her labour on The ‘I began having contractions that started up to a and then about two the she As her contractions they became more ‘It felt like I was to the and I could my body and into them and it was or not experience a birth on The it became the to and was in the as ‘a of how to the energy of the of It was an physical and emotional and an for spiritual growth. the psychic Farm hippies energy could be into pleasure rather than pain. to psychedelic states during labour the connection - whether or - that Farm perceived between the ‘I felt than I had in my It was such a spiritual and much In between at how it wrote In the setting, physical boundaries between the and the world could ‘I was on the feeling all the forces of the it felt my another wrote of her that ‘I on and and the I felt like my and body were from the of and were down on the ‘I found in a place with a and a It was a place I could my body was but I was from I what and she been that contraction and had been able to feel it studies point to evidence that out-of-body experiences as a and rather than scholars the of out-of-body experiences during childbirth as an of rather than as a mechanism or an of of women out of their observing the birth from as a form of dissociation or or past This was not what was in In this birth was a experience - not just by but felt by others as This is part of what made it kept the energy between and my and and were on either of wrote another in labour. and the energy would up their and their and as in this setting, provided a for its that could guide them all towards greater spiritual awareness. birth was a very psychedelic experience for and wrote seemed to be with her in the of a experience - those moments of or that he wrote about in his and experiences as experiences that an form of and are even and in their effect upon the birth also the according to its ‘I the I felt for my new and the wrote one new She the first moments with her as she was by his and her for on a psychedelic ‘The and the early just and like a and for several I would have a at and I was for two she of the positive a special feeling of transcendence of time and experience of and a of insights of cosmic Though he was referring to the experience of LSD cosmic - or as called it - was a in birth were the like a the wrote of his labour. ‘The energy would up and would deeper until it seemed like I could through them like and see the of the out her Ellen a whole other level of consciousness that seemed eternal and during her labour. there, I felt One with everyone in the she Another experienced a sense of cosmic after her was and it like the before my In the countercultural then, childbirth became a community a of spiritual and and even a psychedelic experience. This took in as a natural of Stephen As the from the of San Francisco to the on the and on to Summertown, Tennessee, it new meaning and What started as an in alternative became an set of a of spiritual and and medical It was from though and the of did put alternative midwifery on the was however, to the that what was happening on The Farm was and the of the over the of the how alternative birth continued to we need to to the of LSD was first in by who was for a drug to for LSD was as to any effects. But in of to the by its This time, he some of the through his skin and experienced an of with play of a in as a form of psychiatric treatment. to under the name of to researchers and LSD could be as ‘a kind of training that could and the to a few hours in the world of their The argued, could be to treat and as well as model of in studies on the of mental was a medical in the psychiatry at in when a of LSD first from was and to take micrograms of LSD as one of the volunteers for such a to was and seemed like the of a new he Within a few hours of the his entire about the human and the role of was ‘I how much I about my in those few he recalled. He was by a that seemed to the of a The him out of his an my consciousness to cosmic The was for was in the of an Like many psychiatrists in and the in the he was by he for a of - the of the of insights into religion, and many The problem was the between theory and The results of were he and took of time and ‘I had great to terms with this a one had to study medicine. And in if we a we are able to something about He According to psychiatrist past of the American Psychiatric and of The of this has been the of the from the mental the mind, or the can can through a at of and have little the of he wrote. on the other hand, has than any other medical to evidence that the under its even he the challenges that pain how was it to it was given its subjectivity and the of Over the years he would over psychedelic at first in and then at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Institute in His him that study of human was only the of the LSD had the of the to explain human what he called ‘a new of the human LSD was a different kind of drug. It was not per and the experience could be different time, for he argued, LSD was a catalyst for also made by Stephen It was not experiences by with the