Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and author known for strongly advocating psychedelic drugs. Evaluations of Leary are polarized, ranging from "bold oracle" to "publicity hound". According to poet Allen Ginsberg, he was "a hero of American consciousness", while writer Tom Robbins called him a "brave neuronaut". President Richard Nixon disagreed, calling Leary "the most dangerous man in America". During the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the counterculture movement, Leary was arrested 36 times. As a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, Leary founded the Harvard Psilocybin Project after an experience with magic mushrooms he had in Mexico in 1960. For two years, he tested psilocybin's therapeutic effects, in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. He also experimented with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), which was then legal in the US. Other Harvard faculty questioned his research's scientific legitimacy and ethics because he took psychedelics himself along with his subjects and allegedly pressured students to join in. Harvard fired Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) in May 1963. Many people learned of psychedelics after the Harvard scandal. Leary continued to publicly promote psychedelic drugs and became a well-known figure of the counterculture of the 1960s; he popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, such as "turn on, tune in, drop out", "set and setting", and "think for yourself and question authority". Leary believed that LSD showed potential for therapeutic use in psychiatry. He developed an eight-circuit model of consciousness in his 1977 book Exo-Psychology and gave lectures, occasionally calling himself a "performing philosopher". He also developed a philosophy of mind expansion and personal truth through LSD. He also wrote and spoke frequently about transhumanism, human space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension (SMI²LE).
Early life and education Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, an only child in an Irish Catholic household. His father, Timothy "Tote" Leary, was a dentist who left his wife, Abigail Ferris, when Timothy was 14. He graduated from Classical High School in Springfield. Leary attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 1938 to 1940. He received a Jesuit education there and learned Latin, rhetoric, and Greek. Under pressure from his father, he left to become a cadet in the United States Military Academy. In his first months at West Point, he received numerous demerits for rule infractions and then was sanctioned for failing to report rule breaking by cadets he supervised. He was also accused of going on a drinking binge and failing to admit it, and was asked by the Honor Committee to resign. He refused and was shunned by fellow cadets. He was acquitted by a court-martial, but the silencing continued, as well as the onslaught of demerits for small rule infractions. In his second year, his mother appealed to a family friend, United States Senator David I. Walsh, head of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, who investigated personally. The Honor Committee quietly revised its position and announced that it would abide by the court-martial verdict. Leary then resigned and was honorably discharged by the Army. About 50 years later he said it was "the only fair trial I've had in a court of law". To his family's chagrin, Leary transferred to the University of Alabama in late 1941 because it admitted him expeditiously. He enrolled in the university's ROTC program, maintained top grades, and began to cultivate academic interests in psychology (under the aegis of the Middlebury and Harvard-educated Donald Ramsdell) and biology. Leary was expelled a year later for spending a night in the female dormitory and lost his student deferment during World War II. Leary was drafted into the United States Army and received basic training at Fort Eustis in 1943. He remained in the non-commissioned officer track while enrolled in the psychology subsection of the Army Specialized Training Program, including three months of study at Georgetown University and six months at Ohio State University. With limited need for officers late in the war, Leary was briefly assigned as a private first class to the Pacific War-bound 2d Combat Cargo Group (which he later characterized as "a suicide command ... whose main mission, as far as I could see, was to eliminate the entire civilian branch of American aviation from post-war rivalry") at Syracuse Army Air Base in Mattydale, New York. After a fateful reunion with Ramsdell (who was assigned to Deshon General Hospital in Butler, Pennsylvania, as chief psychologist) in Buffalo, New York, he was promoted to corporal and reassigned to his mentor's command as a staff psychometrician. He remained in Deshon's deaf rehabilitation clinic for the remainder of the war. While stationed in Butler, Leary courted Marianne Busch; they married in April 1945. Leary was discharged at the rank of sergeant in January 1946, having earned such standard decorations as the Good Conduct Medal, the American Defense Service Medal, the American Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal. As the war concluded, Leary was reinstated at UA and received credit for his Ohio State psychology coursework. He completed his degree via correspondence courses and graduated in August 1945. After receiving his undergraduate degree, Leary pursued an academic career. In 1946, he received a M.S. in psychology at the Washington State College in Pullman, where he studied under educational psychologist Lee Cronbach. His M.S. thesis was on clinical applications of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. Marianne bore their first child, Susan, in 1947, and their son Jack arrived two years later. In 1950, Leary received a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. In the postwar era, Leary was strongly attracted to the objectivity of modern physics; his doctoral dissertation, The Social Dimensions of Personality: Group Process and Structure, approached group therapy as a "psychlotron" from which behavioral characteristics could be derived and quantified in a manner analogous to the periodic table, foreshadowing his later development of the interpersonal circumplex.
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