Pahnke, Walter

The fundamental reason for taking psychedelics is the experiences they produce. These experiences may be of many kinds. Walter Pahnke (1967) has recently classified them into five types psychotic, characterized by fear, paranoid symptoms, confusion, impairment of abstract reasoning, remorse, depression, isolation, and/or somatic discomfort psychodynamic, in which unconscious or preconscious material becomes vividly conscious cognitive, characterized by "astonishingly lucid thought" aesthetic, with increased perceptual ability in all sense modalities and psychedelic mystical, marked by all the characteristics of spontaneous mystical experience observed in the literature. These experiences may be the cause for the effects of psychedelics on behavior. They are also the fundamental thing that must be explained if psychedelics and their effects are to be understood. 

Walter Pahnke is Director of Clinical Sciences at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, and Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland. 

For "Drugs and Mysticism," by Walter N. Pahnke. Reprinted from International Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. 8 (1966), No. 2. Also appeared in The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism, edited by Harold A. Abramson. Copyright 1967 by Harold A. Abramson. Reprinted by permission of the publishers. 

Out of this work developed a third area of inquiry the resemblance of mystical experience induced by psilocybin to mystical states brought about by spontaneous rapture or by religious practice. This eventually became a "double-blind study, described by Leary as a "tested, controlled, scientifically up-to-date kosher experiment on the production of the objectively defined, bona-fide mystic experience as described by Christian visionaries and to be brought about by our ministrations. It was conducted by Walter Pahnke as part of his Ph.D. dissertation for the Harvard Divinity School. 

The Use of Music in Psychedelic (LSD) Therapy," Helen L. Bonnie and Walter Pahnke, Journal of Music Therapy, 1972 Narcotics Nature s Dangerous Gifts, Norman Taylor (Dell, 1949, Laurel, 1966) Recreational Drugs, Young, Klein-Beyer and others (Berkeley Books, 1977)... 

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