Julian Silverman required LSD experience for staff on his psychiatric ward.
1. The Drug Science Podcast episode centers on Andrew Feldmár and his book Radical Adventure: an inquiry into psychedelic psychotherapy.
2. David Nutt interviews Feldmár because Feldmár trained with R. D. Laing, worked with MAPS, and has practiced psychotherapy for about 60 years.
3. The episode asks what psychedelic psychotherapy is for when the therapist, not just the drug, shapes the work.
4. Feldmár describes being born in 1940 to a Jewish couple in Hungary as Hitler advanced and his mother was taken to Auschwitz.
5. He says a young Catholic woman hid him for a year and a half while he pretended to be her son.
6. He recalls returning to a family reconstituted after the war, then living under communist rule until the 1956 Hungarian revolution.
7. He describes machine-gun fighting, shells, bombs, and then roughly 10 to 14 days of Hungarian independence before Soviet tanks and aircraft returned.
8. His father then arranged for him to leave Hungary, and Feldmár says he went from Austria to England and then to Canada through the International Red Cross.
9. In Toronto, he found that his Budapest schooling had prepared him in mathematics, physics, chemistry, Russian, German, and French, but not English.
10. He then moved from a PhD track in mathematics at Johns Hopkins University into psychotherapy after a nine-month analysis in Toronto.
11. Feldmár says he thought the analyst was so poor that it gave him hope he could become a better therapist.
12. He defines psycholinguistics as the psychology of language, including acquisition, grammar, and how children learn to speak.
13. He links that work to Noam Chomsky, deep grammar, surface structures, and the relation between the conscious and the unconscious.
14. He says his decisive London experience came after writing to R. D. Laing and being invited to London for supervision and therapy.
15. He describes Laing’s Philadelphia Association, seven London houses linked to asylums, and LSD psychotherapy supervision over about a year.
16. He repeats Laing’s question: “what does it mean?” and says LSD experiences might be real, metaphorical, dreamlike, or something else.
17. He argues that meaning is less important than practical change, and he says Laing regretted years of psychoanalysis because it trained him into habits he later crossed out.
18. He says psychotherapy is a practical science like ethics or politics, where “no theory, no technique” can replace living in the moment.
19. Feldmár says he would suit people in altered states by staying unafraid, because he came to work as a “psychedelic emergency service” and a “Sherpa” when his son and daughter’s friends were in trouble.
20. He argues that older therapists with long apprenticeship experience are dying out, so the field needs to capture their knowledge before it disappears.
