Strassman's Altered States
Review of My Altered States by Rick Strassman
The human DMT study conducted by Rick Strassman in the early 1990s stands out in the history of psychedelic research for several reasons. Firstly, his work helped slowly reignite a fascination with these substances in the scientific world. There had been a virtual absence of human research in the United States for several decades—at least officially sanctioned ones. Also, having tended to use experienced users in his study, Strassman’s approach reconnected a well-established underground to the world of ‘respectable’ research. In short, psychedelics were put back on the official map.
Secondly, as recorded in The Spirit Molecule (2001), was the strange and otherworldly effects that the subjects in his study reported. Along with Terence McKenna waxing lyrical about elves to underground crowds, entities were now in the lab too, and their untold story was thrust front and centre. Therefore, along with Strassman’s popularization of the pineal gland theory of endogenous DMT, there was plenty of publicity for the molecule’s weirdness. In many respects, DMT (and ayahuasca) are today’s iconic psychedelics.
However, not all of the publicity was welcomed, especially among Strassman’s own religious community. The psychiatrist had been a practitioner of Zen Buddhism since his early twenties, but his research with DMT put a strain on his affiliation, leading him to turn more explicitly to his Jewish roots. This resulted in DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible (2014), in which he comparatively explores prophetic states with those described under the influence of DMT.
Strassman’s interest in religious practice and his desire to explain the biochemical basis of spiritual experience has its roots in his young adulthood. In his latest book, a memoir entitled My Altered States: A Doctor’s Extraordinary Account of Trauma, Psychedelics, and Spiritual Growth (2024), the psychiatrist recounts some of the early episodes of his life that led him down these aforementioned intellectual paths. It provides not only a very personal snapshot of himself, but also a picture of the kind of milieu that foregrounded his research.
My Altered States then is a series of chronologically ordered vignettes. In the preface, ‘Research is Me-Search’, he writes, ‘I found these states to be so compelling—either positively or negatively—that they inexorably steered my career into psychedelic drug research’. Furthermore, they are also what first led him into Zen Buddhism. In recounting the episodes, Strassman relies on his experiences of undergoing psychoanalytic psychotherapy, along with his religious and psychedelic interests, and each one is followed by a ‘Reflection’ section.
The book is split into two primary sections; a shorter one dealing with early childhood, and the other when aged between 17 and 22, which makes up the bulk of the book. The former includes memories, moments of realization (like when he discovered meditation during a classroom punishment), and visions of childhood received as an adult during altered states, ‘which may be memories of real events’. This caveat is very interesting and raises questions about how childhood is narrativized. In psychoanalytic terms, one could say that childhood is more present than past in the concern of an adult.
The main section, ‘Finding My Way’, recounts his years at ‘The College’ during which he wished instead to be attending Stanford University. In many respects the vignettes reveal the quite ordinary social anxiety of a young adult—questions of sex and sexuality, fitting in with friends, exploring new experiences, and finding one’s feet. They are tinged with a kind of socio-religious consciousness in which other students are described as Protestant Boston Brahmin types, fellow Jews, and one particularly nasty character is even described as ‘Aryan’.
This anxiety and exploration is filtered through new (and varied) experiences with alcohol, cannabis and lots of LSD. There are embarrassing moments at parties and with girls, great beauty seen and felt on trips in the wilderness, self-doubt, and intellectual curiosity. The narrative necessarily cuts the reader off from the inner feelings and thoughts of other students in the stories, and this gives the memoir an overall tinge of loneliness and self-imposed isolation. The story culminates in a kind of messianic fervour in Strassman’s intellectual desires, mirrored by difficult emotional states, leading to his engagement with Zen.
So far as memoirs go, My Altered States describes college experiences, and personal travails, that are without doubt shared by thousands of other people. For this reason, the ‘reflection’ passages, while providing an insight into Strassman’s own personal reading of himself, sometimes miss the mark with the reader—they needlessly over-intellectualize common experiences. Nevertheless, within the context of a life of fascinating research, My Altered States grounds Strassman’s research very elegantly in the post summer-of-love era of the very late 1960s and early 1970s.