Before Timothy Leary was interested in the weird, the psychedelic, and all that was largely deemed *not* normal – he was dedicated to understanding what was truly normal. Or, in his words, his “obsession” was to demystify the software of human experience” (1988, 1). In his view, human behavior, personality, and decision-making were all functions of a knowable system run by the brain, which was the point of interaction with the much larger external systems encountered in the physical world and via interpersonal relationship. His initial efforts as a scholar at Harvard University in the 1960s focused on revealing these networks of normalcy within a real family system, by conducting a controversial and damaging study of a young area family recruited at a Cambridge PTA meeting.
Leary, in his role as controversial countercultural icon of the 1960s and 1970s, has long been a key figure in my research as a scholar of that era interested in all things revolutionary, Underground, and psychedelic. He is now of the utmost importance to my life and work, as I have learned that the “average” American family selected was my own. While a doctoral student, I visited the New York Public Library to review the archive of Leary’s papers housed there after Harvard refused them. I encountered a file titled “The Family Project” in Box 42 of the archive, and […description of your reaction in the moment…] as I read psychological profiles of my father and his siblings as young children, along with their full names. Based on the research, Leary and the seminar of graduate students with which he was working on the project developed a Hannon Thematic Apperception Test. Leary’s write-up on the project outlines its failure and the trauma inflicted on the family, with some particularly sympathetic notes made following an encounter with my angry grandfather. The study was never published, but the write-up clearly contains the beginnings of many ideas that he, then, articulates in his 1988 book, How to Change Your Brain, without any connection made to the project.
Andrew Green Hannon 