POLITICS OF SELF-DETERMINATION

Words of cosmic wisdom—or, if you’re not a fan, cosmic slop—from the departed duke of psychedelic possibilities.

In a curious bit of posthumous pamphleteering, editor and psychologist Beverly Potter “mined”—the word is hers—the pages of Leary's glancing 1982 memoir Changing My Mind, Among Others to rescue "nuggets lodged in disjointed, statistical references and other incomprehensible language" (vintage Leary, in other words) and to wed them to scattered papers and jottings from the 1990s that Leary left behind. The result is surprisingly coherent, for the most part, as Leary revisits his revolutionary psychological theories of the 1950s and ’60s (which put into practice, among other things, not only the well-known use of psychotropic drugs, but also the then-heretical notion of group therapy). Sometimes Leary's pronouncements seem a little obvious ("I suspect that people tend to select jobs and occupational roles in accord with their interpersonal techniques for anxiety reduction and self-esteem"), sometimes simplistic and loopy at once ("If you want to change someone's behavior, share space-time with hir" [sic]), but they're no great departure from the run of current self-help books. Leary forges a more unusual course in the book's later pages, which are more manifesto-like: he stands firm in his defense of illicit drug use as an exercise in creative expression, arguing that "more and more people are using more drugs with less furor and confusion and accident" than in the 1960s, and suggesting that it would be a good thing to create drugs that are safer and more efficient to serve those consumers' needs. With another nod to the present and future, Leary also holds up the "cyberpunk"—a technologically sophisticated anarcho-geek—as the archetypal hero for the new century, tuned in and turned on courtesy of modems and hard drives.

An entertaining if offbeat specimen of memoir and polemic—albeit the kind of thing that (like the contents of Leary's medicine cabinet) is best taken in small doses.