LEARY, TIMOTHY (Social Science)

1920-1996

Timothy Francis Leary was a psychologist, scientist, and philosopher who made substantive contributions to interpersonal theory and methodology and also gained notoriety for his endorsement of and research on hallucinogens. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on October 22, 1920, Leary was an only child raised by his mother’s family in a devout Irish Catholic household. His father, a successful dentist and prominent member of the community, left the family when Leary was thirteen years old. Initially expelled from the University of Alabama for spending a night in the women’s dormitory, he appealed the dismissal in 1945 and was awarded his bachelor’s degree in psychology while serving in the army during World War II (1939-1945).

Leary met his first wife, Marianne, in 1944 while serving as a psychometrician at Deshon General Hospital in Butler, Pennsylvania. A year later they were married in the same hospital before departing for the state of Washington, where Leary began work on his master’s degree. In 1946 Leary received his master of science degree under the supervision of renowned psychologist Lee Cronbach (1916-2001) at Washington State University. The title of his master’s thesis was "The Clinical Use of the Wechsler/Mental Ability Scale: Form B," which he later retitled "The Dimensions of Intelligence." Following the completion of his master’s degree, Leary entered the doctoral program in clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1950 he received his PhD in clinical psychology with the dissertation "The Social Dimensions of Personality: Group Process and Structure."


Leary’s seminal monograph, The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation, was a direct product of his doctoral thesis. First published in 1957, Leary considered his monograph to be a methodological extension of the interpersonal theory of Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949). According to Leary, the emotional, interpersonal, and social life of individuals could be best understood as attempts to avoid anxiety. Leary’s monograph focuses on five levels of personality that include: (1) public communication, (2) conscious communication, (3) private communication or preconscious symbolization, (4) unexpressed or unconscious communication, and (5) the value or ego-ideal.

The majority of Leary’s monograph is devoted to the development of a two-dimensional circumplex model of personality, his most lasting contribution to clinical psychology. Developed by Leary in collaboration with several of his mentors at Berkeley, the circumplex model presents a methodology for measuring interpersonal behavior using a collection of simple and specific behavioral descriptors. Each behavior is situated along a continuum defined by two dimensions: dominance-submission and hostility-affiliation. Sixteen generic interpersonal themes are identified along the circumference of a circle where the two dimensions comprise the circle’s axes. The circumplex model can be utilized for a variety of purposes, including the assessment of the structure of personality, temporal variation in personality, and variability in personality due to situational context. Extensions and revisions of the Leary circumplex continue to be developed with the primary goal of better measuring and understanding the multifaceted and complex nature of interpersonal relationships.

After a brief tenure as assistant professor at Berkeley (1950-1955), Leary worked as director of the prestigious Kaiser Foundation in Oakland, California (1955-1958), where he applied his circumplex model to understand the process of group psychotherapy. During the time of his greatest academic achievements, Leary experienced a personal tragedy when his wife committed suicide in 1955, leaving him to raise their eight-year-old daughter and six-year-old son.

In 1958 Leary left Berkeley with his two children and moved to Harvard, where he accepted a position as lecturer at Harvard’s Center for Personality Research and began the most controversial period of his academic career. In collaboration with his Harvard colleagues, most notably Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, Leary started an experimental research program examining the effects of psychedelic/hallucinogenic drugs on behavioral change. In a series of studies with Metzner, Leary explored the rehabilitative effects of psilocybin on young criminal offenders at the Massachusetts Correctional Facility in Concord. Leary believed that psilocybin, under guided professional supervision, could act as a conduit for internal reflection and behavioral change. In a second series of studies, Leary’s doctoral student, Walter Pahnke (1931-1971), examined the effects of psilocybin on the mystical and religious experiences of volunteer seminary students, hypothesizing that psychedelic drugs would facilitate such experiences.

Leary’s research, and his expulsion from Harvard in 1963, would catapult him into the public spotlight, where he became a counterculture icon. Popularizing the catch phrase "Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out" in the 1960s, Leary was an open advocate of the use of psychedelic drugs as a method of exploring and expanding consciousness. He published several books on the subject, including The Psychedelic Experience (1964), coauthored with his former Harvard colleagues Metzner and Alpert. A controversial and outspoken figure throughout his life, Leary died of prostate cancer in 1996.

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