When the Impossible Happens

by Grof, Stanislav

  PSYCHIATRIC HERESY THAT BROUGHT FRUIT: The Story of Milada

  I have described earlier, in the Preface and in the introduction to the story of Karen, our concept of “spiritual emergency.” This new approach to spontaneous episodes of holotropic states of consciousness replaces indiscriminate pharmacological suppression of symptoms with psychological support and encouragement to “go through the process.” This therapeutic strategy does not have to be limited to conditions with strong spiritual emphasis. We have been able to extend it to many individuals whose non-ordinary experiences did not include manifest spiritual elements.

  The extreme heresy I have committed in the course of my professional career took this strategy even a step further. During my work at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, I used in several patients with the diagnosis of psychosis a strategy diametrically opposite to the conventional suppressive therapy with tranquilizers. I employed a series of LSD sessions to activate and deepen the process, utilize its intrinsic healing potential, and bring it to a positive resolution. An example of this approach is the following story of Milada.

  Milada was a thirty-eight-year-old psychologist who for many years before starting LSD treatment had suffered from a complicated neurotic disorder, involving a variety of obsessive-compulsive, organ-neurotic, and hysterical conversion symptoms. She had started long-term psychoanalytic therapy with the nestor of Czech psychoanalysis, seeing him three times a week for fifty-five minutes at a time. In the fifth month of her analysis, she had to be hospitalized because she developed acute psychotic symptoms.

  An important part of her clinical symptomatology was an erotomanic delusional system. Milada fell deeply in love with the chief of her department and felt irresistible affection and sexual attraction toward him. She was convinced that this was not a one-sided affair and that he shared her passion. According to her, this strong erotic and spiritual communion existing between them could not be expressed overtly and had to be experienced intrapsychically, beyond the facade of their rather formal social interaction. She felt that her boss, who was married and had children, could not express his feelings openly, at least initially.

  Several weeks later, she started hallucinating the voice of her imaginary lover. In these hallucinations, she heard him describe in detail his passionate feelings for her, promise a beautiful shared life in the future, and give her advice and even specific suggestions. During the evening and night hours, Milada experienced powerful sexual sensations, which she interpreted as intercourse at a distance, magically performed by her secret lover. Although in actual sexual situations with her own husband she had never been able to reach an orgasm, during these episodes she experienced orgiastic feelings of cosmic proportions.

  Gradually, the nature of the communications changed. Her boss now conveyed to her that divorces had been arranged for both of them and that they now would be able to live together. Milada’s hospitalization became unavoidable when she started acting under the influence of her delusions and hallucinations. One day in the morning, she left her husband and made an attempt to move into her employer’s apartment with her children and several suitcases. She actually got into a fierce physical fight with her boss’s wife, who refused to let her in. After many months of unsuccessful treatment with a variety of tranquilizers and antidepressants, as well as individual and group psychotherapy, she began an experimental program of therapy with serial LSD sessions.

  After twelve LSD sessions with medium dosages, her psychotic symptoms completely disappeared, and Milada developed full insight into her irrational behavior in the past. She now interpreted her erotomanic delusion concerning her boss as transference of her feelings for her father, who was very cold and whom she never had been able to reach. In a series of subsequent sessions, she worked on a variety of complicated neurotic and psychosomatic problems.

  While reliving various traumatic memories from different periods of her life, she was able to trace many of her present problems to their emotional sources in her unhappy infancy and childhood. She also spent much time on her complicated marital situation. Her husband was insensitive, cruel, and emotionally, as well as physically, abusive. He was an ardent member of the Communist Party, completely immersed in the pursuit of his political career, and provided no emotional support for her. In addition, both of their children were showing signs of serious emotional disturbances that required professional assistance.

  Then the LSD sessions moved into the perinatal realm, and Milada was reliving various aspects of her difficult biological birth. She experienced a rich spectrum of experiences characteristic of the death-rebirth process. The emotions and physical sensations associated with the reliving of her difficult birth, during which her twin brother had died, were so abysmal that she referred to these sessions as a “psychological Hiroshima.” When she finally completed the birth process and experienced the final ego death, I expected a marked improvement, as was the case in most neurotic patients.

  However, to my great surprise I witnessed instead a sudden and complete reappearance of the original psychotic symptomatology, which Milada had not shown for many months. The only difference was that this time I replaced her boss in the role of the main target of all erotomanic fantasies and experiences. In the process of LSD psychotherapy, Milada had developed a transference psychosis. She now believed that she was under my hypnotic influence and felt in constant rapport with me, in the LSD sessions, as well as during the free intervals between them. She experienced a mutual exchange of thoughts and even verbal communication between us.

  It was interesting that in some of these hallucinated interviews we “continued psychotherapy.” At one point, I spent a week in Amsterdam, Holland, attending a conference on LSD psychotherapy. During that time, Milada, who was hospitalized in the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, continued having her imagined psychotherapeutic sessions with me. We “discussed” various aspects of her life, and she carried out activities suggested by my illusory voice. This involved several hours of bathing and physical training every day and practicing feminine crafts, such as knitting and embroidery.

  Eventually, I told her in these hallucinated conversations that I had decided to drop the therapeutic game and to become her lover and husband. I encouraged her not to address me as “Dr. Grof,” but as “Stanya” (an affectionate form of my first name), and to employ the informal grammatical version of the second person used among relatives, close friends, and lovers. In Czech, as in many other languages, the difference between an intimate and more formal relationship finds its expression in the language used (as in the French to versus vous, German du versus Sie, or Spanish to versus Usted).

  I also gave Milada the permission to use my last name instead of her husband’s name. I repeatedly assured her of my love, told her that her divorce had already been arranged, and asked her to move with her children into my apartment. Among other things, Milada was now referring to “hypnogamic sessions” that she was getting from me in the evening and night hours. She interpreted the sexual sensations and hallucinations of intercourse she had at this time as arranged lessons in enjoying sex that I had decided to give her in order to accelerate her therapy. From the context of her LSD sessions, it became clear that, on the deepest level, Milada’s wishful magical thinking was a transference phenomenon reflecting her early symbiotic relationship with her mother.

  At one point, Milada spent many hours a day assuming bizarre postures, sometimes lying on the bed, other times standing. Once the nurses told me that they found her standing for a long time on the tips of her toes with her arms stretched forward and clasped together. When they asked her what she was doing, she brushed them away, saying: “Leave me alone, I am embracing him (meaning me).” Inevitably, I became a target of the nurses’ jokes; they teased me by pointing out that Milada had my size down and was holding her arms at just the right distance from the floor.

  Externally, Milada’s postures resembled those I used to see in the chronic ward in catat
onic schizophrenics, who manifested the symptom called “waxy flexibility” (flexibilitas cerea). Like Milada, they maintained for long periods of time strange and often bizarre postures. However, Milada’s “catatonia” differed significantly from the stupor of schizophrenic patients in one significant way: it was always possible to reach her verbally and bring her out of these positions just by addressing her and engaging her in interaction. She would then resume a normal posture and be able to carry on a reasonable conversation.

  She also understood what she was doing and offered for it a fascinating explanation. She shared with us that, at this time, her emotional and psychosomatic condition was critically dependent on the position of her body. In some postures, she experienced ecstatic bliss, oceanic feelings, and a sense of cosmic unity. In others, she felt deep depression, nausea, and metaphysical anxiety. She felt that this repeated the situation in her prenatal life, when she had to compete with her twin brother for their mother’s womb.

  On the basis of previous experiences with other clients, I continued with regular weekly administrations of LSD, despite Milada’s persisting psychotic symptoms. These sessions consisted almost entirely of negative experiences of a transpersonal nature. There was an important emphasis on reliving unpleasant intrauterine memories, which she related to the emotional stresses and illnesses of her mother during pregnancy, various embryonal crises, and the mechanical discomfort of having to share the uterus with her twin brother. This was accompanied by challenging karmic sequences and archetypal experiences of a demonic nature.

  In the final phase of treatment, a most unusual phenomenon occurred during one of Milada’s sessions. This time, the LSD had a paradoxical effect; instead of inducing holotropic experiences, it brought her back to normal. As soon as it took effect, she started addressing me in a formal way appropriate at that time in Czechoslovakia for a doctor-patient relationship. She distanced herself from her psychotic world and offered interesting psychological insights about it. However, when the effect of the drug started to wear off, the symptoms of transference psychosis returned.

  In the following session, she experienced for several hours profound ecstatic feelings, with the sense of cosmic unity as the prevailing pattern. They were associated with a sense of being the Divine Child in the womb of the Great Mother Goddess. To my surprise, she emerged from this session without the previous psychotic and neurotic symptoms and with a completely restructured personality. According to her own description, she was now able to experience herself and the world in a way completely different than ever before. She had zest for life, a new appreciation of nature and art, a totally transformed attitude toward her children, and the ability to give up her previous unrealistic ambitions and fantasies. She was able to resume her job and perform it adequately, obtain a divorce from her husband, and live independently while taking care of her two children.

  Many years later, after the liberation of Czechoslovakia, I was able to see her during my visits and find out that this remarkable improvement was lasting. Milada was able to cope with emotional crises in the lives of her two children, who were both severely affected by their parents’ stormy marriage. She did not even experience an emotional breakdown or require hospitalization at the time when her daughter committed suicide by throwing herself under a train. Although she was experiencing deep grief and struggled with feelings of guilt about her daughter’s death, she was able to function in everyday life.

  After the liberation of Eastern European countries, when our training in Holotropic Breathwork and transpersonal psychology extended to that part of the world, Milada enrolled in it and became an enthusiastic facilitator. The highly controversial and heretic therapeutic strategy thus produced one of the most dramatic improvements I have ever experienced during the fifty-some years of my psychiatric practice.

  THE MAGIC OF SANDPLAY: When a Kitten Can Be Therapist

  We have seen repeatedly that the use of therapeutic methods inducing holotropic states of consciousness, such as psychedelic therapy or Holotropic Breathwork, tends to greatly increase the incidence of synchronicities. Synchronicities are also extremely frequent in the work with people undergoing spiritual emergencies. Initially, I thought that this reflected a special relationship between synchronicity and holotropic states of consciousness, but with time I came to the conclusion that it was associated with the transpersonal set and setting rather then a special state of consciousness.

  We have often observed in our workshops that extraordinary synchronicities occurred before the Holotropic Breathwork sessions started, when participants were choosing their partners, or even on their way to the workshop. We have also witnessed an unusually high incidence of synchronicities in association with sandplay, an extraordinary therapeutic technique developed by our dear friend, the late Dora Kalff. Christina and I had frequent contact with Dora because we used to stay as guests in her beautiful old house in Zollikon, near Zurich, practically every time we visited Switzerland. We both had a chance to experience sandplay under her guidance, using her extraordinary collection of sandplay paraphernalia.

  As Dora told us, it was C.G. Jung himself who had given her the idea for the sandplay. Dora was married to a Dutch baron who was much older than she, and lived with him in Holland. After the death of her husband, she returned with her children to Switzerland, desperately looking for a new perspective and orientation in her life. It just so happened that she liked to visit with her children a small village, which also was the favorite vacation place for Jung and his relatives. Dora and Jung met there, and she shared with him that she was looking for a vocation for herself. And Jung responded by suggesting that she might enjoy experimenting with therapeutic use of sandplay and gave her the basic instructions for how to do it.

  The technique of sandplay is very simple. It uses a box of prescribed size (about two feet by two-and-a-half feet), partially filled with clean sand, and a large collection of objects displayed on shelves. These include human figures of different races and professions, animals, trees, and characteristic dwellings from various countries, natural objects, such as stones or shells, and mythological characters and symbols. The task of the client is to shape the surface of the sand and create a scene with the use of any figures and objects they choose. The sandplay does not use a standard set of items; each therapist creates his or her own collection. Dora had an extraordinary assembly of objects and figures from all over the world.

  Christina and I fell in love with this technique after we had experienced its power, and we incorporated it into our monthlong workshops at Esalen. One room in the Big House, where our workshops were held, was regularly designated as a sandplay room. The sandplay toys came partially from our own personal collection, partially from the traveling kits of our guest faculty. Besides rare guest appearances of Dora herself and her son Martin, the resident sandplay therapist for the monthlongs was Jungian psychologist and Dora’s senior student, Cecil Burney.

  One of the most remarkable and hilarious synchronicities we have observed in connection with the sandplay happened during a monthlong in which Mary, one of the participants, was “pushing the buttons” of all the participants. She was almost manic and talked incessantly, extolling her marriage, her intimate life, and the sexual prowess of her seventy-year-old husband. She had “the most incredible orgasms, fantastic breathwork experiences, the greatest mandalas,” and so on. When Emmett Miller, a hypnotist who came to the group as guest faculty, asked participants to introduce themselves with an appropriate movement or gesture, she went outside, ran into the room through an open door, made a wild pirouette screaming her name, and then ran out through the door in the opposite wall.

  It was all too obvious to everybody in the group that her inflated panegyrics were desperate attempts to cover up a very different reality. When it was her time to do the sandplay, she created a complex ornate scene representing her idealized life and romanticized marriage. She was very excited by her creation and went to find Cecil, Christina, me, and
Al Drucker, an Esalen rolfer and acupuncturist, to show us her unparalleled creation. When she got us all together, she insisted that we had to go and see the “fantastic sandplay” she had made. She practically dragged us to the Big House and up the stairs to the sandplay room.

  When we arrived, she was in for a major shock. On her way out of the room, she had left the door open and, during her absence, a kitten walked inside and used the sandbox as his kitty litter. He jumped up into the box, knocked over some of the key figures, and left a big turd in the part of the sandplay that represented the biggest distortion of reality. Seeing what happened, Mary was devastated and heartbroken. We left, and she stayed alone with her ruined sandplay scene. She had to take out the turd and the sand that was defiled and wash some of the figures. As she was doing it, she thought a lot about what had just happened. In the process, she removed some of the figures and replaced others. The result was a very different sandplay, much more realistic and honest than the first one.

  Several months later, during a dinner at the ITA conference in Phillip Island, Australia, we were talking about synchronicities. On this occasion, Cecil Burney related this sandplay story in front of anthropologist Michael Harner, who was known for his incisive humor and his ability to respond very quickly to social situations. Michael and Cecil often got involved in verbal fencing. “What it tells me, Cecil,” Michael charged without losing a second, “is that cat is a better therapist than you are.”