DiCarlo: You have been a major researcher of non-ordinary states of consciousness for the past thirty-six years. What got you interested at first?

Grof: My interest in this field of research started when I volunteered for an LSD experiment in Prague, Czechoslovakia. My original training was in Freudian psychoanalysis and reading Freud inspired me to study medicine and become a psychiatrist. However, early in my professional career, I developed a deep conflict in relation to psychoanalysis. I continued to be very excited about psychoanalytic theory which seemed to offer brilliant insights into the human psyche and fascinating explanations for various otherwise obscure problems, such as the symbolism of dreams, neurotic symptoms, religion, and what Freud called "psychopathology of everyday life". But I became increasingly disappointed with psychoanalysis as a practical tool of therapy.

About that same time, the psychiatric department in which I was working received a supply of LSD-25 from Sandoz, a pharmaceutical company in Switzerland. They asked us to conduct clinical research with this experimental substance, assess whether or not it had some therapeutic value, and to give them report about our findings. They gave us two initial suggestions regarding its potential uses. First of these was that, in very miniscule doses, this substance could produce "experimental psychoses" -- various perceptual, emotional, and mental changes that occur spontaneously in psychotic patients. And the second suggestion was that this substance could be used as a unique experiential training for psychologists and psychiatrists. It would make it possible for them to experience for several hours the inner world of psychotic patients and to return from there with profound first-hand insights into that world. I became one of the early volunteers in this research program and I had a very profound confrontation with my own unconscious psyche. In a sense, that experience inspired me and influenced the course of my entire professional development over the next thirty six years.

I spent twenty years conducting clinical research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances, first in the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and then in Baltimore, MD, where I served as Clinical and Research Fellow at The Johns Hopkins University. During the second year of my fellowship, Russia invaded Czechoslovakia and I decided to stay. I was offered the position of chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Catonsville, MD. I remained there until 1973, heading the last surviving government -sponsored psychedelic research project in the United States.

In the last seventeen years, my wife Christina and I have developed "Holotropic Breathwork", a powerful non-drug approach to self-exploration and therapy that uses very simple means, such as faster breathing, evocative music, and a certain kind of energy-releasing bodywork. Non-ordinary states of consciousness induced by this method involve experiences that are very similar to those observed in psychedelic sessions, however, occuring in a much more controlled way. Beside psychedelic therapy and Holotropic Breathwork, I have been also interested in related areas, such as shamanism, Eastern spiritual systems, mysticism, rites of passage of aboriginal cultures, near -death experiences, and psychospiritual crises ("spiritual emergencies); the common denominator in all these situations is that they involve non-ordinary states of consciousness.