The book describes the work of Dr. Milan Hausner at his clinic at Sadska, near Prague, where as Medical Director of the psychiatric clinic he supervised over 3,000 LSD therapeutic sessions from 1954 to 1980. As Grof says on a back cover blurb, “He has amassed information that is invaluable for the theory and practice of psychotherapy.”
Hausner attributes emotional disorders to the patients’ lack of understanding of hidden thought processes which occur from a combination of disfunctional social learning processes and faulty parenting. His method of bringing these thought processes to consciousness is a system he calls Pathogenic Confrontation Model within a system of Multigroup Community Therapy. In order to reset patients’ irrational attachments to faulty ideas and emotions, psychotherapy confronts patients’ own past illness-producing experiences and replaces their dysfunctional reactions during the more congenial atmosphere of the therapeutic relationship between patient and therapist.
After 10 chapters of theory and description of Hausner’s model, Highway presents 11 chapters of case histories and back-matter enrichments. Enriched with excerpts from transcripts of sessions, these chapters focus on depression, schizophrenia, double bind, archetypes, sexuality, and other presenting problems.
As well as filling in the gap about treatment that continued in Czechoslovakia, LSD: The Highway to Mental Health presents its psycholytic methods of treating inpatients, a way to use group processes, and social learning as adjuncts on the way to mental health. As in addition to a place in university, medical school, and city libraries, Highway deserves a place in the library of anyone doing LSD-based therapy or investigating it, on the shelves of psychedelic book collectors, and of historians of the 60s and of the history of psychotherapy.
LSD: The Highway to Mental Health, door Milan Hausner, vertaald door Erna Segal, ASC Books, 300 pagina’s, ascbooks.com.
