When the Impossible Happens (6 page)

I was among those who were fascinated by Joyce and Pauline’s “fusion therapy” because it was clear to me that “trauma by omission” could not be healed by talking therapy. I asked many questions about their unorthodox approach, and when they saw my genuine interest, they invited me to spend some time at the Welbeck clinic, meet their patients, and have a personal experience with their approach. I was impressed when I found out how much their clients benefited from the nourishing physical contact they had received in their psychedelic sessions. It also became clear to me that Joyce and Pauline encountered considerably less transference problems than an average Freudian analyst with his or her detached “deadpan” approach to therapy.

At the International Conference on LSD Psychotherapy held in May 1965 in Amityville, Long Island, Joyce and Pauline showed their fascinating film on the use of the fusion technique in psychedelic therapy. In a heated discussion that followed, most of the questions revolved around the transference/countertransference issues. Pauline provided a very interesting and convincing explanation why this approach presented less problems in this regard than the orthodox Freudian approach. She pointed out that most patients who come to therapy experienced in their infancy and childhood lack of affection from their parents. The cold attitude of the Freudian analyst tends to reactivate the resulting emotional wounds and triggers desperate attempts on the part of the patients to get the attention and satisfaction that had been denied to them.

By contrast, according to Pauline, fusion therapy provided a corrective experience by satisfying the old anaclitic cravings. Having their emotional wounds healed, the patients recognized that the therapist was not an appropriate sexual object and were able to find suitable partners outside of the therapeutic relationship. Pauline explained that this paralleled the situation in the early development of object relationships. Individuals who receive ad equate mothering in infancy and childhood are able to emotionally detach from their mothers and find mature relationships. By contrast, those who experienced emotional deprivation remain pathologically attached and go through life craving and seeking satisfaction of primitive infantile needs.

Having heard enthusiastic stories from Joyce and Pauline’s LSD patients at their Welbeck Street clinic, I became deeply interested in having a firsthand experience of the “fusion technique.” My own session with Pauline was truly extraordinary. Although both of us were fully dressed and separated by a blanket, I experienced a profound age regression into early infancy and identified with an infant nursing on the breast of a good mother and feeling the contact with her naked body. Then the experience deepened, and I became a fetus in a good womb blissfully floating in the amniotic fluid. For more than three hours of clock time, a period that subjectively felt like eternity, I kept experiencing both of those situations—“good breast” and “good womb”—simultaneously or in an alternating fashion. I felt connected with my mother by the flow of two nourishing liquids—milk and blood—both of which felt at that point sacred. The episode culminated in an experience of sacred union with the Great Mother Goddess, rather than human mother. Needless to say, I found the session profoundly healing.

In 1966, during a conference on LSD psychotherapy in Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to have another equally remarkable session with Pauline and experience the “fusion therapy” the second time. We became good friends and saw each other occasionally at professional meetings or during my visits to London. In the late 1960s, after Joyce Martin’s death, Pauline did not have anybody to sit for her in her own psychedelic sessions, and she asked me to step into Joyce’s shoes and become her guide. At this time, I was not in Europe anymore; having received a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University, I now lived and worked in Baltimore. It reflected Pauline’s deep conviction about the value of psychedelic sessions that she was willing to travel repeatedly over the Atlantic with all the expenditure of money, time, and energy involved. In connection with one of these sessions, I experienced a remarkable synchronicity.

Between four and five o’clock in the morning before Pauline’s session, I woke up from a very disturbing dream. It took place in a gloomy castle, or rather burg, sometime in the Middle Ages. There was a general atmosphere of alarm and chaos, with many people running through dark corridors with torches in their hands. I heard distressing and agitated voices crying aloud: “The Queen ... the Queen ... the Queen is dying!” I was one of the people running in panic through the castle. After a breathless dash through the labyrinth of poorly lit corridors, I finally arrived at a chamber, where an old woman—clearly the Queen—was lying in a large bed with four carved wooden pillars and an ornate canopy. She was gasping for air, and her face was contorted in agony, as she was facing the final moments of her life. I stared at her in despair, overwhelmed with powerful emotions, knowing that the dying woman was my mother.

I woke up from this dream early in the morning in a state of great uneasiness and apprehension. I had a strong feeling that this dream had something to do with Pauline’s session that I was about to run, and I experienced great reluctance to go ahead with it. This was something very unusual for me; I had never experienced anything like it before. The uneasiness I was sensing sharply contrasted with the enthusiasm I had usually felt about forthcoming psychedelic sessions. I lay in bed, reflecting on the dream, and trying to understand the uncanny feelings I was experiencing. As the morning broke and sunshine entered the bedroom, this strange state of mind gradually dissipated. I became more grounded and regained my usual confidence vis-á-vis the psychedelic session I was about to run.

During the first few hours of Pauline’s session nothing extraordinary happened. By this I mean nothing that I had not seen before and that would make this session stand out in any particular way. Naturally, having taken a high dose of LSD, Pauline had very powerful experiences. Some of them were memories of emotionally charged episodes from her childhood and infancy, others involved reliving of her difficult birth, and a few were transpersonal elements from the collective unconscious. We were about five hours into the session when Pauline encountered a memory from her childhood involving a royal parade. At one point, she started singing the British anthem: “God save our gracious Queen, long live our noble Queen, god save the Queen....”

As she was singing, she suddenly became very alarmed. “My God, Stan, I am singing ‘God save the Queen.’ When I was a child, we had a king, not a queen; why am I singing ‘God save the Queen’?” Then all her facial muscles suddenly contracted, giving her an expression of great agony, one that bore uncanny similarity to the face of the dying queen that I distinctly remembered from my dream. “Stan, this is not about my childhood anymore,” she continued obviously distressed, in great panic, and heavily gasping for air. “I am the Queen, and I am dying.” By that time, I had seen enough people in psychedelic sessions experience their death, and I was not particularly alarmed and concerned about Pauline’s physical condition. However, I was astounded to see her enacting my dream from the preceding night and embodying with great accuracy the dying Queen who so prominently featured in it.

Pauline’s session had a happy ending; her experience of death in identification with the old Queen was followed by an experience of rebirth and a “psychedelic afterglow” lasting several days. She felt that her experience was drawn from the collective unconscious or possibly from her own karmic record. She connected it with her lifelong fascination with royalty and her tendency to wear expensive and extravagant dresses and jewelry. I have not been able to find an explanation for why I had this astonishing precognitive dream. From time to time, I recall this extraordinary synchronicity, trying to understand its origin and meaning. I wonder if this strange bond between us was related to the psychedelic sessions I had with Pauline, during which I experienced symbiotic fusion with her as a fetus in a good womb and an infant on a good breast.

(1) An infant and a toddler have strong primitive needs for instinctual satisfaction and security that pediatricians and child psychiatrists call anaclitic (from the Greek anaklinein, meaning to cling or lean upon). These involve the need to be held, caressed, comforted, played with, and be the center of the caregivers’ attention. If these needs are not met, it has serious consequences for the future of the individual.
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THE RAINBOW BRIDGE OF THE GODS: In the Realm of the Nordic Sagas

Profound and auspicious synchronicities can initiate and accompany a powerful spiritual awakening; however, they are not without pitfalls. They can convey a convincing sense that we not only are embedded in a larger ground of cosmic meaning and purpose but also in some sense a focus or center of it. However, the overwhelming feeling of numinousness that is often associated with these synchronicities can be deceptive and should not be naively trusted and acted upon. As we will see in the following story, even the most glorious synchronicities do not guarantee a positive outcome of the situation of which they are part.

The events I will describe here happened about four years after my arrival in the United States, a time when I was looking for a life partner, with unsolicited assistance of my well-meaning, concerned friends. At the end of 1971, I received a call from Leni and Bob Schwartz, who belonged to the closest circle of my friends. Their house in lower Manhattan, testimony to Leni’s impeccable taste, was a favorite hangout of many cultural figures of the time, from Joseph Campbell to Betty Friedan. Leni and Bob were both on the phone at the same time and, with great excitement, they alternated in describing their recent discovery: “We’ve just met somebody really special. She lives in Miami, and her name is Joan Halifax. She is an anthropologist, and she’s beautiful and brilliant. She has done fieldwork with the Dogon in Sub-Saharan Africa, and she studies Santeria and other Caribbean religions. You’ll have so much in common! You’ll love her.”

I wrote down Joan’s name and telephone number and thanked Bob and Leni for their effort. But after one tumultuous relationship (see section entitled “THE KARMIC TRIANGLE”), I was not ready to throw myself headfirst into another relationship. Occasionally, I let my fantasy wander to Joan, trying to imagine what our meeting would look like and toying with the idea of calling her. Finally, after several months, I decided to give it a try. I was about to attend the Annual Conference of the American Psychiatric Association in Dallas, Texas, to present the results of our research of LSD psychotherapy with terminal cancer patients. The conference ended on Friday, and it would have been easy for me to make a side trip and spend the weekend in Miami on the way back to Baltimore.

I dialed Joan’s number, and when she picked up the phone, I introduced myself and said: “I’m Stan Grof from Baltimore. Our joint friends, Bob and Leni Schwartz, keep telling me that the two of us should meet. Is that something you would be interested in? I could come to Miami next weekend. Any chance we could get together?”

“I’m sorry,” was Joan’s response. “I won’t be here. I’ll be in Dallas. Next week I am going to the APA meeting to give a paper on my work with Santeria.”

“That’s very interesting,” I said, marveling at the coincidence. “I will be in Dallas, too, going to the same meeting. I wanted to stop in Miami on the way back. Which hotel are you staying in?”

Things were rapidly getting denser. “In the Baker Hotel,” was Joan’s answer. Of all the hotels in Dallas, this was the one for which I had made my reservation. It turned out that I had actually booked the room, that was directly under Joan’s, one floor lower. Because we were staying in the same hotel, we decided that after our arrival we would connect with each other by telephone. When I arrived in the hotel, the meetings had already started. Joan was not in her room, and she had not left me a message. I decided to go to the meetings and find her. The program had many parallel tracks, eight if I remember correctly, and the meetings were held in several hotels. I looked at the program, trying to guess to which lecture Joan would go. I was using as a clue the fact that she was an anthropologist and also Leni and Bob’s assurance that Joan and I had similar interests. After some deliberation, I chose a movie that was shown in a large auditorium of one of the conference hotels.

When I entered the hall, the lights were already out and they were showing the movie. I looked around and sat down in a nearby seat that was free. As I was watching the movie, my attention was repeatedly drawn to a woman who was sitting in the row in front of me, about three seats to my left. I actually started seeing something like a light aura around her head. After a while, she started turning her head in my direction, which was very unusual because she had to do it at a fairly large angle for our eyes to meet. This went on for quite a while and, by the time the movie ended, both of us felt so much certainty, that we simply went over to each other and confirmed our suspicions by introducing ourselves. Another extraordinary coincidence was thus added to those that preceded our arrival in Dallas.

Our Chinese dinner, an assortment of northern Chinese dishes, probably of average quality, seemed very special. We talked nonstop about our various interests, discovering that Leni and Bob were right; we really had much in common. At the end of the dinner, the waiter brought us the obligatory fortune cookies, something that we usually would not have taken very seriously. But in the context of all the unusual synchronicities that had happened already, the messages seemed absolutely right on and they sounded like an ancient I Ching reading. My cookie said: “Your heart was hers from the moment you met,” and hers revealed: “After long waiting, your dream is finally coming true!” Needless to say, we decided not to go back to our respective homes but to spend the weekend together in Dallas.

After this auspicious beginning, our relationship moved very fast. The weekend following our encounter in Dallas, I flew to Miami to spend several days with Joan. The following weekend, Joan came to see me in Baltimore, and we had a wonderful time together. The two visits further deepened our relationship. By the end of the weekend, we felt so close that we wanted to continue seeing each other as much as possible, and the idea of separation was quite painful. However, my forthcoming schedule presented a serious problem in this regard. I was to go for about ten days to Iceland to attend the First International Transpersonal Conference.