 | The Harvard Psilocybin Project 1960-1963
Edward J. Reither
Psilocybin changed the world - but first, it shook Harvard. The Harvard Psilocybin Project, 1960-1963 reveals how a daring research initiative at the heart of academia challenged postwar cultural norms and set in motion a revolution in psychology, medicine, law, and spirituality that still echoes today.
"It is fitting and natural that the Harvard intellectual community be the first to grapple with this new philosophic and practical issue and that the University of William James be given the first chance to accept or reject the educational protentialities of consciousness-expanding drugs."
Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary.<
December 13, 1962, Harvard Crimson
August 2025
978-1-84890-489-7
Review:
I come to this book from a rare vantage point. As a psychology graduate student at Harvard from 1960 to 1963, I was part of the original core team of the Harvard Psilocybin Project—working alongside my colleagues Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), Ralph Metzner, and George Litwin. Decades later, in 2023, I was also guest speaker in a course on the project led by the author, Ed Reither, at the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement. So dear reader—my perspective in this review is both deeply informed and perhaps not entirely objective.
That said, The Harvard Psilocybin Project 1960–1963 is, in my view, one of the most thoughtful and even-handed accounts of that turbulent and ground breaking era. Ed Reither
ings to life a period that’s often been reduced to caricature—too easily dismissed as either naïve idealism or psychedelic fueled anarchy. What he’s done instead is dig deep into the Harvard archives—uncovering letters, memos, and long-forgotten accounts from Harvard University’s multiple libraries as well as journalistic accounts from that period and weave them together with insight, balance, and empathy.
The book accurately captures what we, the core team, truly believed we were doing: exploring the leading, sometimes bleeding edge of consciousness through a disciplined yet open minded inquiry that was at once both scientific and psycho spiritual. This was not a simple dress rehearsal for the psychedelic ’60s—it was our earnest attempt to expand psychology’s understanding of the human mind that, with few exceptions, such as Harvard’s own William James in the late 1880’s, had long been neglected in mainstream academic psychology.
Ed Reither avoids both hero worship and vilification of us and our critics. He lets the story write itself from the extensive source materials, showing the brilliance and the flaws, the aspirations and the resistance to our work. From compelling individual accounts of psilocybin experiences of Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs and others to the ground breaking Concord Prison Project and the Marsh Chapel Good Friday Experiment, he chronicles the ying/yang of the promise and the pushback—the excitement of discovery and the institutional academic and political fears of the Nixon era that ultimately shut it all down.
From my perspective, this book rings true—not only to the facts but to the spirit of those years. For anyone who wants to understand what really happened—beyond the mythology of the psychedelic ’60s—this book offers a vivid and compassionate account of a time when science, spirituality, and imagination briefly converged in the pursuit of human understanding. I’m grateful to see that story told with clarity, intelligence and respect.
Gunther Weil
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