Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary was an American psychologist and author who became a leading figure of the 1960s counterculture through his research on and promotion of psychedelic drugs. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, he completed a PhD in clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950. His 1957 book The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality was judged by the Annual Review of Psychology to be that year's leading work on psychotherapy. In late 1959 he became a lecturer at Harvard University, where he founded the Harvard Psilocybin Project and ran experiments on psilocybin's therapeutic potential, including the Marsh Chapel Experiment and the Concord Prison Experiment. Harvard dismissed him in 1963. He went on to speak widely for psychedelics, coined the phrase turn on, tune in, drop out at the 1967 Human Be-In, and wrote Exo-Psychology, a 1977 book presenting an eight-circuit theory of consciousness. He gave lectures, at times calling himself a performing philosopher.