Review: 'Realms of the Human Unconscious' by Stanislav Grof

'Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research' by Stanislav Grof has recently (2010) been republished by Souvenir Press, having originally been published in 1975. Stanislav Grof spent 17 years researching LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs between 1955 and 1972 in a psychotherapy context. He began his research in Czechoslovakia but later moved to the United States in 1967. From his research he developed a mode of the unconscious, according to the LSD experience, and which he published in this book.

Having already covered the basic information in a review of Stanislav Grof's LSD: Doorway to the Numinous this particular literary review will take a slightly different tact. Firstly, I will examine how Grof perceived the various schools of LSD Psychotherapy before it fell from legal grace and, in order to begin to create a cartography of psychedelic literature from the same period, I'll connect the literary texts to the various psychotherapy approaches. Secondly, I'll give a synopsis of Grof's model of the unconscious and how it demonstrates a synthesis of ideas from other conceptual arenas, most of which Grof also touched upon in his own vast research experience.