Review: 'The Discovery of Love' by Malden Grange Bishop

Originally published in 1963 'The Discovery of Love: A Psychedelic Experience with LSD-25' written by Malden Grange Bishop, is typical, though with its own idiosyncrasies, of the LSD psychotherapy literature that was published in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As the title suggests, the context of Bishop's single experience was in Psychedelic Therapy and was administered at the Institute of Psychedelic Studies, in San Francisco. The premise of the single, high dose LSD session in Psychedelic Therapy was to induce a mystical, or religious experience and, in this, Bishop was not disappointed.

On the Institute's board of directors was Dr. Humphry Osmond, the individual who coined the term 'psychedelic' and who helped pioneer Psychedelic Therapy; he also wrote the foreword to The Discovery of Love. While Osmond's approach was different from the psycholytic school of thought, they both retain the psychodynamic function of the personal unconscious, and this ensuing biographical detail is necessarily translated into texts. He wrote: "The background here is the whole of the author's life and unless we know what manner of man he is, we cannot hope to follow, let alone understand, his account of the mind manifesting experience" (Bishop 8). Thus the first third of the book is autobiographical and was initially written for the pre-session research.