What Makes a Problem Child

“Problem children are not problems because they are harmful. They are problems because they exceed the categories available to contain them.”

Hofmann's metaphor, the problem child, is more precise than it first appears. A problem child is not a bad child. A problem child resists the available frameworks for understanding children. The child is not the problem; the framework's inadequacy is the problem.

LSD was genuinely difficult to categorize. It was not a sedative, not a stimulant, not a psychotomimetic in any straightforward sense. It produced effects at doses too small to weigh, lasted far longer than its pharmacological half-life suggested, and generated experiences that the available psychiatric vocabulary could not accommodate.

What made it a problem child was not its danger, its safety profile was superior to aspirin's. What made it a problem child was that it required new frameworks. And new frameworks require abandoning old ones, which institutions resist.

The psychiatric establishment of the 1950s had invested in electroconvulsive therapy, insulin coma therapy, and early psychopharmacology. LSD was not a refinement of any of these tools, it was a different kind altogether. One that worked through an experience rather than through a mechanism. One that required the practitioner to have had the experience to understand it.

The child grew up in the counterculture and was put in prison by the state. The problem was never the compound. The problem was what the compound required of the institutions that might have used it.

Sources

• Hofmann, LSD: My Problem Child (1979)