The Hollywood Sessions

“Psychiatrist Oscar Janiger gave LSD to over 900 subjects in the 1950s and 1960s, including painters, writers, and actors. His aesthetic research showed that artists produced work they considered superior during sessions.”

While Osmond and Hoffer were treating alcoholics in Saskatchewan and the CIA was dosing unwitting subjects in San Francisco safe houses, the psychiatrist Oscar Janiger was running a very different program in Los Angeles: he was giving LSD to artists.

Janiger conducted what amounted to an informal aesthetic research project from 1954 to 1962, administering LSD to over 900 subjects, an unusually large number for any single clinical researcher, with a specific interest in what happened to creative work during and after sessions. His subjects included painters, writers, musicians, and actors. He collected artwork produced during sessions alongside conventional psychological assessments.

The results were consistent enough to be interesting: subjects who considered themselves artists generally rated their session-period work as superior to their ordinary production, and independent judges rated it as more original in formal terms (compositional risk, color use, departure from habitual approach). The effect was not uniform, some subjects found the experience blocked or disrupted their work, but the majority reported that the session had altered their relationship to their craft in ways they valued.

Janiger's subjects included Cary Grant, the most famous person to publicly discuss his LSD sessions in the 1950s, as well as the painters who have since been identified as part of what scholars call the Los Angeles LSD aesthetic movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Stevens documents Janiger as part of the clinical ecosystem that prohibition destroyed: not a headline figure like Leary or a theorist like Huxley, but a working psychiatrist conducting systematic observation and accumulating a dataset that would have been invaluable to subsequent research. His archives were donated to the Library of Congress. His findings, published in 2003, arrived too late to matter to the clinical program that might have been built on them.

Sources

• Stevens, Storming Heaven (1987)
• Wikipedia, Oscar Janiger
• Janiger, O. & Dobkin de Rios, M. LSD, Spirituality, and the Creative Process (2003)