The Literary Psychonauts of the Socialist Era

This is the translation of an interview with my father, József Havasréti. He teaches communication and media studies at a Hungarian university, and his research interests include Hungarian literature, pop culture, pop music, and countercultural movements such as neo-avant-garde art in socialist Hungary. Partially inspired by these topics, he has written a trilogy of Hungarian psychedelic novels. The events of the novels incorporate (in heavily fictionalized form) the psychedelic experiments of István Szára. These were some of the earliest psychedelic experiments and among the rare officialy sanctioned psychedelic research happening on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. Szára was also the first to synthetically produce DMT.

Source: https://www.jelenkor.net/interju/2005/a-kadar-korszak-irodalmi-pszichonautai

“At the moment, we have three names: Béla Abody, Ferenc Juhász, Ágnes Nemes Nagy” - József Havasréti is interviewed by Mátyás Sirokai about the drug experiments of the second half of the fifties and their connections to literature.

MS: In an interview about Űrérzékeny lelkek, you mentioned that “The experiment in Budapest in the novel’s plot has a real, historical basis. I read a lot about the topic, but of course, nothing like the events of the book happened.” Experiments with psychedelic substances actually happened in the fifties at Lipótmező [location of the National Psychiatric and Neurological Institute; the word became colloquial for ‘madhouse’]. What sources did you use when you collected material for your novel, and how did you even end up with this topic?

JH: I started on the novel around 2005; it is hard to remember back to the exact beginnings. One piece of data I already knew was Ferenc Juhász’s [a defining poet of post-WW2 Hungary] LSD essay, because he too participated in such experiments. While searching around on the Internet and in libraries, I found the writings of two psychiatrists, Zoltán Böszörményi and István Szára, and I read several of their publications. The wider context of the topic started to interest me when I was writing my dissertation on the seventies-eighties neo-avant-garde movements in Budapest: in Hungary, how much appeared of what Theodore Roszak summarized as counterculture? Such as psychedelic culture, radical psychiatry and anti-psychiatry, lifestyle experiments, and eastern esoteric thinking. All of this could be found here too, just on a small scale.

MS: How should we imagine the cultural and political climate where these experiments somehow managed to happen?

JH: Not very favorable. It is telling in itself that almost all of our data comes from a praxis that was sanctified and legalized by medical research. Generally, the features of psychedelic culture were surrounded by various negative prejudices in contemporary (turn of the fifties-sixties) Hungary. The cultural politics of realized socialism rejected the intellectual tradition in which these endeavors were interpreted in the West. Of course, the greatest problem was the question of drugs. The anti-drug propaganda was extraordinarily strong and dogmatic. Depressants, stimulants, and mind-expanding substances were all stigmatized as narcotics, so their great harm to the individual and to society was emphasized. Bodily decline, degradation, decadence. The jazz drummer strung out on pills and the morphinist doctor were typical figures in the paperbacks of the time. It is worth mentioning too that while they occasionally wrote about the USA conducting research into artificial psychosis for military purposes, as far as I know, the Hungarian press weren’t concerned whether the militaries of the Warsaw Pact needed these tools. It makes sense to draw the conclusion that they actually did because in the cold war scientific and military research ran parallel in the East and the West. If one participant made a step, the other party urgently reacted and made a step too. If something like this existed in the US (and it did, the Hungarian press covered it too) why could it not have existed in the Soviet Union or even in Hungary?

MS: Rick Strassman writes appreciatively about the work of Szára et al in his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, emphasizing that they had to overcome the conditions on this side of the Iron Curtain. It was a great surprise to me that such research happened at all in Hungary.

JH: Multiple sources mention that Szára initially wanted to do LSD experiments, but the Swiss Sandoz Institute (Albert Hoffman worked here when he discovered LSD in 1943) rejected his request because they didn’t want the compound to end up in Soviet hands. This is when Szára’s attention turned towards tryptamines like bufotenin which can be found in the poison of certain toads. He isolated two compounds, diethyl-tryptamine (DET) and dimethyl-tryptamine (DMT). The latter made the greater career later on but at the time of the Budapest experiments, it was little used because it triggered unpleasant shock states and the participants complained. While in the West the research participants were mainly paid volunteers, here (besides the patients) they were freely volunteering psychiatrists and psychologists, artists, literateurs. “They undertook the experiment with us unpaid, most of them out of curiosity. The doctors wanted certain psychopathological insight, the writers and poets wanted inspiration for their further work” - wrote Böszörményi about motivations in 1962.

I found it surprising too that while the Hungarian newspapers were full of anti-drug propaganda and they tried to stigmatize the Beat movement, the hippies, and the whole western rock-culture with being in a constant drug craze, such experiments were undergoing over here as well. The justification of psychopharmacological research was strengthened by findings that showed bufotenin in the blood of certain schizophrenic patients, and this promised a breakthrough in psychiatry. At that time we didn’t know much about the causes of this serious condition. “What causes this? We do not know” - summarized pithily in a 1969 article Pál Avar, another important psychiatrist working at Lipótmező. In this atmosphere, sometimes brutal measures were applied, like frontal lobe castration, which in the US was often performed with an actual icepick. Horror. The main reason, as far as we can tell from the articles of the time, was research into schizophrenia and maybe a hope for progress in its treatment.

But besides these efforts, there were the other, we could say “usual” problems of artificial psychoses and psychedelic research: altered perception, mind expansion, enhancing creativity, recalling memories and the like. So those things and phenomena we know well from western psychedelic literature. The psychologist József Király (another participant in the experiments of the era) highlights ethnographic aspects in an article from 1960: “Pharmakopsychology, this young, few-decades-old branch of science - besides experiences in psychopathology - helps us to a closer understanding of folk beliefs, certain religious elements and cultic habits.”

MS: Zoltán Böszörményi in one of his publications [Data for the relationship of experimental psychosis and creative desire] includes parts of the records of his experiments with artists but instead of names he references the “h.s.”-es (human subjects) as “one of our known prose writers”, “our young lyrical poet”, “noted poetess”. The latter presumably covers Ágnes Nemes Nagy who in her diary commemorates her participation in the 1957 research, but the identity of the others is unknown. Moreover, probably numerous poets and writers went through “artificial psychosis” at the time in Lipótmező.

JH: Indeed, complying with medical ethics and the rules of scientific publication they only circumscribed the identity of the participants. Sometimes it occurs to me that it would be nice to know more about them. We have some ideas about numbers and orders of magnitudes. Böszörményi wrote in 1962 that he used psilocybin, LSD, or DET synthesized by them on around 160 patients. He doesn’t mention the number of intellectual volunteers.

Reading one of his evocative descriptions it occurred to me that the person in question must have been Béla Abody: “B.A. 26-year-old writer (...) pyknic body type, slightly overweight, practical personality, with a bohemian lifestyle.” The paper quotes verbatim several observations of the writer, for example: “The attraction begins now. At this moment I have the fortune to see the basic elements of the universe. I have the feeling I see the basic elements. As if I saw ciliates and flagellates under the microscope in black and white. But it’s horrible, I can’t express myself properly. (...) Now there are some colors. As if I saw a clam, but the rainbow colors quickly decompose” and so on. Finally, one of Abody’s published writings proved that my guess was right. So at the moment we have three names: Béla Abody, Ferenc Juhász, Ágnes Nemes Nagy. An unscrupulous showman, a strongly power-compatible literary celebrity, and a puritanic Újhold-editor [“New Moon”, an important post-war literary periodical]. (Maybe others will be uncovered as a consequence of this interview.)

The situation itself is exciting: we can imagine anything about the bon vivant Béla Abody, but Ágnes Nemes Nagy and Ferenc Juhász were fairly rigid and closeted personalities. It is strange to imagine them in this setting which is partially scientific-laboratory-like and partially evokes the western countercultural milieu. On the other hand, not only the known names are important. It is interesting as well how they imagined such an experiment concerns the psychology of art and the psychology of creativity, how they established for these “sessions'' the environment they deemed ideal. It is an interesting and important question what language the experimental subjects used for recording their experiences.

MS: According to the reports of Ferenc Juhász the circumstances were quite unfavorable (“constantly vibrating neon lamps, in the next room the patients loudly talk, argue, groan, lament, beg, cry, curse and scream, or the telephone rings”). It is thought-provoking that Huxley or Kerouac attributed great significance to psychedelic experiences, while Nemes Nagy or Juhász rather had neutral or negative experiences.

JH: In the case of Nemes Nagy and Juhász, presumably this series of experiments was just a bizarre episode in their life. The American writers (maybe counting Aldous Huxley too here, he lived in the US at that point) turned towards drugs and started experimenting with natural and synthetic mind-altering substances in the possession of a very diverse intellectual and spiritual tradition (weird literature, occultism, ethnology, cultural anthropology). Drugs played an important part both in the beatnik culture of the fifties and the counterculture of the sixties. Criminalization happened relatively late in the United States. In Hungary, none of this was part of the “socialization” of writers; drug consumption was severely penalized, and the writers of the time could not get any relevant knowledge from psychedelic culture. Cultural alienness could have played a part in the bad memories and experiences. Tamás Ungváry wrote in 1963: “Aldous Huxley degenerated. (...) These days he writes books about the imagination-stimulating effects of narcotics.” Timothy Leary was counted off as just a charlatan. At that time we didn’t have either experiential or intellectual frameworks into which the writers could have placed their experiences. Maybe this is one reason why no serious (literary) work was born out of these experiments. We also know that these substances caused strong and unpleasant physical side effects. The researchers emphasized that artificial psychosis, model psychosis is a dangerous and risky thing (a kind of “acute neurotoxicity”), a process that needs strict supervision. This must have had an effect on the research subjects.

MS: Meanwhile the “trippy” factor was not missing at all from the era’s literature; it is enough to just think of Ferenc Juhász’ poetic visions. By comparison, it is notable that while the participants likened their experiences to the creatively inspired state, based on the details of research records they try to convey their experiences in a formulaic or even scientific language.

JH: On the one hand - willingly or unwillingly - they put on some kind of psychologizing, awkwardly scientific linguistic mask, using the vocabulary of psychological introspection. On the other hand, the question occurs how much of their experience was determined (prefigured) by other “visionary” literature: Blake, Baudelaire, de Quincey, Huysmans and the like. It is important in itself - and going over the limits of this conversation - how these two visionary modes of speech in literature (the psychedelic, and the poetic-prophetic) interconnect, what their features are, where are the boundaries between them, etc.

MS: You wrote two novels in which psychedelics play an important role. Why does this topic preoccupy you so much? A series of experiments in 2021 in Hungary would be as surprising as they were in 1957, but if you had the opportunity, would you take part in it?

JH: Starting with the personal aspect: I probably would. At the same time, this topic doesn’t interest me because of the peculiar attraction of psychedelic experiences. A little bit hyperbolically put: the “psychedelic renaissance” (closely linked with the technoculture) starting at the end of the eighties doesn’t interest me very much. I am more interested in the aspects of this phenomenon concerning the history of religion, ethnology, and the history of occultism. I am more interested in that peculiar, partially cosmic, partially gnostic experience of otherness which characterizes certain psychonauts. Or I am more interested in the mad scientist, freak scientist, weird scientist roles into which intellectuals, researchers, expositors of the topic are forced.

In my two novels (Űrérzékeny lelkek [Space-Sensitive Souls], 2014, Nem csak egy kaland [Not Just an Adventure], 2017) I placed the emphasis on similar questions: the isolated existence caused by a psychedelic instrument and an experience that forces apart the boundaries of reality. Far removed from the actual events of the Budapest experiments, I was more interested in the ruminations and anxieties of lost wanderers, amateur psychonauts failing at breaking existential boundaries, subcultural artists, neurotic secret agents caught up in the events than descriptions of emerald fountains pulsing in our hearts, psychedelic fractals embodying the dance of molecules, or purple elephants flying around in rainbow-colored clouds. Honestly, I don’t find most of the “psychedelic literature” very entertaining. While the singular experiences they are based upon can be truly radical and subversive, their descriptions are often conventional. Naturally, there are absolutely genius exceptions like Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, the origin of the “black meat” motif at the center of my novels. Now I’m working on the third part of the story which I hope I can finish in this year or the next.