It was no small thing either—the inner circle was the only circle as far as Tim was concerned and if you weren’t part of it he didn’t have much use for you. The Psychology Department (and its offshoot, the Center for Research in Personality) might have relegated Tim to a converted closet on the second floor as befitting his beggar’s status as visiting lecturer, but no matter the size or location of his office, he was the shining star everybody wanted to study with. Half the students in the grad program were already on board, gravitating to him and Professor Alpert (Dick) because they were the young guns, the ones with the fresh approach, espousing a whole new methodology that was transactional rather than authoritative and hierarchical. Tim described it as a partnership with the patient, as if you were sitting across the kitchen table from him having a beer instead of laying him out on a couch and probing him like an Inquisitor. His first book, Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, had appeared five years earlier and it came down like a hammer on behaviorism and the traditional model of Freudian analysis. People were still buzzing about it. Tim was hot, red-hot, and Harvard was lucky to have gotten him.

The story had it that he was in Mexico writing his second book when by chance he stumbled across a new tool he couldn’t stop talking about, a tool he insisted would revolutionize psychotherapy. It wasn’t a theory or a method, but a drug—psilocybin—which had been synthesized by a chemist at Sandoz Laboratories from the so-called magic mushrooms of Mesoamerican culture, and it had powerful psychoactive properties that could dissolve a patient’s defenses in a single session. Along with an earlier synthesis, lysergic acid diethylamide, it was just then being used in clinical trials as a potent new means of disarming the control tower of the brain, as Tim put it, thereby freeing the subconscious and letting all the unfiltered sense impressions of the world come winging in. No one knew quite how it worked, but the attraction was magnetic. You didn’t need psychotherapy anymore, that was the implication. You didn’t need books and study and lab rats—all you needed was this, a little pink pill, as if it were magic.