In a recent paper for the Journal of Analytical Psychology exploring C. G. Jung’s opinion of psychedelics, I document the role of British psychiatrist Ronald Sandison (1916-2010), who—together with Margot Cutner (1905-1987), a member of the Society of Analytical Psychology—was the first to develop a Jungian approach to working with L.S.D, during the 1950s. I first came across Cutner’s work and her link to Sandison while reading Scott J. Hill’s Confrontation with the unconscious: Jungian depth psychology and psychedelic experience. (Scott and I are both affiliate members of the Institute of Psychedelic Therapy, which is how his book came to my attention.) 

Sandison was born in the Shetland islands in 1916, and raised in Wimbledon, south London. In his biography, A Century of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Group Analysis: A search for integration, Sandison notes that he came into the world at a time when Jung “was making his most profound discoveries.” He was, of course, referring to Jung’s self-designated confrontation with the unconscious, which Jung discusses at length in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and which occurred most intensely between 1913 and 1916. This extended episode, during which Jung explored his internal world of images, provided the insights and methodology that led to the creation of Liber Novus, or The Red Book, and formed the basis of analytical psychology.

Sandison’s psychiatry training and exposure to Jungian ideas

Like Jung, Sandison entered the medical profession after university and chose to specialize in psychiatry. He described the hospital at which he undertook his psychiatry training, Warlingham Park in Surrey, as having had “a strong analytical tradition embracing Freud as well as Jung.” It was here that Sandison “began to hear words like ‘anima,’ ‘the self’ and ‘mandala’” and he found himself warming to his Jungian colleagues. Sandison writes: “The fact that I met a Jungian analyst at Warlingham, and that so many of the staff resonated to Jungian ideas, seemed to me to be heaven-sent… I believe it was my fate to be drawn towards what might called the Jungian way.” He began his own analysis in 1948.

In 1951, aged 35, Sandison arrived at Powick psychiatric hospital in Worcestershire, where amenities were “bleak,” to take up the post of deputy medical superintendent. A year later, he joined a study tour organized by the Royal Medico Psychological Association to Switzerland, where he visited the Burghölzli hospital. Jung had started his own career at the Burghölzli half a century earlier but on reaching his mid 30s, he left to focus on his private practice. Jung’s former employer, Eugene Bleuler, had died in 1939 but his son, Manfred Bleuler, had taken over as director. Sandison “expected that the spirit of Jung would still be living on in the wards and corridors of the hospital” and his trip was embued with the “dream of touching the hem of Jung’s
garment.”

Sandison’s first letter to Jung

On September 15 1952, Sandison wrote to Jung from “Powick mental hospital” to say that he was due to be visiting Bleuler at the Burghölzli in a few days’ time, in the afternoon of September 22nd, and asking if Jung might be available to see him on that same morning. Sandison apologised for writing without an introduction and at such short notice, explaining that the tour schedule for his study group had only just been finalised. He went on: “My reasons for wishing to see you are somewhat complex to enter into in a letter. I had an analysis about 3 years ago and have a considerable interest in the methods of analytical psychology. Earlier this year I spent some months working with Dr. Samiran Banerjee, who visited you in the spring and, I believe, spent a week in your clinic.”

Dr. Banerjee was an Indian physician, psychologist and member of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society, who came into Jung’s orbit in the early 1950s. Sandison had first worked with Dr. Banerjee at Warlingham Park and the pair were reunited as colleagues at Powick, where Banerjee introduced Sandison to the roots of the Indian shrub Rauwolfia serpentina, a herbal anti-psychotic. Sandison trialled it at Powick and was sufficiently impressed with the results to recommend its use “as a treatment in its own right for acute and chronic psychoses and psycho-neuroses.” Jung scholar and cultural historian Sulagna Sengupta writes about Dr. Banerjee in her book Jung In India, and I’m grateful to her for directing me towards information about Dr. Banerjee in Sandison’s biography.

Sandison’s second letter to Jung

On the following day, September 16, Sandison wrote to Jung again to say that “[s]ince writing to you yesterday, I have heard from Doctor Michael Fordham who has kindly allowed me to use his name. I shall be most grateful therefore, if you would accept this as an introduction from Doctor Fordham and I hope that you will be able to see me next Tuesday.” As a founding member of the Society of Analytical Psychology, and later editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology as well as co-editor of Jung’s Collected Works, Fordham was among Jung’s closest associates in London. (It’s possible that Sandison had been introduced to Fordham himself through another Warlingham Park colleague, Dennis Scott, a Jungian analyst in training, who was in analysis with Fordham.)

Jung’s secretary replied in a type-written letter on September 19, addressing him: “Dear Dr. Sandison!” The secretary continued: “I regret very much to have to tell you that Professor Jung is still away on his holidays and will not be returning to Küsnacht until early in October, so that it will unfortunately not be possible for him to give you an interview on September 23rd (sic).”

Sandison’s first visit to Zürich

While Sandison may have been a disappointed pilgrim, he did meet Carl Meier, director of the Jung Institute, and he visited Sandoz, the pharmaceutical company where chemist Albert Hofmann had discovered LSD-25. At that time, Sandoz distributed LSD-25 as a free experimental drug for medical research purposes under the trade name of Delysid. Sandison returned with 100 vials of Delysid to Powick, where he began treating his psychotherapy patients with low doses of LSD, supported by Dr Harold Holgate, Sandoz’s chief medical officer in London. Sandison gradually refined his treatment protocols over time, developing a model that included art materials, music and group therapy, and he went on to establish the world’s first purpose-built clinic for LSD-assisted therapy at Powick. Sandison coined the phrase psycholytic therapy (from the Greek word lysis for loosening) in response to his observation that the drug freed patients’ unconscious mechanisms.

Sandison’s connection to Father Victor White

Among Sandison’s visitors at Powick was Father Victor White—a Dominican priest, Oxford theology professor, Jungian analysand and frequent correspondent of Jung’s. In March 1954, White wrote to Jung detailing his recent trip to Powick, where he had been asked “to talk with the patients in their wrestlings with their material,” and asking Jung’s opinion on whether he (White) might take LSD himself, to facilitate his own unconscious processes, which he felt were blocked. In April, Jung replied at length to express his caution and scepticism about psychedelics, on the grounds he believed that they may increase the “moral burden” that accompanies deeper knowledge of the collective unconscious without sufficient help and support to bring about an equivalent transformation of the conscious personality. However, Jung added: “I should be obliged to you indeed if you could let me see the material they get with L.S.D.” Father White replied a month later, saying: “Dr. Sandison (of Powick Hospital, Worcester) is sending you his ‘reports’ on LSD—one ‘factual,’ the other an attempted ‘Jungian interpretation’… I don’t think I was very serious in wanting some myself; I do realize very well the truth of what you say. But sometimes I feel a bit psychically constipated, and foolishly suppose a laxative (if such there be) might be a help!”

Sandison’s second visit to Zürich

Sandison returned to Switzerland in the mid 1950s, and once again, he tried and failed to arrange a meeting with Jung. On this second occasion, “Carl Meier was most generous, and gave up most of a day to my visit” but Jung was away travelling again. Meier cautioned Sandison that Jung was “greatly opposed” to the use of LSD in psychotherapy and warned against raising the topic with him. Sandison’s hoped-for meeting with Jung never took place and there is no record of the Powick reports, which White had indicated that Sandison would send to Jung, in the C. G. Jung Papers Collection at the ETH Zürich University Archives (author’s email correspondence, May 2024).

Ronald Sandison’s letters to Jung are quoted here with the kind permission of Ronald’s widow, Beth Sandison, and the support of the ETH-Bibliothek Zurich, C. G. Jung Papers Collection. Copyright for the letter from Jung’s secretary to Sandison belongs to the Foundation of the Works of C.G. Jung, Zürich, and I reproduce it here with the Foundation’s permission (c) 2007.

Sources
Hill, S. J. (2013). Confrontation with the unconscious: Jungian depth psychology and psychedelic experience. Muswell Hill Press.
Hofmann, A (2013). LSD: My problem child. The Beckley Foundation.
Lammers, A. and Cunningham, A. (Ed.). (2007). The Jung-White letters. Routledge.
Sandison, R. (2001). A century of psychiatry, psychotherapy and group analysis. Jessica Kingsley.
Sengupta, S. (2013). Jung in India. Spring Journal Books.

Ginny Hill is a psychodynamic psychotherapist working in private practice in London. She is a member of the Society of Analytical Psychology and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. 

www.ginnyhillpsychotherapy.com