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T IMOTHY L EARY'S MID‐CAREER SHIFT: CLEAN BREAK OR INFLECTION POINT?
Author(s) -
DEVONIS DAVID C.
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.216
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1520-6696
pISSN - 0022-5061
DOI - 10.1002/jhbs.21518
Subject(s) - dismissal , inflection point , history of psychology , psychology , inflection , field (mathematics) , psychoanalysis , sociology , law , philosophy , political science , linguistics , geometry , mathematics , pure mathematics
The psychologist T imothy L eary (1920–1996), an iconic cultural figure in the U nited S tates in the 1960s and afterward, has received comparatively scant attention in the history of psychology. This may be due to perceptions that, after a major career shift centering around his experimentation with psychedelic substances and his subsequent dismissal from Harvard in 1963, Leary parted company with the field. While there are several good reasons to adopt this view, examination of his entire career as well as his intellectual ancestry reveals unacknowledged continuities, suggesting that a more prominent place be accorded to him in the history of psychology, as well as to the challenges he poses.