Undergraduates come to me very often and say, “I want to go on to graduate school in psychology. Where should I go?” And I always ask them the question, “Why do you want to study psychology?” And as I listen to them, usually one of two answers develops. Answer number one is: “I want to become a psychologist. I want to play the psychology game. I want to be able to play the role and use the terms you use, and I want to be an assistant professor and then an associate professor and then a full professor, and I want to get tenure, and maybe if I’m really ambitious, I might get to be president of the American Psychological Association.” Well, that’s fair enough, and for someone who has that ambition I can give them advice about the strategic universities to go to, like go to Michigan or Yale but don’t go to XYZ.
Some students, though, will say, “I want to study psychology because I want to study human nature” or “I want to find out what’s what.” To do some good. And then I can tell them, well, forget about graduate school. What kind of good do you want to do? Do you want to help the mentally ill? Then get yourself committed to a mental hospital. Stay there for a year or two; you’ll learn more about mental illness in that two years than our profession has learned in a hundred years. If you want to learn about delinquency and reducing crime, go down to the tough section, learn the crime game, learn how to make a man-to-man contact with tough guys, learn from them why they are crooks and criminals. Spend a year in prison, not as a psychologist, but maybe as a guard, or cleaning up the garbage, and you’ll learn more than you will ever learn in a criminology textbook. That is how it goes. There is no problem that can’t be best solved and best worked out at this stage of ignorance by getting right into the reality.
Timothy Leary
The Politics of Ecstasy
