Dr. James Fadiman came from an illustrious showbiz family. His father was William Fadiman, a script reader in charge of literary acquisitions at major Hollywood studios.
“My father started as a literary agent in New York [and] spent most of his career as a story editor at MGM. His department told the studio what would make a film. After that he became the story editor at RKO and then Columbia and then Seven Arts. He was Dore Schary’s assistant and he finished his career teaching screenwriting at the AFI. So I grew up around all of this. William Faulkner came out to Hollywood and was working on a screenplay at the studio. He asked my father, ‘Do you mind if I work from home?’ He said, ‘No, go ahead, that’s fine.’ He didn’t realize working from ‘home’ meant Oxford, Mississippi!”
James Fadiman’s uncle was Clifton Fadiman, chief editorial advisor at Simon and Schuster, a friend of the Algonquin Roundtable, and a pal of Groucho Marx. Clifton Fadiman hosted the long-running radio series Information Please featuring Oscar Levant and the early television show This Is Show Business featuring playwright George S. Kaufman.
Dr. James Fadiman entered the field of LSD research at the end of the 1950s. Fadiman says, “My parents were not supportive of my psychedelic research to say the least. I came in during the post-Huxley excitement.”
Richard Alpert had been a graduate student at Stanford in 1959. “That summer Richard and I shared a house and we became very close and very friendly,” says Fadiman. “Around 1960-61 he discovered psilocybin. He was taking moderate doses. He said, ‘The greatest thing in the world has happened to me and I want to share it with you.’ I thought, ‘How bad can that be?’ So, that was the first time I tried psychedelics. It was the critical beginning.”
Fadiman acquired a PhD at Stanford University where he completed a dissertation on The Effectiveness of LSD Therapy. “Now that I was enlightened and aware of the mystical truth of all things, psychology seemed incredibly primitive and without much awareness,” says Fadiman. “Off campus a new group had been founded by Myron Stolaroff called the International Foundation for Advanced Study. It was there that I had my first LSD experience - October 16, 1961. It was the central, transformative experience of my life.”
