LSD: My Problem Child

LSD: My Problem Child is Albert Hofmann's memoir of the compound he first synthesized in 1938 and whose effects he discovered by accident in 1943, including the famous bicycle ride home through a transformed perceptual world. Its reflective claim is that LSD, for all its cultural derailment, revealed something genuine about the unity of mind and nature.

The book combines the chemist's account of discovery with a quasi-mystical interpretation shaped by Goethe, in which the psychedelic state exposes the constructed, mind-dependent character of ordinary perception. Hofmann weighs the substance's therapeutic and spiritual promise against its misuse, writing as both its creator and its troubled custodian.

As the testimony of the discoverer himself, the memoir lent the consciousness-first reading of psychedelics unusual authority. Hofmann is the material origin point of the modern psychedelic stream, the precondition without which the figures downstream in this lineage would have had nothing to build upon.