This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Stanislav Grof, born July 1, 1931 in Prague, trained in psychoanalysis in Czechoslovakia and conducted early clinical research into LSD-assisted psychotherapy there before continuing similar research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in the United States. That clinical work with LSD, conducted across two countries early in his career, shaped the theories of consciousness he would develop for the rest of his working life.
Legal restriction of LSD research in the United States in the early 1970s closed off the method his earlier work had depended on, cutting Grof and other researchers in his field off from the substance that had structured their clinical studies of non-ordinary states of consciousness up to that point in his career.
That closure did not end Grof's research into the states LSD had allowed him to study; it instead forced him to find another way to reach them. His response to that legal restriction, developed together with his wife Christina Grof, became the founding act from which his later and better known work grew, an alternative technique built without a controlled substance to replace the one legal restriction had taken away from clinical use in the United States by the early 1970s.