Case Example: Allen Ginsberg's Mystical Vision
From Spiritual Competency Resource Center
© Dr. David Lukoff 1994, 2014


Allen Ginsberg is the winner of numerous awards for poetry, and initiator of the beat genre of poetry. When he was a 22-year-old graduate student, he experienced a psychotic episode which transformed his life. The episode began with auditory hallucinations of the visionary 18th-century poet William Blake. Ginsberg believed that he was being chosen as a "spirit angel" and was having a "cosmic vibration breakthrough." His psychiatrist thought he was showing the signs of a major mental illness and had him hospitalized for 8 months.

Yet the week of communing with the spirit of Blake had a profound and lasting impact on his life and poetry. In an interview with his biographer Portugues (1978), Ginsberg claimed that, "the voice I heard, the voice of Blake, the ancient saturnal voice, is the voice I have now." Most of the poems he wrote for the next 15 years were, he has stated, attempts to rekindle in himself and in others, the state of visionary consciousness he experienced while psychotic. For him, the spiritual aspects of his experience were paramount and his psychotic episode a source of personal renewal. He never had any psychotic episodes which required hospitalization during the rest of life.

Portugues, P. (1978). The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg. Santa Barbara, CA: Ross-Erikson.



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