CIIS

CIIS is a San Francisco graduate institution whose account in the book connects transpersonal psychology, spiritual traditions, and the formal study of psychedelic therapy. Founded in 1968, it appears both as a destination in one practitioner’s personal path and as an academic setting where psychedelic therapy gained a defined educational program.

Origins and Intellectual Orientation

Founded in 1968, CIIS specializes in transpersonal psychology, a school of therapy with a strong spiritual orientation. Its intellectual foundations include the work of Carl Jung and Abraham Maslow, alongside wisdom traditions from both East and West. The account names Native American healing and South American shamanism among the traditions informing this outlook, placing CIIS at a meeting point between Western psychology and spiritual approaches to human experience.

An Academic Destination in a Practitioner’s Path

The institution enters the narrative through Andrei, a Romanian-born psychologist who left Bucharest for San Francisco intending to study at what he had heard was the first New Age graduate school. His route toward CIIS followed an earlier LSD experience that had transformed his sense of life’s limits and sent him through Eastern religion and Western psychology. He later described his military desertion as a decision to make his own choices rather than let service interrupt that psycho-spiritual journey. At CIIS, his studies took place within an environment where spiritual traditions and psychological inquiry were treated as related fields.

From Transpersonal Psychology to Psychedelic Therapy

CIIS’s connection to psychedelic work was reinforced by Stanislav Grof, a pioneer of transpersonal and psychedelic therapy who had been on its faculty for many years. The institution’s 2016 launch of the nation’s first certificate program in psychedelic therapy marked a further step: psychedelic therapy was no longer present only in the histories and practices of individual guides, but had acquired a formal educational program at CIIS. The account does not describe the certificate’s curriculum or outcomes, but identifies its place as an early institutional development in the field.

Place in the Book’s Wider Account

CIIS serves as more than a biographical stop in Andrei’s story. Its spiritual orientation and its later psychedelic-therapy certificate make it a concrete example of how these subjects could enter an academic institution. Elsewhere, the book describes an underground network of guides developing shared ethical codes and practical guidelines; it presents that network separately, not as a program of CIIS. Together, these strands show two distinct settings in which psychedelic work was being organized: formal education and a guide culture built around accumulated practice.