Off the Couch and into the Tub

Like the hero of Altered States, some people are trying flotation

The client sips a cup of peppermint tea, takes a shower, then pads along a plastic-covered carpet into a dim room lighted by two candles and filled with the soothing recorded sounds of wind chimes and bird chirps. He steps into a flotation tank and lies down in 8 in. of water laced with 800 Ibs. of dissolved Epsom salts and heated to 93DEGF. He glides back and forth once or twice, feeling weightless because of the high buoyancy, then settles back, secure in the knowledge that he is one of the earliest consumers of a modish new psychic treatment: tank therapy.

The tank's owner is Human Potential Counselor Alma Daniel, 45, a veteran of the self-awareness movement who, by her count, has attended 52 consciousness-expanding workshops in the past six years. She installed the tank last April in a bedroom of her 25th-floor Manhattan apartment. Now five people a week shed their clothes, as well as their sense of time and space, and for $25 spend one hour exploring their psyches in the Epsom tub or simply enjoying a good soak.

Behavioral Scientist John Lilly, known also for his experimental work on dolphin communication, developed the tank in the 1950s. It is similar to the tanks that helped scramble the brain of the Lilly-like hero of the new sci-fi movie Altered States and turn him briefly, and improbably, into a pseudo ape. Tank centers have opened in most states, and a few therapists are using the tank as a successor to the Freudian couch, or in a search for ASC (altered states of consciousness, in the lingo) or OOB (out-of-the-body experiences). "What I'm experiencing is beyond the ape, beyond all that is pure consciousness," says Daniel. Though Daniel has never induced ape-consciousness, she says she once experienced being a cow. "If you throw the rational mind out the window," she says, "you have the ability to experience anything on this planet or beyond."

One of Daniel's clients, or "voyagers," is a New York television executive who was given his first soak as a Christmas present a year ago. After a hard week of traveling, he says, "I fly back to New York, drop my bags, sort my mail and take a tank. It kind of gives me a stop." Other Daniel clients combine the tank with traditional talk therapy before and after the Epsom bath. Though few have followed his lead, Lilly used the tank as a supplement to his own Freudian therapy. "It carried the psychoanalytic method one step further," he said last week.

Lilly, however, was primarily interested in using the tank--sometimes with drugs--to explore "new inner domains of thinking." By increasing buoyancy and reducing the input to the senses, the tank can indeed produce bizarre effects. But Milton Greenblatt, a pioneer in sensory deprivation research and associate director of the U.C.L.A. Neuropsychiatric Institute, says he knows of no serious therapist who uses the tank, because it "produces symptoms rather than allaying them."

Nevertheless, some advocates of holistic medicine are dabbling with it. Says Psychologist Eleanor Haspel-Portner of Los Angeles: "We have found that for some people it's a safe place, for others it's scary. But it has on the whole been very useful." Adds Dr. Elmer Cranton, president of the American Holistic Medical Association: "How could it not be beneficial to understand oneself--unless something is too heavy to handle?"

Though the tanks are easy to open from the inside, some patients do lose their sense of direction and, unable to find the door, go into a panic. Another problem is that people on drugs are likely to freak out in the tank. Daniel bars druggies, and many tank centers make customers sign a paper stating that they have taken no drugs. But even a carefully controlled tank trip can turn out to be a bummer. Daniel's TV executive, who shows up every Friday for a simple soak, had a harrowing first experience: he felt that he was a neutron flying through space at incredible speeds. "I was so scared," he says, "I didn't use the tank for months."

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