Alan Trist

<h1 class="gb-volume-title" dir="ltr">Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure</h1>

By Carol Brightman

"What united the original Provincetown bohemians, playwrights and painters both, was the idea "that Art was the great universal refreshment." Curiously, for such dissimilar folk, this is what united the founders of the Grateful Dead. "What we were interested in was art," recalls Alan Trist, who was nineteen when he was his father, Eric Trist, a Visiting Fellow at Stanford who founded the Tavistock Institute in London, arrived in Palo Alto in 1960. "It was the business of being an artist that totally captured Jerry and Hunter," he states, pointing out to me, when we meet at the bagel shop near the Dead's office in San Rafael..." 
pg. 79
<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=SRqkcty3lB4C&pg=PA79&dq=%22Alan+Trist%22+%22grateful+dead%22+Tavistock&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xK6YVNOTHcjwoATJr4H4BA&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Alan%20Trist%22%20%22grateful%20dead%22%20Tavistock&f=false">https://books.google.com/books?id=SRqkcty3lB4C&pg=PA79&dq=%22Alan+Trist%22+%22grateful+dead%22+Tavistock&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xK6YVNOTHcjwoATJr4H4BA&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Alan%20Trist%22%20%22grateful%20dead%22%20Tavistock&f=false</a>

A Long Strage Trip: Inside the History of the Grateful Dead by Dennis McNally

"One consequence of American Beauty was the return of Alan Trist, Garcia and Hunter's buddy from Palo Alto. When he'd left California, he'd attended Cambridge, eventually marrying Robert Hunter's friend from the same Palo Alto circle., Christie Bourne. Through the sixties, Christie maintained a close friendship with both men, which kept the connection alive. After the Hollywood Festival show in 1970, Alan had gotten together with Hunter and McIntire, and eventually Jon had offered him the job of running Ice Nine, the Dead's music publishing firm. Alan faced an interesting quandary. He was then working with the Tavistock Institute, which studied social change, and now he had the opportunity to live it." pg. 383
<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=sWCRWJnTTF8C&pg=PA383&dq=%22Alan+Trist%22+%22grateful+dead%22+Tavistock&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Jq6YVIfgC8XioATDwIHQAg&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Alan%20Trist%22%20%22grateful%20dead%22%20Tavistock&f=false">https://books.google.com/books?id=sWCRWJnTTF8C&pg=PA383&dq=%22Alan+Trist%22+%22grateful+dead%22+Tavistock&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Jq6YVIfgC8XioATDwIHQAg&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Alan%20Trist%22%20%22grateful%20dead%22%20Tavistock&f=false</a>

…there would be a woman who, though quite young, would be a peer. Barbara “Brigid” Meier was an extraordinarily beautiful fifteen-year-old high school student when she met Garcia in March [1962]….Brigid had read Kerouac the year before, and this daughter of left-wing bohemians whose lives closely resembled Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s was totally ready for the Garcia-Hunter-Trist scene. It did not represent “coupling” as she later put it, but mayhem “Where’s the scene tonight?”. 4

“…While I was at Mill Hill, people from the Tavistock Clinic, who had gone into the army, visited the hospital, saw what I was doing, were impressed and asked me to join them. I was in a reserved occupation and couldn’t be released. Sir Aubrey Lewis wouldn’t let me go. But no one could prevent my volunteering to join the armed services. So I volunteered and joined the Tavistock group in the army. At the Maudsley people were furious because they didn’t at all approve of the Tavvy. To them I had committed treason, I was a deserter. But they could do nothing. I moved into the military because there was very much more scope there than at Mill Hill and I wanted to be with the Tavistock people. I had got stale at Mill Hill. I recommended Hans J. Eysenck as my successor and he performed incredibly well.
My wife and I went to Edinburgh where I was the psychologist for the experimental work on War Office Selection Boards (WOSBs). I then became Senior Psychologist for the whole development of WOSBs. I was a Captain, but within eighteen months I was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.
In the WOSB experiment I worked with Majors Jock Sutherland and Wilfred Bion. The scheme was first suggested by the late Ferguson Rodger, a psychiatrist. He had the idea of a group of selectors working with a group of candidates. But the form of the Boards was developed by Sutherland, Bion and myself. A very good account of this is in Hugh MurrayÕs article in Volume I of the history of our work – <a href="http://www.moderntimesworkplace.com/archives/ericsess/ericsess.html">The Social Engagement of Social Science (SESS)</a>. My first job was to devise a psychological test program with intelligence tests, projective tests like the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) and a life history questionnaire. At that time I had the only copy of Henry A. Murray’s TAT in Britain and I kept it longer than I should out of the Cambridge library.
This was 1942 and my son, Alan, was born in Edinburgh. We were then transferred to Pierpoint Morgan’s country house near London, and the family came back to London. We worked on WOSBs for three months before they became operational – see the Introduction to <a href="http://www.moderntimesworkplace.com/archives/ericsess/ericsess.html">The Social Engagement of Social Science (SESS).</a>
During the last two years of the war, I was the Chief Psychologist to the Civil Resettlement Units (CRUs), for repatriated prisoners of war. The CRUs were the second therapeutic community. The first, at Northfield Military Hospital, was based on a proposal by Wilfred Bion in a memorandum in 1940 – the Wharcliffe Memorandum – which was never fully carried out.

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JP Morgan’s country house…no less. Small world. (choke)
In 1961, Alan was on a year holiday and was going to be attending Cambridge University later on in the fall. Of all the places in the world to bring his son, Eric brought him to Palo Alto, just in time for Willis Harmon’s LSD (MKULTRA) student experimentations to be gearing up to get off the ground
So, there’s a happy coincidence, Eric Trist, a senior official of Tavistock, was in residence at Stanford essentially that whole year of 1961.
Can you say CASE OFFICER? And he used his own son to boot!!!
My personal favorite, is the following quote from the book A long Strange Trip (ref #4)  saying Eric Trist was “on sabbatical”.
Wow, what a euphemism for what he was really doing there.

Alan Trist

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