Early Life and Education
Timothy Francis Leary was born on October 22, 1920, in Springfield, Massachusetts, the only child of an Irish Catholic family. His father, Timothy "Tote" Leary, was a retired Army officer and dentist who abandoned the family when Timothy was 13---an event that profoundly shaped the younger Leary's rebellious temperament and lifelong distrust of authority.
Leary attended Classical High School in Springfield before enrolling at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he received a Jesuit education from 1938 to 1940. Under pressure from his father, he then entered the United States Military Academy at West Point. His time there was brief and turbulent: he accumulated demerits for rule infractions, was accused of a drinking incident, and was eventually asked by the Honor Committee to resign. Leary refused, demanding a public declaration of his innocence. The committee complied, reading a prepared statement to the dining hall, and Leary departed on his own terms---a pattern of confrontation with institutional authority that would define his career.
He subsequently earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Alabama in 1943 and a master's degree in psychology at Washington State University. He completed his PhD in clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950. His dissertation developed what became known as the interpersonal circumplex, a model for mapping personality traits. The resulting book, The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality (1957), was praised by colleagues as one of the most important works in personality assessment of its era.
