Dick Price

College education

Price graduated from Stanford University in 1952 with a major in psychology. While at Stanford, Price studied with both Gregory Bateson and Frederic Spiegelberg. They would later prove to be pivotal influences when he founded and developed programs at Esalen Institute. He did graduate work in the social relations department at Harvard University, although he left before completing his degree because of his frustration with the conservative, research-oriented faculty.

San Francisco

After leaving Harvard in 1955, Price enlisted in the Air Force and was given an assignment in the East Bay (San Francisco Bay Area). He rented a room in San Francisco at Alan Watts' and Frederic Spiegelberg's newly founded American Academy of Asian Studies (the precursor to the California Institute of Integral Studies). During this time, the North Beach Beat scene was an emerging social trend. Dick knew most of the primary figures, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder. Dick married his first wife, Bonnie, in a Zen ceremony.

Psychosis

In 1956, Price, still in the Air Force, experienced an episode of manic psychosis in San Francisco which he later described as simply "a state", what he believed was a mental break that was transitory and which he needed to go through and experience rather than repress or manage.

On December 7, 1956, his parents involuntarily committed him to the Institute of Living, an exclusive mental treatment facility in Connecticut. While hospitalized, he was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. He was subjected to physical confinement and major tranquilizers, along with numerous electroconvulsive and insulin shock treatments. While committed, his mother had his marriage annulled. He was released almost a year later on Thanksgiving Day 1957.

Price wrote about his hospitalization experience:

There was a fundamental mistake being made and that mistake was supposing that the healing process was the disease, rather than the process whereby the disease is healed. The disease, if any, was the state previous to the "psychosis."... The so-called "psychosis" was an attempt towards spontaneous healing, and it was a movement towards health, not a movement towards disease.... In some categories it would be called mystical, really a re-owning and discovery of parts of myself.

After he was hospitalized, he was discharged from the Air Force, and went to work for his uncle's sign company in Chicago, Price Brothers. Price never forgave his parents for their actions. Price did not like working for the sign company.