Most of the names that get repeated in the current wave of psychedelic history belong to men, and most of them lived north of the equator. So it's worth slowing down for a figure who tends to get edited out of the story: a woman in Buenos Aires who, in the late 1950s, was running LSD-assisted group sessions with food and music in the room — and who flew into the Amazon in 1959 to drink ayahuasca with curanderos before almost anyone in Western medicine had even heard the word.

Her name was Luisa Agusta Rebeca Gambier de Álvarez de Toledo. Her colleagues called her Rebe. She was the first woman to preside over the Argentine Psychoanalytical Association, and she happens to have written one of the earliest scientific reports on ayahuasca published outside the Amazon. For readers interested in the deep roots of plant medicine and psychedelics in clinical practice — and how master plants found their way into the modern conversation about addiction, trauma, and soul exploration — her story is essential reading.

A Buenos Aires Shaped by Exile

To understand why Argentina, of all places, became fertile ground for early psychedelic experimentation, you have to understand what the city looked like in the 1940s. After the Spanish Civil War and then the Second World War, Buenos Aires absorbed waves of European intellectuals, doctors, artists, and analysts fleeing fascism. The Argentine Psychoanalytical Association was founded in 1942 in that hothouse of imported ideas, and Freud, Klein, Lacan, and the British object-relations school all got argued over at the same dinner tables.

Álvarez de Toledo trained as a physician and got drawn into psychoanalytic theory while still in medical school. By the early 1950s she was working at the Hospicio de la Mercedes, the country's first psychoanalytic institution, alongside the legendary psychiatrist Enrique Pichon-Rivière. Her 1954 paper on the emotional life of the therapist during the session — what we'd now recognise as a precursor to modern conversations about countertransference and presence — is still cited as a classic. She wasn't a fringe figure. She was the establishment.

And then, almost as soon as she became APA president in 1956, she organised a working group to experiment with LSD.

How LSD Therapy Actually Looked in 1957

Sandoz was the source. A representative from the Swiss company supplied the substance and the existing clinical literature, which by then included scattered reports from Europe and a handful of American hospitals. She wasn't even the first in Argentina to publish on it — the psychiatrist Alberto Tallaferro had already documented more than a thousand sessions with LSD and mescaline in 1956, and he sat in on her early work.

What's striking, reading her four published articles from 1957 to 1960, is how modern the protocol sounds. The therapists drank the medicine themselves first — sometimes LSD, sometimes mescaline — and wrote up their own experiences in the scientific papers. They considered self-experimentation an ethical prerequisite, not a sideshow. You couldn't sit with a patient through something you hadn't met yourself.

She brought two things into the session that weren't standard psychoanalytic furniture:

• Music. Chosen carefully, used to shape the arc of the experience.
• Food. Offered to the patient mid-session. She wrote that the offer of food was experienced as an unexpected gratification, a concrete demonstration of affection and devotion. Anyone who has sat through a long ceremony and been handed a piece of fruit at the right moment will recognise exactly what she meant.

She also refused to leave patients alone. The therapist's job was to build and hold a strong connection — what she'd been arguing for years was the heart of any good analytic relationship, just intensified by the medicine. By 1960, after three years of work, she was running twelve groups, around a hundred patients in total, and concluded that group psychotherapy combined with LSD was, in her words, a really effective method. She also insisted on two facilitators per group, so that if someone went into what she called a generalised psychopathic episode, one therapist could step out with them while the other held the room. Sound familiar? It's the same staffing logic any honest psychedelic retreat uses today.

1959: Into the Amazon for Ayahuasca

Then came the part of her story that almost nobody outside specialist circles knows. In 1959, Álvarez de Toledo travelled into the Amazon jungle to drink ayahuasca with curanderos. In 1959. Before Burroughs and Ginsberg's Yage Letters had reached a wide audience. Before the Santo Daime had crossed any borders. Before the word ayahuasca meant anything at all to most physicians.

She published her account in 1960 as one of the very first scientific articles on the brew. Her method was a hybrid that feels surprisingly contemporary — part ethnography (she wanted to document what the curanderos actually did, in their own terms), part clinical evaluation (she wanted to know whether this could do therapeutic work). She researched how the curanderos understood the experience and what they expected of participants before she ever lifted a cup.

She ended up trying ayahuasca twice with two different curanderos. The first ceremony she dismissed almost immediately — the brew had been cut with gasoline (yes, really), the room was small and dirty, the village too close and too noisy. The second time was different. Held in the forest. A curandero who treated her as a colleague and refused payment. She asked specifically to be included in a local group ceremony so she could observe how these things actually unfolded in their natural setting, rather than as a private demonstration for a foreign doctor.

What the Ceremony Did to Her

Her own description of the experience is worth quoting because it's so unguarded — a trained analyst writing without any of the defensive posture you'd expect from a 1960 medical journal:

The voices turned into birds, at first motionless, circling around me, then they flew rapidly. Suddenly, I went from the horrible to the wonderful. I was part of a circle of etheric beings that were rising and merging, transforming into a central ascending light.

The curandero himself vomited, she noted, as an invitation to the others. This worried her — in her psychoanalytic frame, vomiting and diarrhea were defensive responses to the fear of the unknown. The villagers reassured her. Then her own nausea came, dry and without release, and the trance took her over completely beneath the icaros being sung around her.

Walking back to the village afterwards, she described seeing the earth and plants and her own body emitting bluish waves spreading outward, lights appearing and going out around her, a deep euphoria in the presence of such beauty. She walked, uncertain, on a very soft earth. Her clinical summary afterwards was characteristically honest: she felt the observation had been disturbed by her own defenses and by her lack of the ritual language, which prevented her from fully grasping what the masters were actually doing therapeutically. She wasn't claiming mastery. She was naming the gap.

Why This Matters for Anyone Considering a Retreat Today

It's easy to read history like this as colourful background, but it bears directly on choices people are making right now. The current wave of interest in plant medicine for addiction, depression, and trauma sometimes presents itself as brand new. It isn't. Álvarez de Toledo and her colleagues had already worked out, three generations ago, several of the principles that any reputable retreat should still be following:

1. The facilitator should know the medicine personally. Self-experimentation isn't recklessness — it's a baseline of respect for what you're asking other people to walk into.
2. Two facilitators are better than one. Especially in group settings. When something gets difficult — and it will, for someone, in any sufficiently honest ceremony — you need redundancy.
3. Music, food, and the sensory environment matter. They're not decoration. They're part of the medicine.
4. Cultural and linguistic context is not optional. Álvarez de Toledo, a published expert at the height of her career, openly admitted that not speaking the ritual language limited what she could learn. Be wary of any operation that suggests you can extract the medicine cleanly from its tradition.
5. Connection is the therapy. The substance opens a door. What happens on the other side is shaped almost entirely by the quality of relationship in the room.

What strikes me, reading her papers now, is how much of the current psychedelic-assisted therapy world is reinventing wheels she'd already drawn. The careful preparation. The continuous presence. The integration sessions. The respect for group dynamics. She got there in heels in Buenos Aires in 1957 and confirmed it under icaros in the Amazon in 1959.

A Quiet Pioneer Worth Remembering

Álvarez de Toledo died in 1990, just as MAPS was being founded in California and the modern revival was beginning to stir. She didn't live to see ayahuasca become an international phenomenon, didn't watch psilocybin trials at Johns Hopkins, didn't read the headlines about ibogaine for opioid addiction. But the through-line is hers as much as anybody's: a working clinician who took these substances seriously as therapeutic tools, treated traditional knowledge as knowledge rather than folklore, and held herself to the same rigour with mescaline and ayahuasca that she held herself to with her analytic patients.

For anyone weighing whether to sit in ceremony, her example offers something more useful than enthusiasm. It offers a standard. Does the place you're considering treat preparation seriously? Are the facilitators trained, present, and willing to talk about their own relationship with the medicine? Is there real integration support afterwards? Those questions aren't new. They've just been waiting for us to ask them again.

If reading this has sharpened your curiosity, a range of carefully vetted ayahuasca and plant-medicine retreats can be explored on our marketplace here — a useful place to start when you want to see what genuinely thoughtful facilitation looks like in practice today.