Tune in, Turn on: Religious Music and Spiritual Power in the History of Psychedelic Therapy.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy relies not only on the drug itself but also on the subject's mindset and the session environment, known as 'set and setting'. Early therapeutic sessions deliberately incorporated or avoided religious sounds and music to foster spiritual epiphanies during peak experiences. Contemporary practices largely repeat these past approaches, relying on aesthetic assumptions that may limit the therapy's broader applicability.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Psychedelic-assisted therapy has attracted considerable clinical attention in the past decade for its ability to bring therapeutic benefits to patients in treatment-resistant categories. In contradistinction from other psychopharmaco-therapies, contemporary psychedelic therapists, like their predecessors, paid close attention to the 'set and setting', and argued that the mind-set of the subject and the conditions or environment of the session was as influential as the pharmacological reaction itself. In this paper, we examine how religious sounds and music were both incorporated into and strategically avoided in the early psychedelic therapeutic sessions in an effort to achieve spiritual epiphanies at peak experiences. Prominent contemporary practices, we conclude, recapitulate many of the practices of the past, relying, we argue, on aesthetic premises that could hinder the therapy's broader applicability.