12 April 2024
Psychedelics and Music: Listening for Liberation
by Stephen Lett
MAPS Bulletin: Volume XXXIV Number 1 • 2024
I first encountered psychedelic therapy in 2014 while I was developing a dissertation project in the field of music theory. I wanted to explore theories of music based on musical experiences that fell outside of the representationally oriented and recognition-based kinds of listening often assumed in that field. Music therapy seemed like a promising starting point, so I asked a music therapist if there was a form of therapy where folks just listened to music. She said to check out the work of Helen Bonny and her therapeutic method called Guided Imagery and Music (GIM). When I did, I learned that GIM grew out of Bonny’s work in clinical psychedelic therapy in the late 60s and early 70s. Listening to music while tripping seemed like a perfect counterpoint to the staid music-theoretical image of listening, so my project came to center both GIM and psychedelic therapy. In 2019 I defended the resulting project called “The Psychedelic Listener.”
Since then my thinking and everyday life have significantly changed. Indeed, I’m no longer working in the academy, so my plans to publish work from the dissertation have ground to a halt. But upon being approached to contribute to this Bulletin, I thought it would be a nice opportunity to catch up with some recent work in psychedelic therapy and reflect on my previous research in light of my current thinking.
One of the allures of studying psychedelics for me was their association with the counterculture and revolutionary potential of the 60s. Indeed, I actually chose to study music, in part, because I loved anti-capitalist punk and postrock. In my mind, being a musician and a leftist went hand-in-hand, and I kind of assumed this was the case for most people. Much too slowly, I realized that this was not the case and that university music departments, like universities themselves, do not exist to foster radical thought and praxis. So already somewhat jaded about the academy, I resonated with the restlessness I sensed in the writing of the first wave of psychedelic studies in the Global North. They seemed to be struggling against their enclosure in modern, secular (if not yet in their analysis also colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, and white) institutions that I too felt. Through their research, they seemed to stumble upon a line of flight from their enclosure in modern life through what they came to call psychedelics. And central to this line of flight was a simple recognition: that the world in which we collectively dwell—as well as how we orchestrate our relations and ritualize our lives—deeply matters. This revelation soon came to be reflected back into their clinical practice as they quickly recognized that these substances demanded that practitioners attend not only to dose but also to “set and setting.” And this is where my topic of study entered the story.
As psychedelic therapy manuals past and present state, music is incredibly useful for facilitating and guiding the psychedelic experience. Indeed, by 1960 music therapists had started working with research teams to study music’s role and develop practices with music in psychedelic therapy (Lett, 2020). The most influential researcher on the topic was Helen Bonny, who was hired at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center (MPRC) in 1968. Writing of already common practices with music, Bonny and her colleague Walter Pahnke recommended preparing for listening by “limiting external vision through the use of eyeshades” and reducing “kinesthetic stimuli … by providing a relaxed posture on a couch” (1972, p. 66). In this way, “The subject can then focus on auditory stimuli through the use of stereophonic earphones which bring musical sound into internal experiencing in a powerful and persuasive manner” (1972, p. 66). As seen in the photos below, these practices are still widespread today.
While eyeshades, headphones, and repose on a couch attenuated “external” stimuli, Bonny’s recommendations for music during the session also reflect practices to strategically disconnect the listener from worldly concerns. In an unpublished manuscript written during her time at MPRC, she recommended avoiding music familiar to the participant except at the very beginning and end of the session. Additionally, for music with obvious associations that might prove unhelpful (such as “religious music”), she recommended waiting until the participant is deep enough in the experience that the “name or type of music will not matter” (n.d., p. 4). By minimizing both personal and worldly associations the music might have, she sought to better harness music’s emotional power: “What we would like to do is to get the emotional effect of this music without [the participant] being burdened by intellectualizations and intellectual reactions” (n.d., p. 4). So instead of choosing music to play according to genre or style (though she was deeply invested in the value of Western orchestral music), the guidelines she developed for selecting music over the course of a session approached music according to its emotional content. She found three types useful in particular: soothing, supportive music; driving, discordant music; and powerful, peak music. The diagram below outlines her recommendations from that unpublished document. Importantly, and in contrast to set playlists often used in contemporary practice, researchers at that time regularly chose music on the fly in response to how the participant reacted. Indeed, there are two experiential tracks in the diagram below, one in which a peak experience occurs and one in which it does not.
Recently, I have been thinking about a contradiction at the heart of clinical psychedelic therapy. As Tehseen Noorani (2021) argues, for all the psychedelic rhetoric around opening and connecting, practices in clinical psychedelic therapy often involve, as we saw with music, disconnection and containment. Indeed, while the need to attend to set and setting arose from the psychedelic insight that everything is deeply connected, once incorporated into modern psychiatric practice, attention to “setting” quickly involved developing practices to control the therapeutic space so that the powerful psychedelic experience could be contained and harnessed towards individual healing. Rather than leading to a radical rethinking of clinical psychiatric practice, that is, “setting” turned into another experimental variable to control, tweak, and tailor to best foster individual outcomes.
Pushing against such practices at the foundation of clinical psychedelic therapy, Indigenous stewards of plant medicines continue to remind us of collective, land-centered, and socio-politically attuned practices otherwise. Tyson Yunkaporta insists, for instance, “You must have plant medicines that you’re in relationship with, within totemic and biological kinship. You do that for a purpose and you go over to another place while you’re still strongly tethered in this world” (2023). And as Assis et al. (2023) write, “Indigenous contexts offer awareness beyond the psychotherapeutic, where illness and healing are social processes oriented within a collective experience. We also cannot ignore geopolitical, neocolonial, and industrial dimensions; wars for resource extraction, exploitation of the working poor, patriarchy, and social inequality and alienation all inform the setting in which psychedelic science operates.” Whereas clinical psychedelic therapy is premised on creating an artificial clinical setting to harness a dose’s effects, Indigenous practices with plant medicines are collective and premised on deep relationships with the land and with the plant medicines themselves as teachers.
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In listening to how we might stand in solidarity with Indigenous peoples and plant medicines (Assis et al. 2023), I hear not simply a call to reform clinical psychedelic therapy, but to political action alongside movements for the return of land to Indigenous stewardship (Land Back!) and the building of infrastructures premised on caring for rather than caging people (Care Not Cops!). Indeed, in hearing these voices I have come to recognize how the concept of the “psychedelic” and practices developed around psychedelic therapy ended up in many ways reinscribing the structures researchers in the first wave of psychedelics sought to break out of. So here I am, once again, resonating as I read practitioners of clinical psychedelic therapy grapple with such realizations that unsettle the still-pervasive “white-dominant medical framework” (George et al. 2020).
Since finishing up my dissertation and struggling for a few years on the academic job market, I have all but given up on winning an academic gig. It’s been a good change so far. Indeed, my commitments had already been shifting away from the academy and towards various forms of abolitionist and decolonial struggle. So now I spend most of my time building an abolitionist mutual aid organization with unhoused folks in Norman, Oklahoma. “Mutual aid,” as Dean Spade writes, “is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world” (2020). Rather than strategically disconnecting from the world for therapeutic purposes, mutual aid operates in the messy reality of our shared horrifying capitalist, colonial, white supremacist setting to build a caring world otherwise. Though it might seem disconnected from my previous research efforts, I understand this work as doing the best I can to respond to the calls of Indigenous stewards of plant medicines. And following my music-theoretical interest in forms of listening, I hope that we do not listen to their calls in a way that simply recognizes what they say. Rather, I hope we listen together in such a way that lets their words transform us and our worlds. In particular, through such close and deep listening, I hope we might take action together in solidarity with movements for abolition and decolonization.
References
Assis, G. L., Labate, B., Mays, J., and Cavnar, C. (2023). Ten tips for standing in solidarity with Indigenous people and plant medicines. MAPS Bulletin, 33(3). https://maps.org/bulletin-ten-tips-for-standing-in-solidarity-with-indigenous-people-plant-medicines/
Bonny, H. L. (n.d.). Notes and guidelines on the use of music in psychotherapy sessions. The Archives for Guided Imagery and Music (Box 44, Folder 3), Special Collections Research Center, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, United States.
Bonny, H. L. and Pahnke W. N. (1972). The use of music in psychedelic (LSD) psychotherapy. Journal of Music Therapy, 9(2), 64–87. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmt/9.2.64
George, J. R., Michaels, T. I., Sevelius, J. and Williams, M. T. (2020). The psychedelic Renaissance and the limitations of a White-dominant medical framework: A call for Indigenous and ethnic minority inclusion. Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 4(1), 4–15. https://doi.org/10.1556/2054.2019.015
Lett, S. (2019). The psychedelic listener: Theorizing music in therapeutic practice.” [Doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan]. Deep Blue Documents. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/151494/1/slett_1.pdf
Mack, A. (Director). (1966, July 5). LSD: The Spring Grove Experiment [TV series episode]. In Hassler, P (Executive Producer), CBS Reports. CBS News.
Noorani, T. 2021. Containment matters: Set and setting in contemporary psychedelic psychiatry. Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, 28(3), 201–216. https://doi.org/10.1353/ppp.2021.0032
Spade, D. (2020). Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next). Verso.
Tyson, Y. (2023). Not like a trip away: Proper relationship with plant medicines. MAPS Bulletin, 33(3). https://maps.org/bulletin-not-like-a-trip-away/
Stephen Lett
Stephen Lett is a writer and organizer based in Norman, Oklahoma. He is a founding member of Norman Care-A-Vans, which is building a community of support and care with unhoused folks in Norman, one ride at a time. He co-edits The Dispatch, a journal of community expression for unhoused friends and housed allies of Norman Care-A-Vans. Previously he has published on music and psychedelics in Chacruna Chronicles and Social History of Medicine. His abolitionist intervention in the field of music theory, “Making a Home of the Society for Music Theory, Inc.” was published and became the basis of a colloquy in Music Theory Spectrum. In his free time, he assembles harm reduction kits with SHRED the Stigma in Oklahoma City and plans for abolitionist futures with his partner, Vivian, and two cats, Minerva and Phoebe.
