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

Summary

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.

Introduction

Psychedelics are once again breaking through—not only to ‘the other side’,¹ but also to this side’s mainstream.² After decades on the margins and underground, in 2017 (with MDMA) and 2019 (with psilocybin), psychedelic therapy earned ‘breakthrough therapy’ status for the treatment of major depressive disorder from the United States Food and Drug Administration. To achieve this status, contemporary advocates of psychedelic therapy have distanced themselves from the ‘excesses’ of the earlier research on the therapy by enlisting a new cast of characters in clinical pharmacology to design and carry out the research. Indeed for some contemporary observers, the spectre of Timothy Leary’s revolutionary political and explicitly spiritual vision for psychedelics haunts contemporary researchers.³ To keep their research agenda from ‘going off the rails’ like before,⁴ scientists today seek to contain the destabilising political and epistemological forces of psychedelic’s ‘other side’ by articulating the therapy in the secular terms of ‘this side’: as neurologically describable effects that lead to outcomes documented in double blind, placebo controlled trials. In this way, contemporary researchers distinguish themselves from the ‘impure scientist’ Leary—more a ‘high priest’ than a scientist or properly modern physician.⁵

Before their first mainstream breakthrough as ‘psychedelics’ in the 1950s, psychiatrists had dubbed these substances ‘psychotomimetics’ for their apparent capacity to induce a temporary psychosis. Some hypothesised that such substances—including mescaline, LSD and psilocybin—might hold the key to discovering a biochemical basis for schizophrenia.⁶ While pursuing this ultimately unsuccessful line of inquiry, a group of Canadian researchers and clinicians developed a psychotherapy for alcoholics using these substances. According to one of the researchers, the initial goal for the therapy was to induce an experience mimicking delirium tremens, the acute psychosis accompanying severe and deadly cases of alcohol withdrawal.⁷ Since it had been observed that after ‘hitting bottom’ in this way some alcoholics sobered up, the idea was that perhaps a therapy where such an experience was induced in a safe and controlled manner might lead to similarly sobering outcomes.⁸ In practice, the therapy appeared to work. But it was not because of any psychotomimetic effect of the drug. The positive benefits did not emerge from psychotic-like experiences, but instead patients reported mystical experiences and the capacity to see oneself from an outside perspective.⁹ The therapy appeared to work, that is, when a subject followed The Door’s front-man Jim Morrison’s imperative to ‘break on through to the other side’.

Early reports of the successful treatment of alcoholics using psychedelic therapy led others to pursue trials with therapy elsewhere in North American from the early 1950s to the early 1970s.¹⁰ Though the therapy initially garnered positive media attention, the enthusiasm of pioneering researchers failed to translate into a place for psychedelic therapy in mainstream medicine. Historians have documented a number of intersecting reasons for this outcome, including backlash to the 1960’s counterculture and a lack of support from the pharmaceutical industry.¹¹ Another important factor for our purposes involved the consolidation of research methodology around the double blind, placebo controlled trial, which seeks to isolate the effects of the drug itself from contextual factors. However, as the earliest (self-)experiments had shown, the therapeutic effects of psychedelics seemed to have just as much to do with the mindset of the subject and the environment in which it is taken as they did with the dose of the drug itself. Thus, clinical investigators of the therapy emphasised the significance of ‘set and setting’,¹² leading them to engage architects, music therapists, artists, psychologists and theologians in conversations about what kinds of physical and aesthetic settings created optimum conditions for the therapy. Psychedelic therapy, that is, led investigators to break through the emerging pharmacological myopia to recognise the essential role that context plays in drug experiences.¹³ This emphasis on the ritual nature of the therapy, however, rendered it illegible to the increasingly hegemonic ideal of psychiatric drugs as ‘magic bullets’ rather than as one factor among many in fostering psychotherapeutic outcomes.¹⁴

In this article, we explore music’s role in the first wave of psychedelic therapy. While the importance of music to the therapy is a persistent refrain in psychedelic therapy manuals past and present,¹⁵ these practices with music have yet to draw sustained attention in the historical literature on psychedelic therapy.¹⁶ Our goal in this article, then, is both to present select documentary evidence of these practices and to situate these practices within historical trends and intellectual tensions that continue to play out in the medical and therapeutic professions. Central among these tensions, and one that orients our selection of archival materials for this study, is the role of ‘the religious’ in medical practice following the ascendance of secular modernity. Contesting the boundaries erected in the medical profession that saw the priest’s care for the soul displaced by the secular physician’s care for the body, psychedelic therapy appears to break through the secular frame, reopening the doors of medicine to spiritual experience and care for the soul.

For those drawing on the power of music for healing, this contestation of the secular is nothing new. As Penelope Gouk notes, ‘Caught between the archetypes of rational doctor, priest and divinely (or demonically) inspired musician, the identity of the musical healer is inevitably compromised’.¹⁷ Music, like psychedelics that is, appears to break through the sober oppositions of secular modernity to therapeutic effect: music is often articulated as a site of vitality and animacy for subjects dwelling within the oppressive, seemingly inescapable logics of ‘modern’ life.¹⁸ With the shift away from religious governance, as commentators on nineteenth-century intellectual history have observed, ‘the aesthetic’ offered an alternative site of secular investiture in what was previously the province of religion.¹⁹ And music for many of these Romantics—whose thinking informed the ideological foundations not only of Jim Morrison,²⁰ but also the imaginary of the psychedelic as popularly articulated by Aldous Huxley²¹—proved an indispensable and exemplary object within their ideology of the aesthetic. Indeed, music’s power as a ‘non-representational’ conveyer of ‘absolute’ affective power was precisely, as we will see, what led many practitioners to view certain kinds of music as indispensable tools in psychedelic therapy.

We explore how the earliest experiments in psychedelic therapy came to recognise the important role sound played in the therapy. Here we draw on materials in an unpublished 1952 manuscript from researchers in Saskatchewan, Canada. Next we introduce Al Hubbard, whose role in developing practices with ‘set and setting’ and his emphasis on leveraging ‘religion’ for therapeutic ends proved influential on the early therapy’s development. In the following sections, we present numerous instances from the archives of clinical encounters where music is discussed in connection with religion across a number of research sites. In particular, we engage materials from patient files at Hollywood Hospital in British Columbia, Betty Grover Eisner’s work at Veterans Administration Hospital in Los Angeles, Aldous Huxley’s self-experimentation as reported in correspondence and Helen L. Bonny’s influential work with music at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center (MPRC). As contemporary researchers renew inquiry into ‘set and setting’ of psychedelic therapy and the role of music in particular,²² to conclude, we suggest that contemporary practices and thinking recapitulate much of the Romantic aesthetic ideology of the previous generation that could hinder the therapy’s broader applicability.

Tuning in to Sound

One of the key players in early psychedelics research was British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond (1917–2004). Osmond left England in 1951 to take up a position in Saskatchewan, Canada where he spent a decade experimenting with hallucinogenic substances.²³ In his initial experiments, Osmond recorded everything that the participants uttered, and documented it in a report with colleague Ben Stefaniuk.²⁴ After the therapeutic sessions, Osmond analysed the data, grouping it into different categories but reserving all of the raw data for subsequent reflection as he calibrated the trial setting to his therapeutic objectives for each subject. Subjects frequently described feeling anxious in the beginning of the session. Some worried about being left alone and asked whether a friend or staff member could remain present. Osmond was at first concerned that subjects may feel as though they were constantly under surveillance, but he became convinced that the presence of others was preferred over being alone.²⁵

These early experiments relied on timed reports in order to monitor trends in the psychedelic effect. For example, the majority of subjects reported feelings of bodily heaviness or light headedness within the first hour. Then, Osmond and Stefaniuk noted, ‘Almost all of our subjects reported either a tendency to euphoria or an outright burst of euphoria activity’.²⁶ Euphoria came in many forms—some broke down in tears, while others expressed indescribable feelings of joy, others laughed uncontrollably. Most of the subjects reported that these feelings came in waves that engaged the body (usually in the stomach) and the mind. Some subjects also reported observations that at first seemed to stymie the study: the sound of a phone ringing in another part of the hospital or a tap dripping.²⁷ Paying closer attention to how such ambient sounds affected the experience, investigators started collecting subjective reports about how the experience of sound changed under the influence of LSD. For example, one experiment in 1952 reported that Subject 10 ‘heard his voice as if coming from a loudspeaker, interesting enough the change to the voice was frequent or “wave-like”’.²⁸ Upon reflection, Osmond found that several subjects had reported on ambient sounds, including the crackling of the recorder, voices and the muffled sounds of the hospital beyond the trial room. Subject 15 ‘stated that the noises produced by the recorder sounded like a knocking on a door or bells ringing, more clear at certain times than at other times’.²⁹ Although at first these audible phenomena seemed to tamper with the controlled uniformity of the therapeutic environment, these sonic features—or soundscapes—came to take on greater importance as investigators moved away from an emphasis on visual hallucinations as the main object of interest, and began considering the influence of setting across all the senses. In studying the subjects’ reports more closely, Osmond and Stefaniuk found that these ambient sounds had in many cases triggered memories, and in some cases, rhythmic sounds like ticking or static buzzing transformed into tunes from the subject’s perspective.³⁰ In one case, Subject 4 ‘heard “a melody, nice tunes which seemed to fill the room.” This melody he hadn’t heard before’.³¹

In 1953 Osmond introduced mescaline to the philosopher and author Aldous Huxley, a meeting that later led them to introduce the word psychedelic. Within weeks of meeting they were interested in the synaesthesia produced by psychedelic experiences. Huxley expressed to Osmond in 1953, weeks after meeting one another, ‘it may be that mescaline or some other chemical substance may play a part by making it possible for young people to “taste and see” what they have learned about at second hand, or directly but at a lower level of intensity, in the writings of the religious, or the works of poets, painters and musicians’.³²

Cultural accoutrements soon became a focal point for these early psychedelic investigators, both as conduits for expressing emotion and ideas, and also as features that might facilitate insights. When thinking about philosophy under the influence of mescaline, one might come to new puzzles and conclusions, just as listening to music may elicit strong emotional reactions as the drug intensifies the senses. Osmond wrote to Huxley about his own realisation of how mescaline allowed him to better understand a piece of writing. He explained: ‘Read after mescal clicked, I knew and I knew that I knew, and I knew that others had known this before me. Of course I had read some of it before but The Perennial Philosophy [Huxley’s 1945 study of theology and mysticism] presents it so well and without the nonsense which so many expositors feel bound to add off their own bat. … So you see we are mutually indebted and that is an exchange of the most precious gifts which can bind a friendship’.³³ Soon, they wondered whether these kinds of heightened emotions might have therapeutic benefits for patients.

A few months after their first meeting, Osmond explained to Huxley that ‘The music and poetry for delighting our patients has not yet started, however, I have some equipment and money for records and I shall try as soon as I can in a small way. Then I shall write it up and try and raise money to equip some beds and really try a Huxley on it’.³⁴ A year earlier, Osmond had developed a clinical experiment using psychedelics in a manner that coordinated specific environmental features into the clinical environment. First, he identified spacious rooms in the hospital ward, and furnished the rooms with comfortable lounging chairs and tables. He hung pictures on the walls ‘of various types and sizes and the floor was covered by a beautifully patterned wine coloured rug’.³⁵ Osmond readily recognised that the room had to provide a stable environment, but that the setting of the trial mattered. He knew from personal experience that psychoactive substances like mescaline and LSD often produced visual hallucinations, but in order to systematically study the content of those hallucinations, the environment itself had to be studied and carefully constructed.

Optimising the Therapeutic Setting

Psychedelics research proceeded in Saskatchewan for over a decade. By 1959 Osmond’s colleagues, psychologist Duncan Blewett and psychiatrist Nick Chwelos, produced a therapeutic handbook for best practices in psychedelic therapies based on experiments that now spread to multiple sites in the province.³⁶ In producing these guidelines Blewett and Chwelos had worked closely with Osmond observing trials with volunteer subjects as well as patients. By this time, investigators recognised the importance of music and ambient sound in the trial context. Blewett and Chwelos began with the recommendation that these therapeutic spaces follow similar protocols to those described by Osmond in 1952—a comfortable room, with proximity to a private washroom, a couch and artwork. But they also elaborated on Osmond and Stefaniuk’s initial recommendations by adding specific features that had by 1959 become commonplace in the psychedelic trial setting. Some were visual cues: photographs, flowers, a mirror.³⁷ But recognising the vital importance of the soundscape, too, they write: ‘A record player and a dozen or so recordings of classical selections covering a variety of moods are so useful as to be virtually essential. Music is an important feature in permitting the person to get outside his usual self-concept’.³⁸ Elsewhere in the guidebook they explained that music is ‘felt physically; is heard with greater clarity and intensity and with new meaning’.³⁹ As the therapy sought to foster an intensely emotional-spiritual peak or ‘psychedelic’ experience in order to lead subjects to a new disposition towards their own lives, the enhancing powers of music quickly became a staple aspect of psychedelic therapy’s setting.⁴⁰

In addition to accumulating experience in the trial setting, the Saskatchewan researchers had developed extensive non-medical networks, which brought in new personalities and influences that strongly influenced their approaches. One of the main figures in the development of the psychedelic therapeutic setting was Al Hubbard (1901–82), a man with a storied past as a double agent in Prohibition era Seattle.⁴¹ According to psychedelic investigators like Osmond and Blewett, Hubbard was also a very skilled guide with a wildly curious imagination that led to innovations in the trial setting. According to Blewett, Hubbard helped to give structure to the psychedelic experience in a way that optimised results by tethering the environmental cues to the emotional rhythms of the drug’s effects. Hubbard suggested that some stimuli could be used effectively to help the patient or subject relax, and that the drug reaction did not need to cause hallucinations for a subject to appreciate the intensity of environmental cues and their capacity to bring about an emotional—even spiritual—reaction. Indeed, Hubbard was Roman Catholic, and one who believed that spiritual or religious insights had the most transformative potential in a therapeutic encounter. Subjects in the trials had occasionally described features that were spiritual or religious, such as hearing church bells, or seeing themselves bathed in a light or hearing the voice of God, but under Hubbard’s influence these moments were intensified by incorporating musical selections that suggested connections to spiritual insights. According to Blewett, Hubbard’s ‘method employed a religious setting involving religious themes in pictures and music and a general stressing of the spiritual aspects of the experience’.⁴²

Hubbard was far from alone in linking religion with psychedelics and attempting to harness this connection for therapeutic ends.⁴³ The centrality of ‘religious’ concepts in psychedelic therapy had ricocheted through the psychedelic research community, as investigators attempted to parse out the healing or therapeutic aspects of the experience into psychological, sociological and pharmacological components. As a therapy directed primarily towards the treatment of alcoholism, furthermore, many of the researchers recruited subjects from and were in close dialogue with Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), whose discourse praised spiritual insights while remaining dedicated to approaching alcoholism from a non-medical position. AA’s position became an important source of inspiration for psychedelic therapists,⁴⁴ especially the position articulated in AA’s Step 2: that one must come ‘to believe [in] a Power greater than ourselves’ to overcome the grip of their addictions.⁴⁵ Many people interpreted this step as a spiritual leap-of-faith, and for alcoholics it was a crucial step—both to confront the spiritual malaise thought to be at the root of their addictive behaviour, and to be guided by awareness of this fact. For psychiatrists, the step could also reveal a breakthrough in psychoanalytical terms, interpreting it as a step involving overcoming one’s superego. Regardless of the theorising of its meaning, psychedelic therapy appealed across practical orientations, and created space for religion, spirituality or at the very least humble introspective reflection within twentieth-century medical practice.

But religion and spirituality were not easily interchangeable concepts. Indeed within the influential thinking of AA, the two are in tension as evidenced in the turn of phrase ‘spiritual but not religious’.⁴⁶ In this thinking, ‘religion’, for many, especially alcoholics, referred to paternalistic, dogmatic institutions that themselves alienated individuals from an authentic spiritual life. For AA, this alienation was a major cause for the modern predilection to addiction, and in order to confront and ultimately conquer addiction, the alcoholic needed to develop an authentic spiritual life. But there was no consensus on the best way to foster such a life. Might ‘religious’ objects and practices, following Hubbard, offer the best path towards authentic spirituality? Or were similar breakthroughs more reliably attainable through non-religious though spiritually vital practices, objects and concepts? For many psychedelic therapists, these questions oriented, both implicitly and explicitly, their use of music as they explored the ideal conditions of the therapeutic setting.

From Setting the Word to Expressing Reality

Following Hubbard’s explicitly religious approach to the session setting, some of the early experiments with sound presented passages of the Bible in both spoken and musical forms. At Hollywood Hospital, one of the recordings in common rotation from 1960 to 1967 was referred to as ‘St. Paul’s Letter’. While we have not been able to identify this recording, in a document discussing their experience during the psychedelic session, a patient indicates that it comprised ‘[w]ords of [an] actor reading passages from St. Paul (“If I give body to be burned” etc.)’.⁴⁷ The themes of the passage in question, 1 Corinthians 13, resonate with those that oriented the conversations on religion the Saskatchewan researchers report having with their subjects—the need for one’s relations to others and the world to be infused with generosity of spirit and love.

Responses to this recording proved divisive. On the one hand, notes from a session indicate that during the recording, the patient ‘became Mary Magd[a]lene for a good ½ hr.’ Continuing the therapist wrote,

Using the main Hi Fi speaker for an alter [sic] she repeatedly brought therapist the following: large vase, small vase, cup + saucer, bowl of roses, ash tray, silver cream jug, silver flower bowl, pitcher of tea + finally one of her son[’]s baby socks + her other chil[d’]s. belt. … No words spoken entire time … All delivered with arms outstretched, palms up, tears streaming down cheeks. Finally with nothing else left on the alter [sic] she offers herself. At this point St. Paul[’]s ‘Love’ tape fortunately ended.⁴⁸

For this patient, the recording appears psychodynamically useful, and she would later reflect on the experience generally, ‘Thank God, for L.S.D. It has given me the chance to live again, instead of dying’.⁴⁹

Though the ‘St. Paul’s Letter’ recording appeared useful in that instance, the patient who described this recording—a Jesuit priest—was ‘annoyed.’ He continued, elaborating on his experience: ‘It … sounded … false, phony. … Neither this nor the gospel speaks to me. … I want it to mean something—I can make it sound meaningful to everybody but me. … This seems to belong to old-time religion, which cannot be my way to God now’.⁵⁰ Through this recording, that is, the priest did not experience the vital spirituality of the words, but instead found in the actor’s reading, the disingenuousness both of the institution to which he dedicated his life and his own proselytising. While this appears to have offered an incredibly useful moment for psychodynamic work in which the priest could work through his relationship to his profession and his religion, rather than finding any vital spirit through this recording, he found ‘old-time religion’.

While this practice of playing spoken word recordings of Bible verses appears unique to Hollywood Hospital, many psychedelic researchers at this time experimented with the use of music written for Christian religious services. Two early reports indicate playing recordings of Christian chant. In his correspondence with Osmond, for instance, Huxley wrote, ‘One of the … records we tried was one of traditional Byzantine music—the Greek version of Gregorian [Chant]. To me at least, this seemed merely grotesque. The single voice bawling away its Alleluias and Kyries seemed like the voice of a gigantic flunkey kowtowing before a considerably magnified Louis XIV’.⁵¹ Huxley’s description suggests that this chanting evoked imagery of hierarchy and subservience—an image, and therefore also music, that he found grotesque during a psychedelic trip. Rather than evoking the vital power of authentic spirituality, Huxley experienced through this music an ossified and outdated—that is, a ‘religious’ rather than ‘spiritual’—institution.

Huxley’s negative experience with chant is not unique in the archives. Betty Grover Eisner (1915–2004), a psychologist at the Veterans Administration in Los Angeles who expanded considerations of set and setting beyond the therapy room,⁵² noted in a 1957 psychedelic session with AA’s Bill Wilson and Tom Powers, ‘Gregorian Chants [...] moved [Powers] profoundly. He seemed to take onto himself the suffering of humanity’.⁵³ Later, she wrote in her ongoing correspondence with Powers, ‘Gregorian Chants are not good LSD music; they have invariably projected the subject into strong feelings of guilt [...]. I have had it happen several times until I realized what it was’.⁵⁴ Although Eisner does not elaborate on this finding, in reporting that the music caused subjects to take on the suffering of humanity and evoke strong feelings of guilt, once again this explicitly religious music caused listeners to experience not the vital spiritual source of religion, but their negative associations with such institutions. Of course, while such experiences could prove useful for psychodynamic work through these relationships, such experiences, the therapists observed, hindered movement towards the primary experiential goal of therapy: a transformative psychedelic experience.

Following their reports of poor experiences with chant, both Huxley and Eisner suggest better music to play, and both heavily gravitated to pieces written within the European ‘classical’ tradition. Eisner writes, continuing her letter to Powers, ‘The music is very important: if the subject doesn’t have any preferences, I’ve found a Mantovani record of classical selections is good to start—and then Chopin’s first piano concerto is better than anything. Pablo Casal’s Kol Nidrei is good, too, and several of Beethoven’s concertos. Also some Mozart—just so it isn’t done mechanically’.⁵⁵ Although she does not draw the distinction herself, the selections she offers here are striking in the fact that they are entirely instrumental works written for the concert hall. That is, the music she indicates is secular ‘absolute’ music—music that is to be appreciated in and for itself rather than as an expression of some outside, non-aesthetic context.⁵⁶ Indeed, as Eisner notes elsewhere, her focus on concertos—an orchestral genre that features a soloist—emerges from the general psychodynamic affordances of its structural properties: ‘concertos seemed to express and enhance the relationship of the individual to the environment as expressed by the interaction of the soloist with the orchestra’.⁵⁷ Whereas the psychodynamics brought about by the association with ‘religion’ appears to have proved more difficult to work with and through, here we see that the more abstract psychodynamic relations afforded by such ‘absolute music’ was here conceived as better fostering the psychological conditions required for facilitating therapeutic work while on psychedelics. And while she here articulates the music’s structural properties as facilitating psychodynamic relations useful for the therapy, she saw the experiences lent by such affordances as leading, in the end, to essentially spiritual insights: a bridge to God.⁵⁸

Huxley, continuing his reflections on experiments with music during his psychedelic experiences, also focuses on musical structure. Indeed, he writes to Osmond that the structure of genres like Gregorian Chant is not conducive to expressing and thereby facilitating an experience of ‘the nature of reality’. Trying some other music, Huxley reports to Osmond, ‘We played the Bach B-minor suite and the “Musical Offering”, and the experience was overpowering. … [These pieces] were a manifestation, on the plane of art, of perpetual creation, a demonstration of the necessity of death and the self-evidence of immortality, an expression of the essential all-rightness of the universe’.⁵⁹ Whereas chant comprises a monophonic texture in which a single melodic line is sung by a single individual or group, Huxley seeks to explain his experience of the Bach in music-structural terms: ‘Only polyphony, and only the highly organized polyphony (structurally organized and not merely texturally organized, as with Palestrina) can convey the nature of reality, which is multiplicity in unity, the reconciliation of opposites, the not-twoness of diversity, the Nirvana-nature of Samsara, the Love which is the bridge between objective and subjective, good and evil, death and life’.⁶⁰ Since ‘polyphony’ simply refers to any kind of music where there are multiple voices or melodic lines occurring simultaneously, he parenthetically clarifies that the kind of polyphony that expresses the nature of reality is ‘structurally organized and not merely texturally organized’. Here he distinguishes between the aesthetic values of the J. S. Bach’s high Baroque and Palestrina’s Renaissance styles. Writing elsewhere, he elaborates: ‘All the … voices [in Renaissance polyphony] are of equal importance, and they move, so to speak, straight ahead, whereas [structurally organised polyphony] move[s] in the equivalent of circles or spirals. In other words, there are, in [merely texturally organised polyphony], no systematic returns to a starting-point, no recapitulations’.⁶¹ As opposed to Palestrina’s polyphonic style, Huxley finds in Bach the pinnacle of music that brings listeners into contact with the ‘divine Other’ while under the influence of psychedelics.⁶² Huxley’s explanation of the spiritual resonance of Bach relies on particular musical values indicative of his Romantic intellectual premises: through Bach’s polyphonic and contrapuntal practice, listeners open their doors of perception to essential Nature.

Though Bach composed extensively for religious services, the pieces that attract Huxley’s attention are, notably, his secular instrumental works. For Huxley, the music that best leads to a spiritual experience, like Eisner, seems to be neither religious music, nor vocal music, but secular instrumental music. While Huxley and Eisner both appear implicitly attuned to the complexities of using music with clear associations with religion, their discussion does not thematise these issues, but instead shifts towards aesthetic properties to relate how other kinds of music—in particular, secular concert music—serve the ends of the therapy better. Later, in the notes of music therapist Helen L. Bonny, however, we see an explicit discussion of the complicated place of explicitly religious music in the therapy, alongside the consolidation of earlier practices regarding the importance of properly timing the playing of music with the intensity of psychedelic drug effects.

Harnessing Power and Avoiding Association

From their earliest experiments, psychedelic researchers were committed to mapping the psychedelic experience. Plotting it on a timeline, Osmond initially observed approximately 6–8 h for an LSD experience. It began with some anxiety and occasionally nausea, but that evolved into waves of euphoria culminating, ideally, in a peak moment, before a gradual re-entry to everyday consciousness. In order to support the subject on a trajectory towards the peak experience, music provided a shifting affective atmosphere to facilitate productive movement and proper support through the stages of the experience. In their Therapeutic Handbook, for example, Blewett and Chwelos indicate that the primary purpose of music at the beginning of the session is to get the patient’s mind off of the peculiar effects that might lead to paranoia, while also relaxing them with more soothing music during the initial transition from ordinary consciousness into the psychedelic state. The ‘semi-classical’ music of Mantovani’s orchestra—comprising classical music and popular tunes arranged for orchestra—became a standard option for the early stages of the experience across several psychedelic research units. While Blewett and Chwelos do not indicate specific selections of music for later in the session, Eisner writes,

[W]e found that the type of music and the period when it was played in a session could have a profound effect. We developed a set of pieces, mostly classical, which aided the drug in its effectiveness and direction. Also, we let subjects bring their own music, which sometimes was helpful, sometimes not. We found that ‘light’ classical music was good at the beginning of a session, and that concertos were really effective in the deepening and integrative periods of the drug action.⁶³

With increasing recognition of the importance of musical qualities and proper timing for various kinds of music, researchers and therapists, also under general pressure to tighten their research methodology, sought to codify their practices with music. To do so, they began to draw on the expertise of professional music therapists.⁶⁴ Having moved from his position in Saskatchewan to be director of research at the New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute, Osmond drew on the expertise of music therapist Hermina E. Browne⁶⁵ and researchers at the Veterans Administration in Topeka, Kansas, worked with professor E. Thayer Gaston and students from the University of Kansas, one of the premiere music therapy programs in the country.⁶⁶ One such student with connections to Topeka VA researchers was Helen L. Bonny, whose work with music in psychedelic therapy continues to prove influential.

In 1960, Bonny (1921–2010), a preacher’s wife who had earlier studied violin at the Oberlin Conservatory, returned to school to pursue a degree in music therapy. Her impetus for pursuing a career in music therapy, she reports, was an event in 1948 during which she had peak experience while playing the violin at a church retreat. ‘My premise’, she reports having related to Professor Gaston upon entering his program, ‘was that the magic could happen to others, as it had for me, if a way might be found to enter and uncover the creative potential in each person through the use of carefully chosen music’.⁶⁷ After completing her undergraduate equivalency and Masters degree, through connections at the Topeka VA, in 1969 she joined the research team at the MPRC of Spring Grove State Hospital as staff music therapist. From 1969 to 1975, Bonny documented practices and drafted a set of guidelines based on her own experience and expertise working as a music therapist in conjunction with psychedelic sessions. Bonny brought her considerable musical expertise to bear on the therapeutic setting, focussing on the affective properties of musical selections in the therapeutic sessions. Her resultant guidelines pioneered how music therapists saw the fraught nature of ‘definitely labelled religious music’.⁶⁸

In an unpublished document that was circulated among the staff at MPRC called ‘Notes and Guidelines on the Use of Music in Psychotherapy’, Bonny developed a broad, threefold typology of music according to the mood or affect it elicits before mapping the use of music of certain types onto the timeline of a session. Her typology consists of three kinds of music. First there is ‘soothing supportive music’, which ‘can help [the subject] organize his experience in a positive direction’, ‘has a warm, human element’, and has a ‘familiar’ and ‘reassuring’ character.⁶⁹ Second is ‘powerful driving music of a rather discordant nature’, which ‘drive[s] a person through conflict and release[s] unpleasant conflictual emotions as an aid to abreaction’.⁷⁰ And third is ‘peak music’, which is ‘very powerful in an emotional way and aids greatly in inducing peak experiences’.⁷¹ The guidelines suggest that the music used in the psychedelic session should generally follow the intensity of drug action, beginning with soothing music, continuing with driving music and climaxing with peak music, before returning to soothing music. In addition to soothing music, however, she suggested that familiar music or music chosen by the subject can prove useful at the start and conclusion of the experience.

Although Bonny here typologised music in terms of its emotional or affective content, she was also cognisant of music’s associative relations, which were particular to each individual subject. Indeed, throughout this document, her primary purpose of outlining the use of music in terms of emotional content was often interrupted by a fixation on the issues arising from ‘religious music’. Her reason for continually returning to a discussion of religious music followed from the fact that many of the records in common rotation at MPRC were noticeably religious in character. For instance, when discussing ‘soothing music’, she described the common use of ‘Mahalia Jackson’s I Believe, One God by Johnny Mathis, or on occasion for people with the appropriate background Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Hymns’.⁷² But whether or not such music was soothing, she indicated, depended on the subject’s ‘set’ with respect to religion. Thus, elaborating on the use of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Hymns, Bonny wrote:

The quality of this music is that it has a warm, human element, is familiar, and the emotional tone is very supportive. Of course, it must be kept in mind that someone who did not come from a Protestant Christian background would not find Tennessee Ernie Ford very reassuring. Also, even some who have may have a negative reaction to this music. These are the kinds of things which need to be determined before hand—that is before the drug session.⁷³

For those with an appropriate background, then, religious music provided soothing music. But its associations also had the capacity to cause negative reactions.

Aside from the use of religious music as ‘soothing music’ early in the session, Bonny also discussed at length the common use of religious music as ‘peak music’. She wrote:

[T]here is some of our peak music that is powerfully religious in nature. But if it is identified as such too strongly by the person in his conscious state he can mobilize resistance against this for various reasons of his past and because of his prejudices. What we would like to do is to get the emotional effect of this music [i.e., ‘definitely labeled religious music’] without [the subject] being burdened by intellectualizations and intellectual reactions. If this music is saved until the person is deep in the drug effect, the name or type of music will not matter. But the person will be able to go directly into the emotional content of the music, and this is what will help him achieve a psychedelic peak.⁷⁴

Here Bonny distinguished between two levels of experience. First, there is the level of ‘intellectualizations and intellectual reactions’ which had the potential to ‘mobilize resistance’ because of past experiences. This was the type of reaction to religious music she wanted to avoid. Second, there was a level of experience which directly engaged ‘emotional content’ outside of the intellectual stratifications of ‘name or type of music’. The utility of music that was ‘powerfully religious in nature’ resided in the particular selection of music’s ‘power’.

For Bonny, the primary therapeutic utility of music was found in its affective-emotional ‘power’. In Bonny’s language it was the inherent ‘power’ of music that fostered a move away from ‘religious’ associations and guided participants towards a more specifically ‘spiritual’ connection. Bonny’s typology and descriptions, then, fit well with how AA articulated the tension between religious and spiritual benefits. For Bonny, religious music was not effective because it was religious—in fact, insofar as it functioned religiously, it was detrimental to the therapeutic experience; religious music was effective, rather, when it was harnessed for its spiritual, affective power.

Bonny’s contribution to the study of music’s role in set and setting cannot be overstated. She paid close attention to how music influenced the experience of the environment fostered by the music, while also seeking to mitigate undesirable associations that may cause ‘undue turbulence’ in a psychedelic-assisted therapy session. By coordinating music with the pharmacological aspects of the therapy, Bonny argued that carefully selected music was evocative of the client’s personal cultural embeddedness. The meanings inherent in the music were personal, and music could also elucidate intimate reactions, as Huxley wrote of Bach, ‘being brought to a direct, unmediated understanding of the divine nature’.⁷⁵ Carefully selected pieces could evoke a spiritual reaction because they reminded listeners of cultural connotations associated with musical pieces and particular sounds. This approach combined elements of pharmacology, psychodynamism and therapy by highlighting the significance of the environment or setting in predicting, and arguably guiding, an otherwise pharmacological experience. To achieve these results, Bonny, like Huxley and Eisner, recommended using ‘masterworks’ of the European concert tradition. For Huxley and Bonny, this preference was explicitly premised on their belief that through such works, listeners transcended the everyday world and entered into an authentic relation with an aesthetic/spiritual vitality. That is, putting the nineteenth-century tradition of Romantic aesthetics into psychedelic-therapeutic practice, they sought to harness the power of such musical works to ‘probe and reveal the higher world of universal, eternal truth’.⁷⁶ Following the Romantics, they believed that secular instrumental music rather than vocal religious music ‘provides a direct path to the experience of a kind of truth that transcends particular natural contingencies and transitory human feelings’.⁷⁷ While other kinds of music might have proven useful at other times in psychedelic therapy, this music, they believed (and Bonny sought to demonstrate in her studies at MPRC), functioned universally towards these ends at the height of the drug’s psychological effects.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s a number of psychedelic research centres paid close attention to the representational and affective resonances of religious and spiritual features within the therapeutic setting, the psychological mindset and the clinical objectives. Over time researchers developed some consensus on the therapeutic benefits of spiritual experiences, and sought new mechanisms for standardising practices that allowed participants to reach these moments regardless of religious background, training or cultural memories of interactions with spiritual guides. While Hubbard created an explicitly religious setting inspired by his own Catholicism, other therapists incorporated religion in strategic ways that at times downplayed the religious connotations out of concern that they might generate negative emotional responses. Standardising this practice required attuning therapy sessions to individual patients, while also engaging patients in preparatory sessions that explored preconceived ideas about religion, or traditions and experienced that had influenced one’s religious perspectives prior to the treatment. Discussions about religion informed the musical selections. Despite a growing desire to foster religious experiences in the therapeutic milieu, the various approaches as described by Bonny, Hubbard, Eisner and Huxley reveal considerable tension over how to cultivate the desired spiritual epiphany.

Conclusions and Future Applications

Psychedelic researchers in the twenty-first century have not entirely dispensed with the theories produced by the earlier generation, and the focus on ‘set and setting’ has found new currency in a psychedelic renaissance that looks at some of these questions with renewed enthusiasm. Helen L. Bonny’s work is once more being used at Johns Hopkins University, by theologian-psychologist William A. Richards.⁷⁸ No stranger to these historical applications, Richards participated in Spring Grove research in the past, and is part of a team now resurrecting some of those older ideas. Richards’ playlist emphasises music that was in widespread use in the earlier psychedelics research.⁷⁹ However, this field is also changing and incorporating new technologies that alter the soundscape of the psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions.

The most prominent contemporary practitioner focussed on music is London-based neuroscientist Mendel Kaelen. Kaelen builds on Bonny’s approach, emphasising the importance of the affective quality of music, while also promoting the use of music that eludes familiarity to the subject. Moving further away from an identifiable genre, Kaelen, like Bonny, seeks to transcend particular associations with the music in order to better generate a peak experience. Describing his approach in an article arguing for the centrality of the role of music in psychedelic therapy, he writes:

Several of the musical works originally included in playlists for psychedelic therapy are very familiar today. Examples include ‘Samuel Barber—Adagio for strings’ and ‘Beethoven—Piano Concerto 5’. Such high familiarity may reduce the opportunity for patients to have a new experience with the music, unfettered by prior associations. In addition, a strong emphasis on music with ‘Christian religious’ content may not be appropriate for individuals that are either non-religious or practice a different religion. Therefore, a music playlist was designed for the present study, containing predominantly contemporary music such as the ambient, neo-classical, contemporary classical, as well as traditional/ethnic music styles. The intention with this music selection was to minimise religious associations and to support mystical experiences within a secular framework.⁸⁰

Kaelen expresses a desire to avoid music that may be overtly religious or potentially reminiscent of problematic experiences with or views of religion. But Kaelen seems to have set his sights on another dimension of this approach: to develop a musical experience completely unfettered by prior association, to create a space transcending associative relations.

Though Kaelen has shifted away from the ‘classical’ canon that oriented earlier selections, his secularising aesthetic logic extends Bonny’s ideas and practices. In particular, like Bonny he finds music useful for its affective quality, downplaying its associative capacities, thereby emphasising personal spiritual insights over the institutional religious ones. Changes in technology create new opportunities to pursue this project in ways that were not possible in an earlier generation of psychedelic science. Kaelen’s company, Wavepaths, is developing software that produces collages of musical materials based on the patient’s current mindset in order to lead to particular affective ends. These materials will eventually, he indicates, be drawn from a very broad repertoire—from ‘musicians who are more oriented towards ambient music, but also musicians who are oriented towards electronic music or jazz or classical. Really, to provide that full landscape of possibilities’.⁸¹ He aspires to create a playlist that ‘transcends cultural boundaries’.⁸² He approaches this objective by studying the aesthetic qualities of particular musical properties. Kaelen explained in a recent interview:

For example, we might have a client who has listened to classical music his or her entire life. Instead of thinking that therefore this person needs to listen to classical music, we ask what it is in classical music that’s probably integrated in this person. What are the compositional qualities that are unique to classical music? What are the timbral qualities unique to classical music? And can we work with classical musicians to capture that? But maybe the result doesn’t sound exactly like a classical composition or what we’re used to hearing, because we’re really thinking through new ways that music can have this adaptive, flexible-component structure to it but still have this element that makes you as a classical music listener responsive to this music as well.⁸³

Kaelen has developed an approach that attunes to the aesthetic properties that listeners are accustomed to, and then leverages those properties to generate an affective environment for the patient, based on knowledge of the kinds of things the patient prefers to listen to. The music itself may not be familiar, but its structure will retain familiar features. Kaelen states that, ‘our aspiration [is] to build something that’s not necessarily bound to one time and place’.⁸⁴ While moving away from Bonny’s emphasis on masterworks, Kaelen’s desire to transcend boundaries resonates with her Romantic aspirations to the universality of certain forms of music. Instead of particular pieces of music serving as the basis of transcendence, Kaelen locates this capacity in the technology his company is developing. While recognising the utility of a kind of general familiarity, the technology seeks to abstract the essential qualities of the familiar in order to create for each listener an entirely novel, yet unmarked aesthetic space.

If Kaelen’s approach succeeds, it reopens doors of perception that underscore the importance of ‘set and setting’ not only in psychedelic psychotherapy, but also perhaps therapy more broadly. And, if the psychedelic renaissance results in the decriminalised use of psychedelics, a much wider and diverse range of people will be participating in a project that syncopates set and setting with therapeutic objectives. However, as some critics within the psychedelic field suggest, the contemporary research appears to recapitulate the domination of white, male and western perspectives.⁸⁵ Kaelen’s approach, then, operating in this lineage, might also prove a hindrance to the therapy’s accessibility to those for whom experiences with plant medicines are less about an individual’s subjective transcendence than immanent, embodied collectivity. Whether therapeutic techniques change or not, it is clear that the emotional and aesthetic tastes of a more diverse set of users will alter the context of how we understand the relationship between set, setting and its relationship to therapeutic success.

Stephen Lett is an independent scholar based in Norman, OK. He studies practices with music in psychedelic therapy and the Bonny Method of Guided Imagery and Music. Enacting the ethical and political concerns of these therapies, he also writes on the institutional politics of music theory in the North American academy.

Erika Dyck is a History Professor and a Canada Research Chair in the History of Health & Social Justice at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the author of Psychedelic Psychiatry (2008); Facing Eugenics (2013); co-author of Managing Madness (2017), and co-editor of Psychedelic Prophets (2018).

Funding

Research for this article was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.