This session will be moderated by Jean Vion-Dury.

The establishment of the SoMuThé project was requested by the CNRS as a determining factor in the creation of the FRE and then the UMR PRISM. The CNRS is indeed interested in this emerging issue in the field of health, non-drug therapies and well-being because of the considerable number of publications in these fields and the evolution of the notion of health as defined by the WHO.

Several possibilities were open to us (Gaëlle Mougin, Manuel Dias-Alvez and myself) in developing this theme. Being in a SHS unit, we chose to approach the problem through the lens of consciousness, from a philosophical (phenomenological), psychological (and psychoanalytical), as well as medical (mainly psychiatric) point of view, leaving aside empirical, biological, cognitive or other research deemed too reductive.

Moreover, since the project concerns therapies, we could not consider developing it physically in the laboratory, since therapeutic evaluations are done in hospitals in the current regulatory context. For various reasons, we chose to work with the hospital of Toulon.

The SoMuThé project is built as a mosaic of thematic blocks, at the same time independent and all linked together by the same conjecture: music and sounds have a therapeutic effect because they lead to modifications of the structure and content of consciousness in the same way as psychotherapies such as EMDR or hypnosis do, thus opening a space in which certain difficulties are resolved thanks to the imaginary and non-reflexive processes.
From then on, the SoMuThé project is widely open to the medical world, while keeping a philosophical and psychological theoretical base. It involves members of the 3 axes of PRISM, hospital doctors, hospital-university doctors, a thermal center, a department of digital art (Paris VIII), a collaboration in China, and private doctors.

I propose in this seminar a first assessment of this complex and multiparadigmatic project which is now reaching maturity.

Jean Vion-Dury.

Dr. Vion-Dury is a senior lecturer in medicine and science, and a hospital practitioner. Specialized in the functional exploration of the brain and the problems of consciousness, he practices at the University Psychiatry Unit of the Marseille University Hospital (Hôpital Ste Marguerite) and provides hypnotherapy and psychotherapy consultations for high potential individuals. He has directed various teams in CNRS or hospital units. He is the author of 230 publications (including 124 publications on empirical research in international journals, 33 on epistemology and 51 on phenomenology) as well as several academic or literary works. A great reader of phenomenological texts (Husserl, Heidegger, Henry, Merleau-Ponty…), he has been leading the Atelier de Phénoménologie Expérientielle (APHEX) for more than 10 years and is editor-in-chief of the journal Chroniques Phénoménologiques. He is also an amateur harpsichordist.