An Eye on Psychotherapy

Review of Psychedelic-Assisted EMDR Therapy: A Memory-Consolidation Approach to Psychedelic Healing (2025) by Hannah Raine-Smith and Jocelyn Rose

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy was first conceived of in the late 1980s by its founder Dr Francine Shapiro. While walking in a park, Shapiro noticed that negative emotions she associated with distressing memories were reduced with eye movements, and she hypothesized that this behaviour had a desensitizing effect. Coupling this idea with cognitive components in order to facilitate longer term therapeutic results, she began conducting studies dealing with PTSD—and with positive results.

With what was then still being called EMD, Shapiro began teaching it to other researchers, notably in Israel and the United States, and an Institute was founded in 1990. Reflecting on what she had learnt, Shapiro renamed the therapy EMDR and, through workshops and networks, continued facilitating the technique’s adoption. A form of psychotherapy, EMDR focuses on the processing of traumatic memories while engaging in bilateral stimulations, such as eye movement, and today has developed an international network of practitioners.

Meanwhile, the re-emergence of psychedelic-assisted therapies has being growing apace over the last twenty years. While various therapeutic techniques have been utilized, EMDR could be said to have something of an unexplored lineage in this respect; Brion Gysin and Ian Somerville’s Dreamachine for instance, and the stroboscope being employed by neurophysiologists and cyberneticists like Dr William Grey Walter, often in conjunction with LSD. Therefore, therapy involving both psychedelics and the manipulation of the visual cortex is an intriguing possibility—enter Hannah Raine-Smith and Jocelyn Rose.

Raine-Smith and Rose, psychotherapist and psychotherapeutic counsellor respectively, first met in 2022. Both were fascinated by EMDR and together developed a protocol for psychedelic-assisted EMDR therapy. Alongside, they’re members of the Drug Science psychedelic therapies working group and facilitate harm reduction and training initiatives using an AIP framework. Their new book Psychedelic-Assisted EMDR Therapy: A Memory-Consolidation Approach to Psychedelic Healing (Routledge 2025), explores how EMDR may enhance the effects of psychedelic medications.

The book’s introduction reviews existing therapeutic approaches using psychedelics, including indigenous, underground and approved models. While the authors note that all therapies can be seen as potentially useful modalities, ‘PsyA-EMDR therapy’ has several specific development goals. These include, strategies for managing uncomfortable emotions, stabilizing adverse reactions, and a more cohesive integrative and theoretical framework, one that might be fruitfully used alongside harm reduction, psychoeducation and community-based integration strategies.

Central to this method is the adaptive information processing (AIP) framework. This approach suggests ‘that impairments to the information processing systems of the brain under stress cause memories to be stored in an unprocessed, state-specific form that is not connected to adaptive information that is necessary to calm the nervous system’ (24-25). The aim, therefore, is to re-process these traumatic memories so that they become adapted and integrated successfully in the patient. EMDR then facilitates this process, in part, by emotional regulation.

The PsyA-EMDR protocol is described in Chapter 3, which begins with phone calls and preparedness, and moves through treatments and integration. EMDR is used in this process to facilitate the emergence of adaptive information. For practitioners who may wish to utilize this method, the authors have written a comprehensive set of treatment pathways and phase-by-phase sections, along with additional considerations and supervision. The following chapters provide a breakdown of key areas, such as ethics, preparation, stabilization and risk reduction, and integration.

Chapter 7 also examines EMDR is relation to psycholytic therapy—the largely European model developed in the 1950s and 1960s that entailed regular small doses of a psychedelic alongside traditional psychotherapy (as opposed one high dose session). In respect of the psychotherapeutic treatments involved in EMDR, this model seems quite pertinent, and the authors note that, ‘Subjective reports from experimental practice of psycholytic PsyA-EMDR indicate that large doses of psychedelics are not necessary to facilitate long-term positive change’ (149).

In conclusion, Psychedelic-Assisted EMDR Therapy is a comprehensive appraisal of the techniques and possibilities of this therapeutic method. The authors, obviously very knowledgeable in their fields, provide a clear protocol and discussion, and conclude with a lucid appraisal of the potential future development of PsyA-EMDR. Ultimately, therapy is a results game, so in what is becoming a very crowded therapeutic space for the ‘psychedelic-assisted’ prefix, building an evidence base is of the utmost importance—and this book is an excellent groundwork for this endeavour.

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