The Importance and Efficacy of Music in the Therapeutic Encounter and Healing: Neuroscientific, Mystical, and Clinical Perspectives
Julian Ungar-Sargon 
Issue: Vol.5 October 2025 Issue Article 1 pp. 1-12
DOI: https://doi.org/10.38159/ejomur.2025511 | Published online 31st October, 2025
© 2025 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Music has long been recognized as a powerful agent of healing, bridging the somatic, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of human experience. This paper explores the multifaceted role of music within the therapeutic encounter, drawing on clinical, neuroscientific, and mystical perspectives. Integrating insights from Ungar-Sargon’s healing essays, contemporary studies on music and the brain, and Kabbalistic notions of the sefirot and divine harmony, this study argues that music occupies a unique space within the therapeutic encounter—one that both transcends and grounds language. Music’s affective power, its rhythmic entrainment with the body, and its capacity to resonate with unconscious material enable it to become an agent of healing and transformation. Through examination of neurobiological mechanisms, mystical frameworks, and clinical applications, this paper demonstrated that music therapy represents not merely an adjunctive treatment modality, but a fundamental pathway to healing that addresses the whole person—body, psyche, and spirit.
Keywords: Music Therapy, Healing Encounter, Neuroscience, Kabbalah, Therapeutic Presence, Embodied Healing.
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Julian Ungar-Sargon, MD, PhD, is a physician, educator, and scholar at the Borra College of Health Sciences, Dominican University, where he teaches and directs clinical education for Physician Assistant and Biomedical Science students. Trained in both medicine and philosophy, his work bridges clinical practice, ethics, and theology, exploring the intersection of healing, moral presence, and human dignity.
Ungar-Sargon, Julian. “The Importance and Efficacy of Music in the Therapeutic Encounter and Healing: Neuroscientific, Mystical, and Clinical Perspectives,” E-Journal of Music Research 5, no.1 (2025): 1-12. https://doi.org/10.38159/ejomur.2025511
© 2024 The Author(s). Published and Maintained by Noyam Journals. This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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