Culture and Voices - Professor Tanya Luhrmann at ISPS-US 2025

Culture and Voices - Professor Tanya Luhrmann

This presentation was a session at the ISPS-US 2025 National Conference in Chicago, IL. Presenting sponsors: Advocacy Unlimited and Windhorse Integrative Mental Health.

ISPS-US promotes psychological and social approaches to states of mind often called "psychosis" by providing education, training, advocacy, and opportunities for dialogue between service providers, people with lived experience, family members, activists, and researchers. Get involved by attending our educational events or joining us as a member.

www.isps-us.org

Description

Over the past two decades, I have talked to a great number of people about their auditory hallucinations, commonly referred to as “voices.” Today, I will summarize what I have learned. First, I will argue that we have identified three factors that seem to facilitate voices in the general population: a proclivity (absorption), practice (mental imagery cultivation, as if play), and porosity (a cultural commitment to the idea that thought is potent). Second, I will describe what I have seen in interviews with persons who meet criteria for schizophrenia in the US, Ghana, India, Thailand, China, and Russia. The sample sizes are modest, but there were differences in content and valence that appear to have been influenced by the local culture. Most strikingly, the participants in the US sample reported more violent commands, and it seems that their voices felt more alien to them. More generally, I think that these experiences are a feature, not a bug, of consciousness, and that Western/American biases lead people to experience mad voices more harshly and to ignore the way voices can become positive sources of consolation, creativity, spirituality, and companionship.

About the Presenter

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. She is a medical and psychological anthropologist, and also an anthropologist of religion. More recently she describes her work as an anthropology of mind. Her recent work has been on voices, visions, felt presence and other remarkable events. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. She has published over thirty OpEds in The New York Times, and in many other literary outlets such as Harper’s. Her books include Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, The Good Parsi, Of Two Minds, When God Talks Back, Our Most Troubling Madness (co-edited with Jocelyn Marrow), and How God Becomes Real. In 2026 Norton will publish Voices.

Thank you to our sponsors:

Advocacy Unlimited, Inc. is a Connecticut based non-profit organization that provides holistic, peer led recovery resources. https://advocacyunlimited.org/

Windhorse Integrative Mental Health: Windhorse has offered holistic, compassionate care for 30 over years. An alternative to residential treatment, Windhorse uses mindfulness-informed clinical teams and therapeutic households to support our clients’ recovery journey.
https://windhorseimh.org/

Other Sponsors: Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, INSPIRE at Stanford University