Thoughts From the Pit: Can Raving Change the World? A Literature Review Exploring Rave Culture as Expressive Arts Healing

Abstract

This literature review examines the structural and philosophical commonalities between expressive arts therapy (EXA) and rave culture. Drawing on scholarship from anthropology, cultural studies, health sciences, transpersonal psychology, neuroscience, and expressive arts therapy, this review identifies five core principles shared between the two fields: transformational experiences, multimodality, entrainment and flow, containment and ritual, and community and social action values. Across each principle, the literature reveals not surface-level similarity but deep convergence — two fields that have, independently and through different lineages, arrived at the same understanding of what human beings need in order to heal, grow, and connect. To the author\u27s knowledge, no prior academic literature has brought these two worlds into conversation, and this review argues that the absence of that dialogue reflects a broader tendency within Western therapeutic discourse to render some community-born healing spaces invisible. The implications for EXA clinical practice are clear: recognizing the rave as a legitimate site of transformational experience is not a departure from EXA\u27s values but a natural extension of its existing decolonial commitments. This review concludes by calling for future research that is participatory, embodied, and developed in genuine collaboration with rave communities themselves