Newsletter 2010

Music and Psyche:

Contemporary Psychoanalytic Explorations

Paul W. Ashton and Stephen Bloch, Editors

New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal, Inc., 2010, 304 pp.

(with CD containing some of the music discussed)

C. G. Jung avoided listening much to music, particularly to anything in the romantic style, and Beethoven, because this stirred up his emotions too much. Only late in his life, in 1956, did Jung meet with Margaret Tilly, a music therapist, and was so impressed by her work that he said that “from now on music should be an essential part of every analysis. This reaches the deep archetypal material that we can only sometimes reach in our analytical work with patients.” There is no record, however, of Jung himself ever having used music as a stimulus for active imagination.

The present volume, Music and Psyche, in my opinion, would have been gratifying to Jung in that it explores the interrelationship of psychoanalysis and music from a number of different perspectives and musical genres. The opening chapters offer insight into the ways that both composers and performers have made music that promotes individual development or transformation.

The first essay focuses on a musical analysis of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony against the backdrop of his life history. The author, Melinda Haas, regards this composition as “one of the most profound statements about human possibility and capability that has ever been written” and asserts that it is “an aural manifestation of the all-containing nature of psyche.”

In “The Voice of the Anima in Popular Singing” John Beebe delineates several different traits of so-called “anima singers,” concentrating primarily on certain American female vocalists from the 1920s to the 1970s. A key point here is that the anima is an archetype of connection and that the singer can link a listener to an actual situation in the latter’s unconscious, just as a dream can do.

In a particularly impressive chapter Helen Anderson, a music therapist, discusses the union of spirit and soul in Beethoven’s Passion music and the powerful transformational impact listening to part of the third movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 31 in A-Flat Major had on one of her female analysands.

In a bow to modern technology Paul Ashton includes an e-mail interview he conducted with Mario Jacoby, who once was a professional violinist. They discuss such issues as music and typology and listening to clients with “a musical ear.”

Patricia Skar, as both a piano teacher and a Jungian analyst, draws fascinating parallels between learning a musical instrument and undergoing analysis. She is one of a very few analysts who use music improvisation within analysis and hopes that it may become a standard part of Jungian training programs in the future.

The following essay by Laurel Morris deals with creatively connecting elements of Schumann’s life and work and Jungian theory within the context of German romanticism and its great emphasis on Witz, the linking and amalgamation of opposites.

Chapter Seven, written by composer Kevin O’Connell, offers his interpretation of the reasons for the impact, both positive and negative, that Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring has had on audiences since its premiere in 1913.

In Chapter 8 Paul Ashton shifts the focus to a discussion of music in relation to brain structure and functioning and neurophysiology. Ashton suggests that because becoming proficient in playing or listening to music results in a greater connectedness between the left and right sides of the brain, this proficiency may enhance the link between consciousness and the unconscious, the ego and the Self, and humanity and God.

The next four chapters, written largely from the standpoint of non-Jungian psychoanalysis, delineate contemporary thought on music and “primitive” psychological states. Operating within a Lacanian framework, Lawrence Wetzler uses music with patients in situations where words seem unable to access those dark places in which the analysands found themselves frozen and mute. Wetzler sees music as a way of enabling us to return to our fundamental hallucinatory mode of being which was sacrificed with the advent of language acquisition that molds us into social beings living in society.

In an e-mail interview with psychoanalyst Michael Eigen, Stephen Bloch discusses such topics as the innate musicality of what is expressed in psychoanalytical sessions, the destructive aspects of music, Freud and music, music as a sense organ, Eigen’s own musical background, and the spiritual importance of silence.

Lawrence Wetzler returns in Chapter Eleven and alludes to certain compositions of Mahler and Schubert as evoking aspects of Winnicott’s concept of “unthinkable anxiety and nameless dread” generated in infants growing up in unsupportive environments. As an analyst, Wetzler confronts this psychic death his patients underwent as infants and the efforts they make as adults to retrieve in the transference a sense of their core agony and resume a growth process that had ceased.

The symbolism of the Black Sun with insights from object-relations psychoanalysis is Stephen Bloch’s topic in Chapter Twelve. Relevant compositions by John Dowland, George Crumb, Gavin Bryars, Astor Piazzolla, and Robin Williamson facilitate an embodied participation with the various dimensions of the Black Sun as well as a salvific expression of it.

“Can Music Save the World?” is answered in the affirmative by Melinda Haas in her essay. Haas sees American culture as being in crisis in its domination by ego at the expense of psyche, but a 34-year-long socio-educational orchestral experiment in Venezuela, which has yielded positive results for the entire country, gives her hope that music, as one avenue to the transcendent, could address our own dilemma.

Chris Wildman discusses his role as a music therapist and musician in participating in playback theater performances in a Cape Town township (Chapter Fourteen), while Jungian analyst William Willeford next offers a nuanced, multi-perspectival inquiry into blues music, which frequently reflects the mother-infant dyad and Oedipal triangle conflicts and abandonment issues.

Bloch revisits Eigen, delving into his views on unbearable experience with its pleas for mercy together with John Tavener’s composition Prayer of the Heart (Chapter Sixteen). The book concludes with singer and theologian Nόirín Ní Riain’s exploration of some of the dimensions underlying the relationship between song and psyche, especially the source and destiny of every song and sound, the realm of silence.

As a codicil to this review, I would like to comment on my experiences with songs and synchronicity. On a number of occasions, when puzzling over some personal dilemma, I would hear welling up in me the Beatles lyrics “There will be an answer; let it be.” My reaction has been to regard this as an intuitive insight and to honor it. While reading Music and Psyche, I experienced three stunning synchronistic happenings, all within less than twenty-four hours, related to the Trews’ song “Hope and Ruin,” which spoke to me in regard to accepting the demise of a personal relationship and also seemed to prompt me to include a reference to the phenomenon of musical synchronicities in this review since none of the contributors really deals with it as such.

–Valerie Broege