Jungian Music Psychotherapy

When Psyche Sings

Joel Kroeker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138625662
• eBook ISBN: 9780429861628
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Music is everywhere in our lives and all analysts are witness to musical symbols arising from their patient's psyche. However, there is a common resistance to working directly with musical content. Combining a wide range of clinical vignettes with analytic theory, Kroeker takes an in-depth look at the psychoanalytic process through the lens of musical expression and puts forward an approach to working with musical symbols within analysis, which he calls Archetypal Music Psychotherapy (AMP).

Kroeker argues that we have lost our connection to the simple, vital immediacy that musical expression offers. By distilling music into its basic archetypal elements, he illustrates how to rediscover our place in this confrontation with deep psyche and highlights the role of the enigmatic, musical psyche for guiding us through our life. Innovative and interdisciplinary, Kroeker's model for working analytically with musical symbols enables readers to harness the impact of meaningful sound, allowing them to view these experiences through the clarifying lens of depth psychology and the wider work of contemporary psychoanalytic theory.

Jungian Music Psychotherapy is a groundbreaking introduction to the ideas of Archetypal Music Psychotherapy that interweaves theory with clinical examples. It is essential reading for Jungian analysts, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, music therapists, academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, music studies, consciousness studies, and those interested in the creative arts.

Chapter 1
The Red Album

Jung’s relationship with music

Within the Swiss municipality of Rapperswil-Jona in the canton of St. Gallen amidst the sloping green hills that softly plunge into the cool clear waters of Lake Zürich is an unassuming little collection of early gothic (13th-century) Swiss homes. A short stroll in the direction of Liechtenstein, just past a grove of trees and a grotto honouring St. George, nestled in an inconspicuous clump of trees by the lake is a stone castle built by Carl Jung. Somehow even half a century after his death his secrets still reverberate from the sealed turret that guards this land. Sailboats and swans glide by unaware of the history of this place, as the hollow shriek of shore birds echo and waves lap gently at the foot of his family-owned property. These are the sounds he would have heard on Friday, December 12, 1913, over four decades before he conclusively told Margaret Tilly that “music should be an essential part of every analysis” (Tilly, 1977). This was the same Friday that Jung began to scrawl his fantasies and visions into the Black Books (Jaffé, 1961, p. 179), whose consolidated contents have become popularly known as The Red Book.

One can imagine the unseen acousmatic soundscape that may have accompanied Jung’s secret and deeply engaging magnum opus. “White noise” punctuated by silence, verbal sounds, vocalized utterings, perhaps his daughter, Marianne, practicing the piano, the ambience of the Swiss environment near Bollingen and acoustic sonorities of all kinds. I heard some of these sounds myself as I circumambulated Jung’s medieval-style tower and swam in the waters that ripple onto its shore. Upon entering this cold dark stone structure, the gentle din of Swiss nature decrescendos giving way to more internal sounds such as feet shuffling on concrete and the distinct ring of one’s own taciturn solitude.

If Jung had collected and engaged these sounds with as much rigour and zeal as he did with the visual component he may have established a theory for how psyche relates with sound. As a music-oriented Jungian analyst I cannot help but wonder what effect Jung’s Red Album might have had on our appreciation of how sound mediates human experience.

There are many hints within the Jungian literature that Jung himself had an intimate relationship with music and sound. Jung’s grandson, Dieter Baumann, and Bennet’s (1967) account, suggest that Jung was particularly moved by African American spiritual music (Brome, 1978). According to the well-documented (and much cited) account of music therapist Margaret Tilly’s auspicious meeting with Dr. Jung in 1956, he had a tremendous sensitivity to music and eventually told her “from now on music should be an essential part of every analysis” (Tilly, 1977).

Freud, on the other hand, found music inscrutable and vexing, stating:

I spend a long time before [works of art] trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.

(Freud, 1955, p. 211)

Jung alludes to his own musical aesthetic preferences in his autobiography when he states, “Bizet’s music put me in a springlike, nuptial mood, whose depth and meaning I could only dimly grasp” (Jaffé, 1961, p. 111). Later, he says, “(the boiling tea kettle) was just like polyphonic music, which in reality I cannot abide” (Jaffé, 1961, p. 229). Barbara Hannah (1976) recalls Jung spontaneously joining in with military songs and, according to Laurens Van der Post, Jung enjoyed Wagner’s Parsifal, connecting it to the Grail legend (Van Der Post, 1975).

Some of Jung’s family carried forward a musical lineage and he considered his mother and sister to be fine singers and his daughter to be a fine pianist (Tilly, 1977). He told Tilly that he knew “the whole (musical) literature” and had “heard everything and all the great performers” (Tilly, 1977), but felt that musicians “don’t realize the depth of archetypal material” that music is dealing with, so he effectively stopped listening to music because it “exhausted and irritated” him (ibid.).

Jung dreamt about music. Jaffé (1961) recalls him sharing stories of brass bands blaring in his dreams (p. 214). He paid close attention to how he perceived his acoustic environment and the meaning of how he received the sounds around him. He makes reference to auditory synchronicities breaking into his realm of perception and chalks them up to psychic contents emerging through acoustic means (Jaffé, 1961, p. 23). During my training at the Jung Institute Dieter Baumann shared personal stories about Jung’s children camping with his grandfather on an island on Lake Zürich where Jung expounded on “hearing the sounds of nature as music” (personal communication, July 2013).

Another example of Jung’s creative receptivity to his acoustic environment can be found in Memories Dreams and Reflections (Jaffé, 1961) where he speaks of the whistling tea kettle (at his Bollingen tower) sounding “like many voices, or stringed instruments, or even like a whole orchestra” (p. 229). He explores the relationship between external sound and his own internal perception when he writes:

It was as though there were one orchestra inside the (Bollingen) Tower and another one outside. Now one dominated, now the other, as though they were responding to each other. I sat and listened, fascinated. For far more than an hour I listened to the concert, to this natural melody. It was soft music, containing, as well, all the discords of nature. And that was right, for nature is not only harmonious; she is also dreadfully contradictory and chaotic. The music was that way too: an outpouring of sounds, having the quality of water and of wind so strange that it is simply impossible to describe.

(ibid., p. 229)

Jung was haunted by the numinous quality of music. In the early spring of 1924, while alone at his Bollingen tower, Jung awoke to the sound of “distant music … coming closer and closer.” He writes:

then I heard voices laughing and talking. I thought, Who can be prowling around? … I opened the shutters (but) all was still. There was no one in sight…. I fell asleep again and at once the same dream began: once more I heard footsteps, talk, laughter, music. At the same time I had a visual image of several hundred dark-clad figures, possibly peasant boys in their Sunday clothes, who had come down from the mountains and were pouring in around the Tower, on both sides, with a great deal of loud trampling … and playing of accordions. Irritably, I thought, This is really the limit! I thought it was a dream and now it turns out to be reality! At this point, I woke up…. Then I thought: Why, this is simply a case of haunting!

(ibid., p. 230)

According to a letter Jung wrote to “Dr. S.” some of the sounds that Jung interpreted as psychic contents may have been related to an overgrowth of a bone inside his own ear, which was then known as otosclerosis. In response to a letter describing “noises in the ear,” Jung wrote, “the unconscious often uses symptoms of this kind in order to make psychic contents available … my own otosclerosis has presented me with all manner of noises, so I am fairly well informed on this matter” (Jung, 1973, p. 20).

Jung seldom writes directly about music. One of the rare examples can be found in a letter to Serge Moreux, from January 1950, where he writes, “Music expresses in sounds, what fantasies and visions express in visual images. I am not a musician and would not be able to develop these ideas for you in detail. I can only draw your attention to the fact that music represents the movement, development, and transformation of motifs of the collective unconscious” (Jung, 1953, p. 542). He goes on to cite the music of Wagner, Beethoven and Bach as examples.

As an extension of Jung’s comparison between the visual and the auditory, one could reasonably explore whether the auditory sense also has a peripheral limit as the visual sense does and, if so, what form does it take. Beyond the simple physical limitations of distance-to-sound and decibel level, there is a symbolic perimeter that we tend to use defensively regarding the function of audition, but also as a mental mapping of meaningful sounds around us.

Under certain relaxed circumstances (such as during Jung’s extended retreats at his Bollingen tower), this auditory periphery widens, like a highly sensitized net that catches even subtly nuanced dynamic contents and connections. Once, while lying on the table of a massage therapist, I realized that I could tell where she was going to touch my body next just by the sound of her shuffling feet. A confident staccato double foot tap meant she was standing in mountain-like posture and would exert a corresponding amount of pressure with both hands to my mid-lumbar spine. A tap and slide would occur just before her strong elbow would glide up the right side of my thoracic spine. Through the dialogue between my haptic (tactile) memory system and my echoic memory mechanism, I was able to create a mental map of her movements like a dancer does with Labanotation (Laban, 1928). My auditory periphery in this instance was not particularly wide, but it seemed to have become highly responsive, like the optical mechanism becomes during a visual field test at the neuroopthamologist’s office.

Jung’s early work on his association experiment manages to isolate this psychic auditory periphery mechanism in the column that he titled “mis-heard words,” which he considered to be indicators of a complex worthy of further exploration. As if the conscious ego translates words (i.e. images) which are too difficult to receive (i.e. outside of one’s conscious auditory periphery) into a word that is more palatable. This phenomenon of mis-hearing one word for another in analysis continues to occur often enough (by both patient and analyst) that it warrants further exploration. Jung was auditorily curious enough to listen beyond his mutable peripheral limits, as an innovative musician does, and this musical capacity was an essential part of his genius.

References

Bennet, Edward Armstrong. (1967). What Jung Really Said. New York: Schocken.

Brome, Vincent. (1978). Jung. New York: Atheneum.

Freud, Sigmund. (1955). The Moses of Michelangelo. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIII (1913–1914): Totem and Taboo and Other Works, Insel-Verlag. London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute Of Psycho-Analysis, pp. 209–238.

Hannah, Barbara. (1976). Jung: His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir. New York: G.P. Putnam.

Jaffé, Aniela. (1961). Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung. New York, NY: Vintage, 1989.

Jung, Carl Gustav. (1953). C.G. Jung Letters, Volume 1: 1906–1950. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jung, Carl Gustav. (1973). C.G. Jung Letters, Volume 2: 1951–1961. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Laban, Rudoph. (1928). Schrifttanz. Wein: Universal.

Tilly, Margaret. (1977). The therapy of music. In Jung Speaking, eds. William McGuire & Richard Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Van der Post, Laurens. (1975). Jung and the Story of Our Time. New York: Vintage Books.

Chapter 2
The musical cure

Cultural amplifications of musical healing throughout history

Music in its healing aspect, as an archetypal image, is teeming with historical, cultural and mythological amplifications. Some well-known examples include Orpheus’ musical powers, Biblical accounts of David soothing the mad king with his lyre, Pythagoras’s Monochord (500 BC) and its connection to the music of the spheres, Galen’s (400 BC) utilization of music to balance the humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile), Plato’s use (400 BC) of the Dorian and Phrygian musical modes to “encourage man to a harmonic brave life” and Roman Philosopher Boethius’s (AD 500) treatise De Institutione Musica, which became required reading at the Quadrivium university and for students all over Europe.

The field of Medical Ethnomusicology explicitly states that music and healing have been virtually synonymous for much of recorded history and likely beyond:

100 years of Ethnomusicology research has shown … that music is most often practiced as a means of healing or cure … to transform illness or disease to health and homeostasis … (and that) such specialized music almost always emerges from a spiritual or religious worldview and from a ritual or ceremonial practice … (and it) often functions as prayer or meditation and constitutes a preventive and/or curative practice within a broader complex of local medical practices.

(Koen et al., 2011)

Within many cultural communities, ceremonial music is considered to have tremendous power and thus there is secrecy within many healing traditions. Therefore, not all indigenous music and healing ceremonies are accessible to “outsiders” and some of the communities are very strict about the circulation of their healing music (Koen et al., 2011, p. 23). Often the one who manages these powerful practices within the community carries a mana-personality (i.e. one who carries numinous power), such as the song keeper or knowledge keeper in Plains Cree...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the book
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Red Album: Jung’s relationship with music
• 2 The musical cure: Cultural amplifications of musical healing throughout history
• 3 Music as an orienting force: The place of music within analytical psychology
• 4 A lexicon without a language: How musical thinking transcends the confines of grammar
• 5 A conspicuous silence: The absence of music in analytical psychology
• 6 What is music?: [Music = time + sound]
• 7 Working analytically with musical symbols: A natural next step from Jung’s original vision
• 8 Archetypal Music Psychotherapy (AMP): Analysis through musical processes
• 9 The musical field: Processing the symbiotic auditory ecosystem
• 10 Bilocation and the composer’s vantage point: Some hints on setting the frame from the world of the sound poet
• 11 The scope of a music-oriented approach: On beauty, ethics and the role of creativity
• 12 Musical approaches to analytic technique: Navigating the dual role of musician and analyst
• 13 Amplifying musical symbols: Example #1: Tonal centre as the musical archetype of home
• 14 In conclusion …: Musical reverie as a profound investigation of oneself
• Index