When Psyche Sings

A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Joel Kroeker's Jungian Music Psychotherapy: When Psyche Sings from the new books shelf of my local university library. Joel Kroeker, who came to be a Jungian psychotherapist after studying music composition in college, working as a singer-songwriter in various fields (pop, rock, and folk), and studying ethnomusicology and its meditative components, has written an engaging and useful book. The book seems to be aimed at an audience of readers in the psychoanalytic field who may or may not be musical, but because of its thoughtful and clear explanations about the way music works, I imagine that musicians like me who know little about psychotherapy would find it enjoyable.

I don't have a background in psychotherapy, but I did cut my teenage teeth on Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections (the link goes to the full text in the Internet Archive), digesting every bit. Since my teenage years were filled with around ninety percent music and ten percent everything else, I always imagined that Jung's explorations and explanations had everything to do with music, even though I now understand that he was not particularly musical. Still, there was something about Jung's symbolic approach to the world that particularly resonated with the mixture of know-it-all-ness and overwhelming confusion that accompanied me every day as I went about my teenage business.

My esteem for him in adulthood has fallen a bit, particularly when I consider his feelings about polyphonic music:

One evening I can still remember it precisely I was sitting by the fireplace and had put a big kettle on the fire to make hot water for washing up. The water began to boil and the kettle to sing. It sounded like many voices, or stringed instruments, or even like a whole orchestra. It was just like polyphonic music, which in reality I cannot abide, though in this case it seemed to me peculiarly interesting. It was as though there were one orchestra inside the 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 out-pouring of sounds, having the quality of water and of wind so strange that it is simply impossible to describe it.

The field of music therapy was young when I was a teenager. My mother studied music therapy at Emerson College during the early 1970s, but she must have found it unfulfilling because she didn't continue. I suppose that her loss of interest in the field might have been one of the reasons I didn't think about music therapy for decades. But the field of music therapy has really blossomed in the twenty-first century, and the incorporation of music in therapy sessions, Jungian or otherwise, seems totally natural and totally appropriate.

Kroeker's sixth chapter attempts to answer that age-old question, "what is music?" He comes up with brilliant and entertaining analogies, and approaches the question from the standpoint of a practicing musician, a composer, an ethnomusicologist, and a therapist who uses music in his practice as a way of helping his patients find out truths about themselves. Here's a striking example his own encounter with some of the mysteries of music:

Sometimes one person's prayer can be another person's music. In 2008 I travelled to India and spent some time under the Bodhi tree in Bodhugaya, where the Guatama Budda is said to have attained enlightenment. I remember ducking into a nearby monastery to escape the searing Indian sun and chancing upon a group of Tibetan monks in full regalia filing in to perform a puja ceremony. They entered the enormous silent shrine room just as I slipped in through the heavy wooden doors and arranged their exotic instruments on low tables in front of them in a row. I was still a bit dazed from the heat, and, as they began their continuous flow of rich throaty chanting, I was transported to a place outside of time. I had been practicing in the Kagyu and Hyingma traditions for many years at that point, so I was familiar with some of the cultural forms, but then something happened that was completely beyond expectation. It suddenly occurred to me that they were singing in four-part harmony. There was a low fundamental pitch much deeper than my own voice could go and a clean high sonority that soared above like an eagle. In the middle, I heard inner harmonies that were changing rhythmically. I tried to place this in the realm of other sounds I had heard. I thought of the Sardinian Tenores di bitti and Georgian polyphonic singing and a combination of Gregorian chant with the Mennonite choral music of my childhood. But something about this experience was un-categorizable. This was simply a new experience and I had no words of thoughts that could make it make sense, so my mind went blank. I returned the next day with my camera in hopes of secretly recording a few minutes of this ecstatic music, like an undercover ethnomusicologist from previous generations, but no luck, the monks did not re-appear.

Those of us who teach students to play or sing know that we often end up acting as untrained psychologists during our lessons. I have come to understand, partially through reading this book, that teaching a person to play well is almost the opposite of doing the work of psychoanalysis.

On page 128 of the book Kroeker completes the statement that serves as the subtitle of the book (as well as the title of this blog post), "When psyche sings, she sings exactly what she means." I know that my students are incapable of "singing" what they mean unless they know exactly what their bodies (hands and arms) must do to assure that a phrase can sound the way a student (or a teacher) wants it to sound. A string player, for example, can't say what he or she means musically if their bow arm is uncomfortable, or they are unable to shift to the right pitch and make the sound they want to make. Our jobs as teachers involve showing our students the "how" of musical expression so that they can do it when we are not there to remind them what to do. Our job is also to teach them to identify when they are indeed "saying what they mean" musically.

It is a far easier task, as far as I'm concerned, than the work of a psychoanalyst. But being able to express yourself musically can be extremely empowering.

I applaud Kroeker's work, and recommend this book. You can get it on Amazon.