After meeting with music therapist, Margaret Tilly, in 1956, Jung stated:
“This opens up whole new avenues of research I’d never dreamed of. Because of what you’ve shown me this afternoon – not just what you’ve said, but what I have actually felt and experienced – I feel that from now on music should be an essential part of every analysis. This reaches deep archetypal material that we can only sometimes reach in our analytical work with patients. This is most remarkable.“ (C.G. Jung, 1956)
Lecture Description
This lecture and discussion will focus on illustrating a Jungian approach to working with music and sound that is based on Jung’s personal experiences with music. There are many hints within the Jungian literature that Jung himself had an intimate relationship with music and sound. According to Jung’s grandson, Dieter Baumann, and to E. A. Bennet’s account (Bennet, 1967) Jung was particularly moved by African American spiritual music (Brome, 1978). According to music therapist, Margaret Tilly, Jung had a tremendous sensitivity to music and after inviting her into his house to teach him about music therapy he eventually told her “from now on music should be an essential part of every analysis (Tilly, 1977).”
Jung liked Bizet and Wagner, despised polyphonic music and stated 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 “exhausts and irritates” him (Tilly, 1977).
This lecture is an exploration of how we relate with music, both clinically and personally, from a Jungian perspective while travelling our individuation path. We begin with a rare glimpse into Jung’s own experiences of music and their impact on his discoveries and then move through modern clinical examples and musical narratives in order to express a current understanding of how music and psyche relate to each other.
Topics covered include:
- Jung's relationship with music and how he used it in his own work
- The Music Therapy connection between Jung and Margaret Tilly
- Musical dreams and non-rational creativity
- What Jungians are (and aren’t) doing with music
- "The next step" in applying Jungian approaches to working with music
- Musical Active Imagination
- How Archetypal images, shadow aspects and Anima/Animus show up in sound
- Clinical examples of how the transcendent function operates through ‘musical mandalas’
- Contributions of psychoacoustics and quantum physics to a Jungian understanding of music and sound
- The relationship between psyche and music as archetype
- Bridging the gap between verbal therapies and the expressive arts
- The role of musical Beauty and Aesthetics across cultures
- How to work therapeutically with music and sound
Speaker Bio
Joel Kroeker is a Swiss-trained Jungian Analyst and a registered Music-Centred Psychotherapist with a private practice based in Victoria, BC. He is the founding international workshop facilitator of Archetypal Music Psychotherapy (AMP) and an international recording and touring artist on True North Records. He currently divides his time between his clinical practice and teaching Jungian-oriented courses at various universities across Brazil, Europe and North America.
Feel free to contact Joel by email at: joelkroeker@hotmail.com.
See Joel's online course: Archetypal Music Psychotherapy: A Depth Approach to the Creative Expressive Arts.