Youtube Love Music
Eduviges Gearlds
For over 10 years, Stories Love Music has provided caregivers with the creative tools to manage the challenging behaviors of those they care for, as well as attend to their own stress management and self-care. Stories Love Music has empathy for the caregiver and created The Joy of Creative Engagement program using the interdisciplinary field of neuroarts to care for the caregivers.
Through donations and grants to Stories Love Music, the caregivers receive a free program that focuses on: How to treat their burnout and stress, How to apply creative tools to their caregiving day. The program blends music and story telling, sparking the imagination and bringing us more fully into the present moment.
This multimedia session will introduce the concepts of Stories Love Music and our mission with The Joy of Creative Engagement for Caregivers program. An interactive music concert will be integrated into this session.
I've been a musician and lover of music most of my life. Not all music. I never developed a taste for opera, for example. Nor do I care much for country music. I can enjoy classical music, especially that of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Vivaldi. I also like jazz and jazz-fusion, have an appreciation for its complexity and free-form improvisation, but, frankly, don't listen to either much. Unlike my parents, who came of age in the 1940s with the brassy music of big bands led by musicians like Glen Miller and Tommy Dorsey, and crooners like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, I grew up hearing, loving and playing pop and rock music. Chuck Berry. Motown. Beach Boys. Beatles. Rolling Stones, Kinks, the Who and the entire amazing musical revolution known affectiionately as the "British invasion." I was twelve and already taking drum lessons in 1963 when the Beatles arrived in America and made their debut television appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Like most impressionable American adolescents, I was hooked. And I'm still hooked. Today, as both an amateur musician and professional psychologist, I pose the following questions: What is it about music that makes it such a popular art form? Why do we humans love it so? And why did Freud despise it?
Fascinatingly, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general, disliked most music with a passion. With the exception of certain bland operas, he had practically no appreciation of music as an art form. Indeed, he avoided almost all music like the plague. One might even speculate that Freud suffered from a significant fear of music, a "music phobia." Here is how Herr Doktor Freud (1914) himself explained his strong resistance to music:
Quite a confession. Why would someone with such a penetrating appreciation and comprehension of painting, architecture, sculpture, literature, poetry and other traditional art forms reject music so totally? One possible reason is that Freud, who is known to have suffered from various neurotic symptoms including obsessions, compulsivity, death anxiety, migraines and psychogenic fainting spells, may have also manifested melophobia. Fear of music. (Some even speculate that Freud suffered from an extremely rare form of seizure disorder known as musicogenic epilepsy. In such cases, music, either while played or heard, triggers an underlying neurological dysfunction, resulting in mild to severe seizures, and hence, an understandably powerful fear and avoidance of certain types of music.) As with other specific phobias (e.g., fear of snakes, spiders, flying, heights, storms, elevators, etc.), melophobia involves anxiety reactions to some specific stimulus. In Freud's case, this auditory triggering stimulus seems to have been music of almost any sort. When exposed to music while out on the town in Vienna or Munich, his automatic response was reportedly to immediately place his hands over his ears to block out the sound. What could have caused such a negative reaction? Was Freud's hearing, so finely tuned by decades of psychoanalytic listening, acutely hypersensitive? Or could his problem have been more deeply rooted?
One possible explanation for melophobia is that at some time music--either all music or some specific piece or genre of music--was psychologically linked and negatively associated with a traumatic event or period in the person's past. A Freudian interpretation almost certainly would conclude that the music stimulated some repressed or repudiated unconscious complex, memory or emotional content, typically sexual in nature, which the person feels compelled to avoid becoming conscious of at all costs. (Freud later, in his 60s, would have included repressed aggressive impulses as well.) But let's take that one step further: What if someone's dislike and avoidance or even hatred of music is rooted in a fundamental fear of the unconscious itself? Of the "irrational"? A primal dread of what Rollo May (1969) called the "daimonic"? Or of what Jungians refer to as the "anima" or "feminine"?
For example, I once treated a very angry yet chronically repressed and, therefore, depressed patient who, despite his strong interests in literature, theater and film, could not read, attend or view works of any emotional depth and intensity. He would consciously avoid placing himself in such situations. And, when he did, he would dissociate from his feelings, numbing and preventing him from relating to the material more than merely superficially. My patient felt paralyzed with anxiety by the very activities and artistic endeavors that most stimulated him intellectually and emotionally, calling forth his fiercest passions and providing some sense of meaning and purpose. He feared that if he were to permit his self-imposed defensive walls to be breached by the sublime beauty and power of art, film, music and literature, he might lose all control of himself, go berserk, become mad, psychotic, be overwhelmed or destructively possessed by the daimonic. So he carefully steered clear of such circumstances, concealing his artistic sensibilities behind a crude persona, impoverishing his quality of life and starving his soul. When we chronically deny the daimonic in ourselves, we must preclude activities, relationships or experiences that threaten to waken it from its unconscious slumber. (For more on the concept of the "daimonic," and its connection to creativity, see my book Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic.)
Fear of the feminine is yet another way of conceptualizing Freud's hatred of music. Music is all about feeling, emotion, passion, the irrational, the heart, the soul, and is closely associated with the "feminine" mode of being and, in men, what C.G. Jung called the anima. Despite his profound genius, Freud's denigrating antipathy toward the feminine and its embodiment, women, is well known, as seen, for instance, in his controversial concepts of "hysteria" (wandering uterus) and "penis envy." He devalued the feminine in his psychology as in himself, and overvalued the more "masculine" qualities of thinking, reasoning, logic, analysis, intellectualism and scientific reductionism. Did Freud fear his own "feminine side"? His sensitive, "hysterical" inner woman? Did he avoid dealing with his anima in part by excluding music from his world? (Freud allegedly did not allow music to be played at home, including by his children.) Or, to put it another way, was Freud unconsciously afraid of his own feelings? Powerful feelings that would involuntarily and irrationally be stirred up in him by music? Feelings he could not dissect analytically or comprehend rationally? Feelings he strove compulsively to keep under control at all costs? And did the chronic repression of his anima, his divorced inner woman, his dissociated emotional, irrational side, underly Freud's own hysterical or psychogenic symptoms?
According to Freud biographer Peter Gay (1988), "Freud's life...was a struggle for self-discipline, for control over his speculative impulses and his rage--rage at his enemies and, even harder to manage, at those among his adherents he found wanting or disloyal [emphasis mine]." It is precisely this obsessive-compulsive defensiveness against the daimonic, particularly his own anger, resentment or rage, that may have produced Freud's dread of music and its uncontrollable and evocative effects on the human psyche. And soul. Freud possessed a towering intellect and profound insight into the human mind. But, like all of us, he struggled with his own personal demons. His complexes. Music has the power not only to sedate but to summon our demons. Especially long-suppressed emotions, memories and associations. It has been said (by playwright William Congreve) that "music has charms to soothe the savage breast." (Sometimes this is misattributed to William Shakespeare and commonly misquoted as "music soothes the savage beast.")
There is much truth to this. Music, like movies or a good book, temporarily takes us far away from our ordinary troubles and tribulations, transporting us to a different time or another world. It can provide the solace of companionship for the lonely, lessen our sense of existential isolation and convey compassion to the suffering soul. The "blues" is but one example of how listening to music created out of someone else's suffering--unrequited love, loss, trouble, bad luck--helps make us feel less alienated and alone in our problerms. Misery, as the saying goes, loves company. When we hear such tragic tales and the sorrow they engender, whether in folk,country, R&B, standards, rap or rock music, we relate to the performer and feel ourselves to be part of the herd, tribe, the collective, the archetypal, the universal, the human family. For who among us has not felt the angst and confusion of adolescence, the sting of love lost or unreciprocated at some time? So listening to such sounds soothes our souls. When we're feeling sad or down, discouraged and disheartened, music can raise our spirits, be uplifting, inspirational and energizing. Music makes us want to dance, in a joyous, spontaneous expression of the primal life force. It can gently lull us to sleep (lullaby). Or it can make us want to cry or laugh. And, sometimes, music makes us feel angry. When, for example, Bob Dylan wrote, played and sang protest songs like "Masters of War" and " A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," we felt his personal anger and that he was expressing or channelling our own collective rage. This is what differentiates true art from self-indulgent pretension; real music from cacophony or mere commercialism. The best music comes from and most purely expresses personal experiences, but arises and speaks also to what Jung called the "collective unconscious." It taps directly into our psyche at the deepest possible level and addresses archetypal and existential concerns about the human condition, concerns and experiences we all share. And it connects us intimately to each other.
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