Music is everywhere in our lives, both waking and sleeping, inside and out. It is a dynamic, living domain that is an expression of nature itself, which is capable of reflecting back our own phases of growth and development in a myriad of ways. The objective psyche is continuously offering communication through sound-based symbols, but like an unopened letter or a lone tree falling in the forest, most of this communication goes unheard and remains in a state of non-representation. The perception of sound triggers psychic contents and music mediates between our internal and external experience of consciousness through its affective impact on our symbolic imagination.
Drawing on Jungian, post-Jungian and contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives, this four-week course will explore the place of the acoustic imaginal within our psychic ecology and our current fractured world of splitting and polarization. Like a sound engineer, who can stop Time toward differentiation and integration, we will deeply listen together to the soundscape metabolization process of our auditory digestive system toward the fundamental psychoanalytic goal of hearing what cannot yet be seen.
By distilling music into its basic archetypal elements, an approach is illustrated for working with musical symbols within analysis, referred to as Archetypal Music Psychotherapy. Through locating the role that acoustic images, both imaginal and material, play in our affective and archetypal engagement with our world, we will explore the contribution that musical processes offer to the wholeness and teleology of the individuation process intrapersonally, relationally and collectively.
Course Overview
Week 1: The Six Principles of Archetypal Music Psychotherapy (AMP)
Week 2: Perception as a creative act
Week 3: How psyche communicates through sound (Musicking and Dreaming)
Week 4: The Musical Field: processing your auditory ecosystem
February 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, 2023 | 5:00 – 6:30pm UTC-7