Animartists internationalEditor: Katerina Gkikopoulou
Psychologist
Translator: Katerina Fragkopoulou
When I was studying various therapeutic methods, I asked my professor about music therapy. He told me that music therapy doesn’t essentially exist in the sense that nobody can tell today that we heal only by listening to music. I don’t know if this opinion finds everyone agreed. However, he continued his way of thinking by assuming that various researches today can prove a few things about what music may offer to a mental ill patient. Our focus is not to understand the consequences that listening of music has to a patient, but whether it can keep away the “voices”, or otherwise, the psychotic reality.
The thing that we have to learn first is which part (of our body) is responsible for the voice -the voice and not only the speech- from the earliest already stages of development. For Freud, les objets pulsionnels (the instinctual objects) are the chest, the anus and the phallus. However, Lacan (1952) came to add two more in the list, the gaze and the voice.
The voice is studied by Lacan (1952) in the context of the study of psychoses and according to him it has an important dynamic that leads to the fulfillment of a person. Provided that we talk, we produce voice; it prerequisites immediately the existence of the Other who is ready to listen to us and to answer back. Therefore, already from the childhood, the subject waits for an answer to this voice, the primitive answer from the mother. During the development of the child, it’s important that the child develops its own voice, without being overwhelmed from the Other’s voice; it’s mother’s. Maybe it’s not so easy, of course. “From the voice that is heard, nothing can slip through us. We can’t just simply close our ears.” (Vives 2014).
According to Freud, the infant comes to the world mutilated from its own self, as a consequence of the removal; of the infelicitous state that blocks the conservation of its homeostatic balance. In this way, crying emerges; the first cry of the baby. But of course, we hypothesize that this crying is not a call for the Other, the mother, but an attempt to express the sadness that the baby feels out of the secure environment it had been growing into for nine months.
However, each of us understands music in a different way. Therapeutic mean or not let’s discover it! Beyond every theory, psychoanalytic or other, there comes the need for help and compassion to whomever has a need for any kind of therapy. It’s really beautiful to see some people give such a possibility a good try..!
References
Lacan, J. (1952). Seminaire 23. Paris: Le Seuil.
Vives, J. (2014). Médiations thérapeutiques par l’art. Paris: ERES.