The Recovery of Mytho-ecological Perception by Joel Kroeker

NOTE: This article was originally in Quadrant (Spring 2023) and is printed here with permission from Quadrant.

According to Lurianic Kabbalah the creation of everything we know, perceive or experience, our entire universe, occurred when the immeasurable undivided totality without beginning or end (Ein Sof) contracted (tzimtzum) their infinite light (Ohr Ein Sof) to make a central conceptual space, within which all that is finite, including us, can exist. But instead of then passively stepping back from creation, the divine force of life, "which brings all creatures into existence must constantly be present within them in order to recreate and revivify them on an ongoing basis." In fact, "were this life-force to forsake any created being for even one brief moment, it would revert to a state of utter nothingness, as before the creation of the universe (Shaar Hayichud Vehaemunah - Ch.2)."

Musical perception behaves this way too since the ephemerality of acoustic phenomena require continual co-creation for its perceived existence to continue. Sound ecologist, Hildegard Westerkamp, suggests that to fully enter the confrontation presented by the natural soundscape that always surrounds us is to participate in the animating liminal space between perceiver and its object of perception (personal communication, Dec 10, 2022). We enter the acoustic ecology itself, because the soundscape offers a place for us to exist this way, and are a part of it through our non-defensive perception beyond egoic agenda. To respond to this ever-present sonic invitation without fleeing from it or defending against it is to enter as a component element of its creative ecosystemic capacity. If we listen this way, we wake up to our interdependent reality. Or, put another way, if we abstain from defensively un-listening, we begin to truly hear.

An ecosystem can be perceived as something fragile that we live within, which we must vigilantly maintain. But our inner/outer ecological circumstance can also be imagined and experienced as an archetypal image of active creative totality, which makes a space for us, conceives us, gestates us, births us, feeds us, imbues our life force and actively maintains a lacuna for our existence in some central place within itself without obliterating or smothering us out.

The multivalent reality of this eco-psycho-spiritual relationship between creator and created includes both fragility and resilience on all sides, including within the perceiver and the perceptual act itself. The mytho-ecological perception required to comprehend this must be deep and large enough even to include the truth of its opposite. To stay in meaningful contact with this depth and breadth of reality requires a specific use of self/mind. I refer to this necessary state as mytho-ecological perception because, through the appropriate collective dreaming of reality and personal narrative, we are brought back into accord with nature itself. Returned to our place within it through remembering a more realistic appraisal of the interdependent web connecting all organisms and that which we rely upon for existence and sustenance. To perceive this way is a creative act that is also an act of being created. We are not separate from that which is coming into form but are somehow creating a space (tzimtzum) for this transcendence/immanence to occur.

Just as an ecosystem can slip out of mind and slide past the holding place of the imaginal realm into nowhere/nothing/forgotten/never-did-exist, our deep, rich mytho-ecological thinking can seem to evaporate. Patients can arrive this way into consulting rooms, un-imagined, forgotten ecologies where clusters of psychic organisms no longer relate symbiotically to each other or their internal/external surroundings. At times we can be tortured by a dominating harsh superego akin to the punishment of Prometheus whose liver is eternally devoured and regenerated as the cost of consciousness (fire). Or we find ourselves suffering the lack of an alpha function (Bion, 1962a), where nothing is digestible, only raw angular beta shards like eating glass.

Within the necessary but unbearable confrontations that occur in psychotherapy, it can be helpful to borrow from the contributions of the similarly discombobulating field of apophatic theology, which relies on the via negativa instead of direct egoic knowing. To listen for what is there by inhabiting the longing for what is absent. Like listening for the notes that are not played in a piece of music, which requires holding imaginal pitches in some internal place that are not externally actualized.

Patients sometimes enter the initial consultation yearning for an antidote for their unacceptable symptoms, because these manifestations compete too successfully with the longed-for unitive reality. An almost perceptible voice implores for an idealized alliance to tip the scales back in good favour such that one can finally enter the fantasy of symptom-free nature. Nature itself does not require this alliance configuration because the nasty oppositional content still maintains a place within the whole. Nature, in its essence, does not need to split off from its ecosystemic reality in order to maintain identity or existence. Nature co-exists with its shadow. The poet, David Whyte, suggests that we humans are the only creatures who can perceive ourselves to be something other than what we actually are (Whyte, 2016). In this way, perhaps we are the shadow of nature, which is always and only what it actually is. Mytho-ecological perception is the result of (and the prompt toward) entering back into accordance with our essential nature. To remain in the liminal space between perceiver and perceived instead of compulsively tipping toward one side or the other.

Ecosystemic perception requires some acknowledgement of wholistic reality, otherwise our cosmology becomes crushed and flattened into status quo antagonistic reasoning. There must be a place for suffering, woundedness and even symptoms if we are to transcend the regressive splitting defense that kills life force in potentia. To create a space (tzimtzum) for holding in mind that which has been unbearable to imagine, including the imaginal patient in potential, is the work of analytical psychology. To co-compose, re-discover, embody, constitute and re-constitute toward a whole, first an imagined whole, from the essential elements present.

But where does this holding of the imaginal Other occur? Caterpillars have chrysalids within which to morph, but where or what is the containing vessel for the imaginal patient to exist before existing. Does the co-created analytic field contract (tzimtzum) itself to offer a space of conception where the analytic dyad can surrender to becoming? Is this analytic field an ecological system?

The musical field (Kroeker, 2019) is a place like this, as it refers to a realm of affect-laden audition where animated relationships between sounds and musical qualities become an intricately sensitized web of intersubjectivity within which we are swimming and symbiotically connected in a musical ecosystem (p.87). Western traditional composers of music, for example, hold the not-yet-actualized musical-opus-in-creation as a guiding teleology in a place that is difficult to describe. At some point they know (or decide) when that imaginal work has been born into the external world and they cut the umbilical cord. But as they slump back in exhaustion from their labour, rather than receiving the little one onto their body for its first feeding, they hand the baby to the world. Instant empty nest. They contract their attachment needs for this newly born musical organism to have a life of its own out in the world.

Musical improvisors also engage with the musical field as an ecosystemic life force. They enter an activated zone of spontaneous invention, where any dominating fixation or rigidity in the psychic operating system must be suppressed to create a space (tzimtzum) for generativity. Maintaining this zone of activation without resolving, foreclosing or emptying out the tension loads up the libido within the musical field, allowing us to remain inside the processing of the symbiotic musical ecosystem (Kroeker, 2019, p.83).

We are referring to an auditory imaginal environment akin to Corbin's (1964) mundus imaginalis. A world of image and symbol which is "as ontologically real as the world of the senses and the world of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of perception belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic value, as fully real as the faculties of sensory perception or intellectual intuition." But this refers to a "land of nowhere (Na-kojd-Abad)...a place outside of place (Corbin, 1964, p.3)" that makes it possible for the experience of a place to exist and even inhabit.

The ecological musical field behaves like a quantum field, since tremendously dissonant and oppositional musical elements co-exist within the same proximal zone without cancelling each other out. The ego complex defensively avoids adaptation demands that require tolerating this level of ambiguous and oppositional immanence in its preferred perceptual field. But within music this tension is tolerable. Perhaps this is why Jung suggested, late in his life, that "music should be an essential part of every analysis (Tilly, 1977)."

In a music-oriented analytic moment this field of habitation can sometimes empty out until it has only a single occupant, the analyst (or patient), or worse, no inhabitants at all, a ghost town. In the analytic dyad's confrontation with unbearable content the experience of non-consensual terrorization of the inhabitants of consciousness, sometimes driven by the destructive impulse, can feel like losing touch with creative potential itself. But if creation and destruction are truly two sides of the same coin, as most mythic traditions suggest, the residents of exclusionary consciousness are caught in a defensively reductive partial perception, outside of wholistic ecosystemic thinking. The larger reality beyond ego-consciousness-only becomes unperceived and unimaginable resulting in a degraded, reductive flatland. David Whyte [ibid] describes a moment like this where he suddenly realized that his hardcore scientific language of marine zoology was not specific enough to describe what needed to be perceived and expressed. He needed a more precise language than science, which he was relieved to find in the close cousin of music: poetry.

The musical field has much to contribute even to the frightened un-perception, where mytho-ecological thinking is lost, since the music we perceive relies on simply foregrounding some frequencies while all others shift to the imperceptible background of nowhere. Perception itself is a creative act (Kroeker, 2019) and the meaning-making processes of our auditory digestive system are continuously directing the curated soundscape of our sonic awareness. Within a music-oriented analytic moment, while working psychoanalytically through musical processes (ex. listening, composing, improvising, thinking musically), we often find ourselves inside the ecosystem of the musical field itself. Here the analytic dyad is confronted with the relationship between the moment of creation and our capacity for mytho-ecological reflexivity. During the sublime act of creation, one surrenders to the small but active position of observer/scribe intoxicated with gratitude at the almost orgasmic edge of holy terror. At this place beyond place, elements of the greater whole (e.g. holons) (Koestler, 1967) can get buried underneath our striving to keep up with the flow of transcription and tabulation of ideas bursting into emergence. Interdependent reality takes a backseat to the foreground task at hand of actively forging what feels like new ground toward self-expansion.

Within the music and artistry of the therapeutic relational interaction this foreground/background curation can happen too. The musical realm as containing temenos acts as an objective psyche within which our projective relationship occurs. Here the act of creation is relational. We are in the womb of co-creation together and the musical container is our mother. We must trust her enough to eat of her and even to fall asleep inside of her to enter the necessary unconscious thinking (Bion, 1962a) that is dreaming and, in this case, musicking (Small, 1998). To distrust her is to starve ourselves by feasting on paranoid-schizoid (Klein, 1946) split off content while dissociating from the available nutrition all around us. To stay receptive and creatively alive in the moving space she keeps creating for us is to remain actively in the liminal threshold between perceiver and perceived. To remember her in vivo initiates a sustainable reciprocity where gratitude compensates other saturating drives vying for gratification. Suddenly this is not merely conscious mother giving everything to unconscious needy baby, but rather two Others in actual relational contact. This is a two-person musical exchange with all of its relational implications.

The ego complex, in its wounded, reductive or defensive aspect, tends to overvalue perceptible bits of consciousness while hygienically maintaining obliviousness to their emergent-yet-still-unconscious correlates. The uneven psychic field this creates brings to mind baryonic asymmetry between matter and anti-matter, which mysteriously set our universe on a course toward great imbalance between ordinary matter and antimatter just moments after the initial big bang. When matter (baryons) and antimatter (antibaryons) meet, there is the potential for tremendously efficient energy generation (Liddle, 2015) at a rate approaching one hundred percent. Artists willingly enter this realm of baryosynthesis in the attempt to create cultural artifacts from a field of imbalance whose component parts are not fully perceptible. The analytic dyad stumbles into it as well within the sometimes dim light of the analytic enterprise. Like Parsifal finding himself bewildered in the Grail Castle, dumbfounded and far too early, the analyst too fails to ask the appropriate question and out we go, kicked out of the generative creative place of life, back onto the literalizing thin, concrete realm of over-exposure to the perception of symptoms as the enemy.

The analytic ecosystem, continually re-remembered and re-constituted, is the place of the mind's eye and the mind's ear, where that which cannot yet be seen or represented, can indeed be heard. "Let there be light (sound)"...yes, but where? In some creation stories, the Light was created four "days" before the creation of the sun, moon and stars. In the beginning there was the Word (the Sound). Yes, analytically and musically this feels right. Before any way of thinking about it, replicating it, or expressing it, the pre-representational primordial sound is inherently present. The interdependent music of this analytic moment can feel like a return home, after a prodigal journey. What a relief when this relational moment, with its intricate web of links between us, welcomes us home instead of rejecting us, as our doubt can sometimes fear.

To hear a glimmer of what only existed as absent, unformed proto-representation, requires a sophisticated and well-maintained acoustic system of attunement. A sonic ecosystemic perceptual capacity. To perceive a mental representation from acoustic content requires changes of state, from physical vibration to electrical impulses in the physical inner ear and finally to a mentalized conscious image. This alchemical series of operations requires a protected and adaptable location that can survive the multivalent demands at each phase of the creative act of auditory perception. The listener must hold the integrity of this intimate relational vessel without allowing their own attention to get scattered or fragmented beyond containment. The links within this perceptual web must be maintained for something of value to develop into meaning.

This meaning-making endeavour can get defensively aborted by distraction, apathy, dis-interest or by being aggressively displaced by something that presents itself as more concrete. The task here is to hold a cluster of seemingly irrelevant aspects (ex. a feeling + a thought + a resistant urge) in a potential constellation without emptying out the tension through over-exertion or premature foreclosure. By holding the tension, even in the face of tremendous oppositional resistance, some consilience and jumping together into actualization and development can occur within this imaginal metamorphic vessel.

A parent also holds their fully developed imaginal child in this heart-mind place beyond place, throughout the sometimes-grueling resistance (on both sides) of the working out of early attachment bonding and development. This can require a love so big that it must even include hate. The setting (e.g. ecosystem) for this primordial drama is a resilient-enough-to-survive, reliable, good enough, relational body within which this shared human odyssey of becoming takes place. This place of becoming, like all physical and imaginal home places, requires upkeep, relational sustenance and continual care.

The term 'ecology' consists of the Greek words "oikos" (home) and "logos" (word, reason, to learn about), bringing to mind symbols of centrality, return, source, belonging, birthplace and resolution. The complex field known as Ecomusicology focuses in on the relationship between music and culture within the context of ecology and the natural environment. As a music-centred psychotherapist, who regularly relies on the capacity of musical symbols and their archetypal content to reveal psychological principles of nature, the phenomenon of a tonal centre comes to mind as a central metaphor regarding our analytic musical ecosystem (Kroeker, 2019).

Within a western tonal musical context, the tonal centre is continually returned to as the place of stable resolution. This central home point is prioritized within the musical field just as it is within the conscious realm of the ego complex, which is continually seeking the experience of reliably secure identity markers. The composer ecologically maintains this acoustic ecosystem offering the tonal centre over and over in various ways through setting up tension (e.g. leaving the home point) and then resolving that tension (e.g. returning to the home point). The composer preserves and supports the initially fragile sonic world they are attempting to create by staying true to their own original musical rules and boundaries, which are set up through musical statements and repetition.

Jazz improvisors also preserve and play with the listener's perceptual integrity regarding the tonal centre, but they do it spontaneously in real time. The musical field also adapts in vivo such that when something new enters, the musical field changes to accommodate for this fresh element. "Similar to the experience in a jazz band when the soloist plays a note outside of the current key and the rhythm section alters their own mental image of the tonal structure to accommodate for the soloist’s innovation. The band’s accompaniment forms a highly sensitized zone that empathetically warps instantly to accommodate and respond to any modification or emergence of new content (Kroeker, 2019, p.87)."

The ego complex also morphs and warps in response to new data, but often it initiates distorted protective and even defensive moves to conserve what it perceives to be tenuous and vulnerable. From the perspective of ego, the tonal centre is itself. The composer and ego structure both can be seen as agents of conservation/preservation for fledgling delicate proto-ecosystems as they emerge from their indigestible beta state (Bion, 1962b) into their processable alpha state. The ego complex, however, is more likely to base its defensive structure on mis-perceptions driven by accumulated experiential moments of overwhelm. The stakes are lower in the composer's world since their musical perceptual mechanism is not the underlying basis of their entire psychology, as is the case with ego as the center of consciousness.

But where is this tonal centre in the moments when it is not being literally sounded or perceived? The composer curates and organizes raw bits of sound for the listener to ingest through their own auditory digestive system (Kroeker, 2019), loading up the echoic memory which gives neurological consciousness a chance to make meaning (ex. emotion, memory, narrative, pleasure, longing/desire, somatization, aesthetic response) from sonic stimulus. Within this process the listener of western tonal music, holds the tonal centre in their echoic memory banks as a reference point throughout the musical journey. Like a rubber band that increases tension the further it is stretched, or attachment bonds that increase longing for the other the further and longer one is away, the listener yearns for the resolution that comes with a return to the tonal home point. This requires them to continually re-constitute its existence, even beyond mere memory, in some mundus imaginalis (Corbin, ibid), when the tonal centre is not literally present.

Musical ornamentation such as the appoggiatura (Italian for "to lean upon") increase this tension by displacing the principal pitch with a note slightly above or below the expected (or longed for) central note of resolution before eventually resolving to the yearned for object (the tonal centre). Similar to delayed gratification of drives (ex. sexual, sensual, relational, psychological) the proverbial carrot is held tantalizingly close, just above arms reach and around a corner, but almost in view. The echoic memory holds the tonal centre by remembering it, but also listens around the corner through imaginal memory which generates an envisaged tonal centre in absentia. Like an EMDR therapist who guides the patient toward the emotional hot spot of memory intensity, the composer or improvisor entices the libidinal imaginal ecosystem of the listener to yearn for a sonic object that is then delivered, hinted at or withheld, like a sexual flirtation. By playing with drive gratification in this way, the listener is taken into a psychic space where oikos (home) and logos (primordial reason) are the guiding principles.

The sonic representation of stability (e.g. the tonic note) must find a place to reliably inhabit the mind and memory of the listener, as a holding place for an object with perceived permanence, so that it maintains its potency when it returns in literal form. Within the context of western tonal music, without some version of this perceptual and structural apparatus, music becomes merely disparate physical triggers with no narrative, no meaning and no links between them. Beyond tonal musical systems there are a wide variety of non-tonal, pseudo-tonal and atonal systems including microtonality, modal music, noise music, timbral systems, geometrical organizations of sound, and even pieces of music that include no pre-determined sounds at all (ex. Cage's 4' 32"). But all of these musical approaches rely on some organization of sound at least within the containment of time, which focuses the listener's perception on potential hierarchies and links within this presenting sonic system. After all, "music is anything one listens to when one is intending to listen to music (Berio, 1985)," and when one is intending to listen to music, they tend to listen musically.

Within the time-bound analytic hour the links that keep the system intact can come under attack. This can occur at the intrapsychic level where the underlying perceptual-structural apparatus itself begins to be undermined through doubt or even paranoia, or at the relational level where the interpersonal transferential field gets saturated with beta screen content (Bion, 1962a), projective discharge or is withdrawn from entirely. Part of the strange job profile of the analyst is to maintain the existence of this intricate psycho-auditory faculty, which hears what cannot yet be spoken, seen or perceived in any other way. To hold in mind an emergent capacity that has not yet been actualized, or is currently hiding somewhere behind a defensive filter. To lose this capacity for sonically and relationally co-digesting transcendence into immanence is to slip out of structural existence into the alienation of profound amusia, where one loses the ability to discriminate between various sounds or to make meaning of them. Here the music of the spheres becomes a mere un-link-able void. A meaningless vacuum of un-relational deep space without oikos, logos or tonal centre.

We could imagine that this disturbing image of unredeemable voidness might describe the experience of the post-caterpillar (pre-butterfly) in the gooey nigredo stage of metamorphosis. Through the magic of biological timing, after bulking up on nutrients, the imaginal discs of what used to be a caterpillar start to develop. As the tiny imaginal cells begin waking up, they bond together into strings and clusters. The caterpillar's immune system perceives them as enemies and tries to defensively suppress this transformational development ala Kalsched's (2013) protector-persecutor dynamic. But eventually the teleology toward becoming wins out and these strings begin to guide and direct the development toward the new version of itself.

This same dramatic conflict gets staged in the world of parent-child, composer-listener, intrapsychically and also within the consulting room. The good enough parent manages to contract their own egoic and narcissistic needs to make a space for the emergent other to exist more and more while feeding them manageable adaptation demands and optimal challenges. Likewise, composers and improvisors offer sonic food in bite-sized bits to the listener's auditory digestive (meaning-making) system (Kroeker, 2019, p.66), without overwhelming the other with too much change too quickly. Intrapsychically, the good enough ego-self dyad offers nutritious imaginal content at a pace and level of intensity that activates and enlivens without saturating or annihilating their psycho-relational structure. The analytic dyad similarly aims for optimal, rather than maximal, relational stimulation and continues to explicitly work toward relational repair when the link comes under attack.

These aspirational images of relational good-enough-ness are the non-surviving object (Abrams, 2021), the collateral damage, when mytho-ecological interdependent thinking slips away into the place that is no place. One of the great losses that occurs when one is in the grips of a complex, experiencing overwhelm, or dominated by anxiety is this loss of ecosystemic perception and its contribution toward linkable continuity of self/other. In these thin urgent places, it is as if all links become un-tetherable, allowing anxious urgency to operate on us in a perspectival vacuum, spinning endless ruminations with little gravity or traction. The inherent myriad of variables that led up to this current circumstance slip out of mind as, instead, a handful of selected facts dominate consciousness. In this reductive version of ourself, we forget that nothing happens in a vacuum. The links between interdependent causes and conditions, moments in time, are dis-associated and uncoupled resulting in scattered fragments of perception as isolated un-relatable bits.

Nature shows us that this fragmentary perception is not how reality works. A cold current in the ocean is not an isolated event, but occurs only as a result of other variables both near and very far, recent and from the distant past, and it has an inevitable impact on neighbouring and distant systems. Thich Nhat Hahn illustrates this reality when he suggests that, "a cloud never dies...never passes from being into non-being" but simply continues to exist in different forms such as snow, hail or rain, suggesting boldly that this is also true for everything, including the human life cycle.

We are in a collective circumstance where we find ourselves alienated from the role of nature regarding the means of cultural production. By tracking a musical experience back to its source we can start to explore and even repair this disconnection from our ultimate reliance on natural ecosystems. Musical experience requires some form of perceptual mechanism (e.g. an ear) which takes us right back to our formation in the womb, but we could also track the creative trajectory of the sound itself. Something must vibrate to create a pressure wave that in turn offers a sonic experience. Each instrument, no matter how many steps removed it is from a naturally occurring entity, essentially relies on nature beyond any human intervention for its component parts and is thus a product of life itself. From this perspective, we could say that musical experience consists of nature listening to nature playing nature.

The recovery of mytho-ecological thinking awakens us to interdependent links between seemingly disparate elements. This requires perceiving connections even between various domains and levels, such as emotional/psychological/somatic, intrapsychic/interpersonal/transpersonal or conscious/unconscious realms of experience. This multi-sensorial location is a potent field of creativity, as a psychic space within which previously unrepresented void states can begin to find representation (Kroeker, 2019, p.4). When we find ourselves in the right music at the right time we enter into a deep, rich musical thinking (Kroeker, 2019, p. 26), where various domains become simultaneously accessible within our symbolic attitude. Alternatively, when we are ejected out of ecosystemic perception our perceptual mechanism is drastically reduced and our resultant experience withers into dry, thin, criticality. For a single timbre to hold meaning within a piece of music an intricate web of perceptual continuity is required. To lose connection to the reality of this web is to become lost, alienated, isolated in the illusion of singularity. Hyper-focused on one at the cost of all else. This is the world of the complex. We could imagine that this is how a complex hears music. As one single un-related, alienated pitch after the next, with no context or way of linking to the whole.

From this perspective, perceiving in this detached, truncating, amputational manner could be seen as a perceptual attack on linking (Bion, 2013), where a "psychotic part of the personality" performs a destructive attack on anything which is perceived to have "the function of linking one object to another." To amputate oneself, like this, from our ecosystemic reality is to attack this web of links and interdependent connections. Klein (1946) might refer to this as a sadistic (splitting) attack on the ecosystemic reality as the breast.

On an interpersonal level, this can occur in session when the patient or therapist suddenly experiences the other (or the context) as unbearable, leading them to attempt a defensive exit through dissociation, projective content, denial or self-isolationist maneuvers. Intrapsychically this can happen when the superego suddenly attacks an internal target, zeroing in on a specific imperfection with uncharacteristic perseverance and intensity. This can also happen in a confrontation with the collective, such as when we read the daily news on climate change science and suddenly find ourselves chilled by apathy and boredom, as if we somehow exist outside of this urgent earth-sized systemic crisis.

These attacks on linking take us out of harmony with reality and into a small delusional psychic space that must immediately be maintained and defensively justified. Similar to the endless maintenance labour of the ego complex, who must continuously prove its existence against all odds, the defensive urge must keep chopping away at the newly emerging organic natural roots of connection that keep appearing, like springtime, as an element of nature itself. Continuous and incessant efforts toward destruction are needed to thwart this inherently natural life-oriented teleology. Even while we are busy formulating a self-isolating perception the omnipresent ecosystemic reality is making endless bids for connection. Like sunflowers growing toward the sun, wild geese heading south and a caterpillar's imaginal cells collecting in clusters toward the new flying organism, actively seeking connection is the default mode of human nature.

As a psychoanalytic community, if we stay with this image of tzimtzum, the generous contraction of the Godhead as a generative intervention that makes space for our birth and existence, perhaps the question becomes: how might we set up and maintain causes and conditions within the analytic listening relationship that make space for creation which transcends the purview of threshold guardians such as complexes, stultified ego attitudes, defensive habits of mind and ancestral epigenetic patterning based on histories of self-limiting trauma. The way we listen to all that surrounds and indwells within us can either dissociate us from or bring us back into relationship with our mytho-ecological reality. Our sonic cosmology, which informs our conception of what sound is and can be, matters.

Kroeker, Joel. (2023). "Musical ecosystems and the recovery of mytho-ecological perception within the analytic field" in Quadrant (Journal of the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology). Vol. LII, No.1. Spring 2023. pp.51-66.

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