Music is everywhere in our lives, both waking and sleeping, inside and out, but much of our musical ecosystem remains unheard in a state of non-representation.  Drawing on Jungian, post-Jungian, and contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives, this presentation will explore the place of the acoustic imaginal within our psychic ecology and our current fractured world of splitting and polarization. 

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. Like a sound engineer 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. 

Suggested text: Jungian Music Psychotherapy: When Psyche Sings, Routledge, 2019 (Link to book on Amazon: https://a.co/d/7cIrMC7)

Joel Kroeker, RCC-ACS, MMT, is a Zurich-trained Jungian psychoanalyst and a music-centered psychotherapist based in Victoria, Canada, as well as an award-winning international recording artist.