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‘Music is a metaphor on steroids’ is just one of the many incisive sentences from this new book on music and psychology that convey the energetic liveliness of its Canadian author's life-long involvement with these domains as a musician (from pop to jazz), composer, song-writer, ethnomusicologist, music therapist and analytical psychologist.
The symbolic function of music and its suitability to represent psychic states is a fairly new area of interest for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. I have previously argued that instrumental music symbolizes unconscious processes in an idiosyncratic way (Giaccardi, 2015). However, not many voices have yet explored this topic in all its complexity. Thus, this well researched and authoritative book represents a welcome and accomplished contribution to further the reflection on the relation between music and psyche, particularly with regard to the use of music in therapy.
Music as auditory mirror, Kroeker argues, can help represent and convey aspects of the patients' internal world otherwise hardly accessible, that is, their ‘deaf spots’ (p. 3). The author regards the psyche as inherently musical and argues that emotional, somatic, cognitive and relational levels of human experience may find suitable symbolic representations through musical properties like interchange of tension and release, dissonance and consonance, sound and silence, accelerando and ritardando, and so forth. Music is a sonorous image and, as such, can be used to mirror and help shape internal states through a process of ‘auditization’ (p. 4) — an aural declination of the process of mentalization. Also, he draws on the Jungian tradition