Jungian Music Psychotherapy: When Psyche Sings - Paperback

by Joel Kroeker (Author)

Music is everywhere in our lives and all analysts are witness to musical symbols arising from their patient's psyche. However, there is a common resistance to working directly with musical content. Combining a wide range of clinical vignettes with analytic theory, Kroeker takes an in-depth look at the psychoanalytic process through the lens of musical expression and puts forward an approach to working with musical symbols within analysis, which he calls Archetypal Music Psychotherapy (AMP).

Kroeker argues that we have lost our connection to the simple, vital immediacy that musical expression offers. By distilling music into its basic archetypal elements, he illustrates how to rediscover our place in this confrontation with deep psyche and highlights the role of the enigmatic, musical psyche for guiding us through our life. Innovative and interdisciplinary, Kroeker's model for working analytically with musical symbols enables readers to harness the impact of meaningful sound, allowing them to view these experiences through the clarifying lens of depth psychology and the wider work of contemporary psychoanalytic theory.

Jungian Music Psychotherapy is a groundbreaking introduction to the ideas of Archetypal Music Psychotherapy that interweaves theory with clinical examples. It is essential reading for Jungian analysts, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, music therapists, academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, music studies, consciousness studies, and those interested in the creative arts.

Author Biography

Joel Kroeker is a Swiss-trained Jungian psychoanalyst and a music-centred psychotherapist based in Victoria, Canada. Kroeker is also an award-winning international recording artist.