Friday, September 6, 2019
The Integrative Nature of Psychology and Music Essay Example for Free
The Integrative Nature of Psychology and Music Essay Creativity, while it is recognized and valued by many, means different things to different people. Artists, musicians, and poets are considered to be creative individuals because their products are creative. Art works are valued for their novelty, beauty, uniqueness, and a host of other qualities that are considered to reflect creativity. Scientists who discover a new medicine or cure are considered creative. Young children who have created a finger painting or a poem are praised for their creativity. Often proud parents will even excuse perverse behavior traits in their offspring by saying, â€Å"he is just being ‘creative’. † Creativity is a part of everyday life as much as eating is.            However, creativity is a concept that is difficult to define with specific measures and parameters. For the purposes of this discussion, the author provides theories on creativity in terms of psychological concepts. Freud’s (1952) psychoanalytic technique seems to be the prerogatives of art. The creation of a meaning for a patient’s random acts resembles literary creation. In both psychiatric interpretation and artistic creativity meaning does not emerge fully clothed out of the raw material of incident and language. Rather, from a first experience significance is gradually inferred and elaborated by a process of free association.            What links psychoanalysis and creativity is the notion of symbolic function. Ricouer (1970) speaks of the symbolic function as meaning something other than what is said and therefore he defines a symbol as â€Å"a double meaning linguistic expression that requires an interpretation†(p. 9). An interpretation is seen as a work of understanding that aims at deciphering symbols. Psychoanalysis is first and foremost a form of interpretation, hermeneutic that arrives at an understanding of the facts of mental life by regarding both dreams and neurotic symptoms as symbols to be analyzed. Freud’s interpretation of dreams reveals the dynamics of the mental processes, the â€Å"strategies of man’s deepest desires and instincts†, and provides the paradigm for the analysis of all men’s cultural activities (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 162).            For Freud the dream symbolism is not merely one device of the dreamwork; but rather provides the dreamwork with the material for condensation, displacement and dramatization. These devices then, are all methods of disguise clothing the unconscious symbolic meaning. This universal symbolism is not limited to dreams, but is to be found in fairy-tales, myths, legends, folklore, and also underlies all art, including music.            According to Dalhaus (1978), absolute music is historically rooted in the idea of an unspeakable sublime, in the idea that â€Å"music expresses that words are not even capable of stammering†(p. 63). As a performer, composing or listening to some Western music is an experience of the sublime. As with Freud’s dream symbolism, every music symbolizes something that requires interpretation. Music, through which some of feelings of the musicians are expresses, is essentially a system of symbols. Each symbol is equivalent to an event or an object; when these symbols are put together they give us a kind of an interpretation of the world. According to Langer (1957), the world of sentiments and emotions could also be expressed in a symbolic manner. Music is, therefore, an alternative means of symbolic expression. Elements of music, just as with dreams, do not contain in themselves fixed references to things, but rather a flexible system of symbols capable of expressing various complex feelings. Through music, a composer can express ambivalent and contradictory feelings simultaneously.  With dreams which, as Freud explains, are disguised fulfillment of repressed wishes or desires of the dreamer. Since the instincts hide themselves in dreams, interpretation is necessary to reveal them. The same thing is true with music.            To illustrate this, Kivy (1991) Bach’s Prelude in C Minor from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. In referring to this piece he gives an â€Å"autumnal†interpretation, â€Å"the rustling sixteenth-notes figure, in both the right and left hands, that pervades the entire piece, represents the rustling of the dry autumn leaves in the cold October wind†(p. 206-207). What is relevant is the meaning of the listener fins departing from musical experience and musical analysis. Or at least that is what the listener thinks he does. Perhaps this is the point which Kivy describes when the listener who obtains pleasure from absolute music without needing free associations.            On the most basic level, the interpretation of art is analogous to the interpretation of dreams, for art is based on the same universal symbolism of the unconscious. The first assumption of a Freudian aesthetic then is that it is possible to analyze a work of art in order to reveal its hidden motivations in the same way as we unlock the secrets of the dream.            Weiss has extended and placed more emphasis on Freud’s analysis of the condensation of psychic energy that gives a minimum of pleasure in wit, and discovered that the spectator gets pleasure, at least in regarding a painting, from two kinds of perceptual economies, one quantitative and one qualitative. The pleasure of perceptual economy which form affords is the pleasure of overcoming repression of archaic visual modes by sharing in the artist’s childish and primitive visualization (Shapiro, 1966).            However, this pleasure does have the more noteworthy effect of contributing, in the form of a bonus, to the erotic, aggressive and cynical tendencies of the mind. That is, the technique of wit, the use of puns, strange and funny combinations and the like, seduces us to enjoy those sadistic or obscene tendencies whose expression would repel us if it were not combined with the skillful technical creation of the joke itself. In the same way, all the aesthetic pleasure we gain from the work of the imaginative writer is of the same type as this ‘forepleasure’. Therefore, the true enjoyment of art proceeds from the release of unconscious tensions in our minds.            According to Freud (1958), †¦the capacity of certain art forms to express and elicit emotions directly, that is, without reference to representational or symbolic images of drive related objects. This is expressed in the idea that art forms are isometric with the forms of feeling and mood. (p. 11) According to this view, significant content could include those art elements and forms capable of effecting instinctual discharge through the relatively immediate arousal of affective states. This seems to be particularly true of music. The question – whether is it the work or the emotions the work arouses in us that conveys the powerful meaning of music – by saying that our emotions by themselves are the result of our interaction with the music. They are the byproduct of the musical experience. Music seems to create similar emotions and furthermore a similar meaning for different people. People can all have different ways to express our subjective feelings and meanings of the music but at the same time relate to an object that has its own characteristics. Another such psychological concept is the psychology of perception. The most influential theory of perception in the first half of the twentieth century was developed by the gestalt psychologists Kohler and Koffka. In a series of experiments, they were able to demonstrate that inherent in the process of seeing is a natural tendency to bisect the visual field into two distinct areas, a significant figure and an insignificant ground. They also maintained that it is impossible to hold within a single sweep of vision figure and ground simultaneously, focusing on one automatically excludes the other.  Even when perceiving the famous Rubin profiles, a series of diagram whose meaning is ambiguous because figure and ground are equally significant, attention is forced to centre on either the figure, so that a certain diagram will appear as the outline of two vases, or on the ground, in which case the same diagram appears as two faces in profile. The apparent ambiguity in these visual counterchanges arises from the fact that either the figure or ground represents a coherent object but attention cannot perceive both meaning at the same time.            This mutually exclusive, ‘either-or’ structure of attention is found in aural phenomena as well, particularly in the perception of music in which a clear melodic line is distinguished from the harmonic matrix of chords in which it is situated. Finally, the significant figures or forms spotlighted by attention tend to possess the properties of simplicity, wholeness, and coherence while at the same time eliminating any vague, incoherent or inarticulate structures from our perception (Ehrenzweig, 1965).            Through the study of philosophers, theorists, and musicians, aesthetics is no longer simply a â€Å"theory of nice feelings†(as Hegel put it) but a complex philosophy of art: it involves interpretation, criticism and reflection upon works of art. A work of art, such as a symphony, has an existence, a history and a place that constitute it as the object of the aesthetic experience. Having said that, psychoanalysis presents a new way of looking at things – not only at music or art. It is in this way the departure point for an aesthetic revolution, in the sense of a new treatment of what we hear (and see) in the world.            Musical works have represented an enormous value for each culture. In psychoanalytic terms we can say that music generates a jouissance, which for many musicians and non-musicians alike becomes on occasion an experience of the sublime. References: Dalhaus, C. (1978). The idea of absolute music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ehrenzweig, A. (1965). The psychoanalysis of artistic vision and hearing. London. Freud, S. (1952). A general introduction to psychoanalysis. New York. Freud, S. (1958). The Moses of Michelangelo. In S. Freud (Ed.), On creativity and the unconscious. New York. Kivy, P. P. (1991). Sound and semblance. Cornell University Press. Langer, S. (1957). Philosophy in a new key. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy. New Haven. Shapiro, M. (1966). Leonardo and Freud: An art historical study. Journal of the History of Ideas, 17(2).
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