Most people believe that The Queen’s Messenger was the first television program ever broadcast. In 1928 it was beamed to only four sets, perhaps the same four octagons that are still known to exist. The Queen’s Messenger told the story of a British diplomat and a mysterious woman. The drama broadcasted only the heads and arms of its players. Captured using a technology called the scanning disc, the image was clumsy and although it was probably even more blurred than we can imagine, in the context of its own time it was a technological marvel. The Queen’s Messenger predated the iconoscope (or image dissector), the technology for which the RCA Corporation fought a legal patent case for nearly a decade with a young inventor named Philo Farnsworth.

Philo was one of the pioneering engineers of early television. He drew on his childhood farm boy experience working his father’s Idaho fields. Imagine him toiling in the hot sun and displaying all the stereotypical signifiers of early Twentieth Century farming. Maybe he looks like the cover of a John Steinbeck novel, wearing a hand-stitched cotton shirt and thin black suspenders. Or perhaps he is bare-chested except for the faded blue bib of canvas overalls. In his teeth, he grinds a twig of straw, or a cheap cigar; it dangles out of the corner of his mouth and hangs down his chin. There’s a yellow lab or full-grown collie trotting at his side as he rides a horse drawn sickle bar mower or, if his family was affluent, a bright red enameled steam-powered tractor. Picture Philo cutting the hay in rows — back and forth, from top to bottom – making lines slowly and intentionally from the edge of the property line back to the farmhouse.

Legend has it that Philo was 14 and doing just this kind of work when he visualized an electron beam following the same trajectory. The device he created, “the image dissector,” reproduced images by scanning consecutive horizontal lines. It was like an electron sickle, cutting down tall grass rows of luminescence. Today our interlaced video displays are still based on the same principle. 21^st Century TV viewers, watching on 3D plasma displays or computer screens, should never forget that the moving pictures saturating our daily experience are built on the metaphorical foundation of an Idaho hay field. We’ve always been an agricultural country, even if we’re now in the age of an information economy. Likewise, the United States has always been an oligarchy in which feudal underdogs often find themselves up against the pastoral electric fence of capitalist fat cats.

Thus, when Philo refused RCA’s offer to license the device, yet another version of the classic American story pitting corporate Goliath against a brilliant, but temperamental underdog David ensued. Like the story of how the Ford Motor Company stole the intermittent windshield wiper technology from Robert Kearns, or how Charles Mintz and Universal Pictures stole Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from Walt Disney, the corporate behemoth RCA used its financial and political leverage to steal Philo’s innovation. The image dissector became the formative technology on which television is based. Unfortunately, Philo wasn’t paid for his efforts until after a decade of legal battles. And he was never given proper credit for the innovation he brought to our living rooms. Not only has television permanently changed adult leisure time. Television has also become a glowing nanny with ever-present kid’s programming such as Sesame Street, Blue’s Clues, Dora the Explorer, Fraggle Rock, Teletubbies, Barney, and The Muppets. For better or worse, Television has had irreparable effects on child rearing.

When I was a kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s, televisions were large faux-wooden cabinets with bulbous glass screens, ungainly knobs, and monophonic speakers that amplified sound out of a rectangular plastic mesh of horizontal lines.  The remote control had not been invented. We actually had to stand up from the couch, walk across the room and click the knob into place in order to change channels. Cable was in its infancy and static was normal: a random chaos of tiny black and white squares in motion, the visual cathode-ray equivalent of white noise. Set-top antennae were regularly augmented with tin foil. My siblings and I swore that we each knew the best way to manipulate those “rabbit ears” in order to tune the clearest picture. An interior decorator’s nightmare, the TV “set” was placed about a foot away from the wall in order to make room for the tumor-like “tube” that protruded out of the back. The tube was covered with a trapezoidal casing often colored differently than the rest of the set, usually black. The top of the set was wide, at least 12 inches, and my mother often placed a vase of fresh cut flowers between the antenna and the family pictures that captured us at our most awkward: itchy and uncomfortable in the formal clothing that we wore only in order to conform to social mores of holidays and weddings.

Like most of the United States, the TV was the focus of our “family room.” This was where we convened after dinner and before bedtime. While my older brothers and parents watched programs that I was too young to comprehend, or sporting events in which I had no interest, I imagined how this strange light box worked. Apparently, the explanation I created was common. Most three year olds come to the conclusion that tiny little people live in parts of the TV that can’t be seen.

At the time there was space enough: televisions weren’t flat yet. The physical shape of the device – its boxiness and width – made the miraculous seem possible. Surely behind the wood grained paneling, like a little theater with a back stage maze full of costumes and set pieces, the television hosted a troupe of miniature actors, athletes and comedians.

I imagine Jim Henson, creator of Kermit the Frog and the Muppets, must have come up with similar theories as a child watching the boob tube. After all, he has often been celebrated for understanding that the box itself was the perfect puppet proscenium. He realized that the faux-wood bezel around the glass screen was like the technologically grown up version of a child’s fabric and corrugated cardboard puppet theater. His hand held puppets utilized the tangible characteristics of the television set in the same way that an amateur puppeteer like “the Amazing Schwartz,” utilized handmade ply-wood window frames to create pseudo-magical renditions of fairy tales like “the three little pigs” at my friends’ fourth and fifth birthday parties.

Jim Henson’s first television show was only slightly more sophisticated than the Amazing Schwartz’s “Princess and the Pea.” Schwartz used foam balls atop scrap fabric dresses. Henson made jumbo furry sock puppets. Henson controlled their hands and arms with poles from below like upside down marionettes. Eventually he’d even name them “Muppets,” smooshing the words “marionette” and “puppet” together.  But first he made Sam and Friends, a show on which goofy characters lip-synched comedic tunes.

Sam and Friends was broadcast twice daily from May 9, 1955 to December 15, 1961. Each episode was five minutes long and aired on WRC-TV in Washington D.C.. Viewers who watched Henson’s early creation would have owned one of the 52 million TV sets that were in U.S. homes at the time (nine out of ten households).  They might have owned the Zenith model T1816R, a black and white metal-cased set with rounded corners and cat’s eye shaped knobs that protruded out of cylinders on each side. The sixteen-inch set was the ipod of its generation. It had a cutting edge design that served as a status symbol for those lucky enough to own one. As Henson’s characters pretended to sing funny songs they would have looked out of place. Sure, Sam’s bulging ears matched the knobs on the Zenith, but his clunky choreography as he sang Louis Prima’s “Old Black Magic” would have contrasted against the set’s slick Buck-Rogers-like futuristic aesthetic.

Although Kermit was a regular on Sam and Friends, he was not yet a frog.

Kermit began his life as a giant lizard-like sock puppet crafted from Jim Henson’s mother’s old wool coat. Unlike a tadpole, his eyes, made from ping-pong balls, already bulged.  He not only appeared on Sam and Friends, but also in various commercials for companies like Wilson’s Meat. However, he was not a frog until Johnny Carson introduced him as “Kermit the Frog” on The Tonight Show in 1965.

Why a frog? He only slightly resembles the species Ranidae, of the order Anura. He might just have easily been christened Kermit the Lizard. Or just Kermit: certainly there are many Muppet monsters — Grover, Telly, Gonzo — whose physical characteristics bear no taxonomical resemblance to recognizable critters. How, and why, did Kermit the non-descript sock-shaped creature become known as a frog? Sure, Kermit is green, but frogs aren’t. Frogs are just as likely to be green as any other color in the spectrum.

Even if I allow that frogs tend to be associated with the color green, viewers wouldn’t have known what color Kermit was in 1965. Color television didn’t become common until GE introduced the 11inch “Porta-Color” TV set in 1966. Advertisements boasted that the “lightweight” set weighed 24 pounds. It had a handle on the top and a “compact design” that made it “truly portable.” It is on this type of television that many viewers would have watched the original Sesame Street in 1969. By then Kermit was already well established as an amphibian due to numerous appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Mike Douglass Show, and The Hollywood Palace.  I wonder if young Jim Henson ever considered the implications of amphibiousness while preparing for those performances.

The word “amphibious” literally means living on both sides. It comes from the Greek amphi (both) and bios (life). The designation is reserved for animals that physically mutate. In their youth, amphibians breathe water through gills. When fully grown, they inhale oxygen into fully developed adult lungs. In Sesame Street # 2615, May 1989, Kermit discusses his amphibian mutation in a biographical sketch called “My Polliwog Ways.” Kermit was no longer singing in mono. The industry adopted stereo broadcasts in 1984 using the Zenith multichannel television sound (MTS) transmission system. Kermit wore a velvet and satin smoking jacket and looked like a fuzzy reptilian cross between Tom Jones and Hugh Hefner. Kermit sings his biological life story – from egg to frog — in Las Vegas style cabaret form (search YouTube, its well worth it). In one chorus, he belts out:

So long wiggly tale,

goodbye polliwog,

I started growing legs and became a frog,

As this is a volume about depth psychology, it seems appropriate that I analyze Kermit’s frog-ness as if it were part of a dream. To do this, I use a depth psychological process termed amplification. I amplify the image (in this case: frog), making it stronger and more precise, by collecting corresponding mythological, scientific, cultural and social ideas. For example, the depth psychologist might ask: what is the difference between a frog and a toad? Why not Kermit the Toad?

In fairy tales, frogs tend to be good; toads tend to be bad. Kissing a frog might even reveal a charming husband. Kissing a toad will give you warts. Frogs tend to be masculine, such as the cursed frog prince. Toads tend to be feminine, associated with mother earth and symbolically connected with the moon and the uterus. Kermit is a frog. Kermit is male. But kissing him won’t turn either of you into anything.

Scientifically toads are frogs. Toad is a word used to identify frogs that spend more time on land. The distinction is primarily visual. Toad skin often appears rougher or dryer, not slimy and wet. Toads’ back legs are shorter and suited to hopping on dirt and stone.

Kermit, being fictional, does not fit neatly into either distinctive category. He sometimes seems toad-like, spending most of his time on land; he works in television and movie studios in New York and Los Angeles. His skin (made from fabric) is dry. But his back legs are long.

When analyzing fairy tales, mythology or dreams, depth psychologists often see the water as a symbol for thinking, thought processes, or knowledge – specifically knowledge from the unconscious. “Water” Carl Jung wrote, “Is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.” The Swiss psychologist is not referring to some kind of esoteric or mystical symbolism. He is talking about the way imagery manifests in our everyday life. For example, we use water imagery when talking about our thought processes: the flow of thought, the stream of consciousness. Ideas are either shallow or deep. Marie-Louise von Franz wrote, “Usually, we interpret water as the unconscious, and differentiate its specific meaning according to the context.” Land, then, in the context of amphibian life, can be understood the opposite of water. Land can be understood as a symbol of the opposite of the unconscious: the habitual conscious attitude, the foundation or the thinking processes in which our daily actions are logically grounded.

Some Jungian and archetypal thinkers find it useful to use imagery of wet and dry to help make a distinction between “inner” and “outer” experience. “Wet” or “Inner” refers to the private personal experience, the thoughts and emotions that are within each individual. “Dry” or “Outer” refers to the external events of our lives, such as our public interactions with other people and objects. Wet has to do with feeling and intuition. Dry has to do with thinking and sensing. Lakes, ponds, rivers, streams and oceans could be symbolic of chaotic and liquid inner experience – the unknown: where thoughts and emotions can sometimes flow crystal clear, but can also be murky and swamp-like. Mountains, valleys, and roads could be symbolic of outer experience – made up of tangible landmarks: easily mapped, diagrammed, and represented.

Frogs are amphibious: of both land and water. They begin as chains or groupings of underwater eggs. Then, quickly, they develop into water breathing tadpoles, or polliwogs. They sprout appendages in their youth. They loose their tales as they enter adulthood. In fact, they hardly resemble what we’d think of as frogs until they are fully grown lily-pad hoppers with lungs suited for oxygen.

It is the both-ness of frogs – their ambiguous position between wet and dry — that leads me to call Kermit a depth psychologist. I think of him like an amphibian of the psyche. He is, metaphorically, of both water and land, of both inner and outer. That is, Kermit lives and performs in between, in liminal, threshold, or boundary spaces. And all the while, Kermit is teaching, inspiring and motivating his audience to do likewise.

When he sings, Kermit’s lyrics often describe a world that is congruent with my ideal. It is a place where dreams come true, where magic is ubiquitous, and impossible things can and do happen. Yes, it sounds like a Disney vacations brochure, but Kermit knows it. Don’t worry; the frog sees through his own platitudes. Always of two worlds at once, he transcends the ambiguity between his utopian fantasy and the reality that he is made of material.

Kermit is puppet, lifeless without his operator, and yet his is arguably the world’s most recognizable frog. Fabric skin and ping pong ball eyes tie Kermit to the laws of inanimate matter, yet puppet and puppeteer are both struck by the other’s autonomy. The puppet seems to exist independent of the puppeteer. Despite the fact that Jim Henson’s arm forms Kermit’s skeletal structure, the performing puppet becomes more than just the operator’s talking hand.  Does something magical happen? No, even Kermit is skeptical of magic. He binds his vision of the miraculous to its shadow, reminding us constantly that he is constructed of fantasy. He reminds us that he manufactured by acknowledging the long-haired bearded puppeteer in a headband that controls him as if he were his autonomous unconscious. Likewise, Jim Henson acknowledges Kermit as a puppet. He often allows the public to see Muppet and Muppeteer together: Henson’s lips moving in full sight as Kermit talks. Henson once said he never bothered to learn how to throw his voice, figuring people would rather look at Kermit the Frog then a freakishly tall bearded hippie. Audiences don’t watch to see Henson; they watch to see Kermit.

Kermit is not simply an extension of Henson, nor is Henson driving Kermit. Jim Henson, on many occasions, commented that the frog had a life of his own. Henson wasn’t alone. After he died in 1990, Steve Whitmire took over as Kermit’s operator. Whitmire described the first time he placed Kermit on his arm: “I looked him in the eyes and he just stared back, almost as if he was saying, ‘come on, I need a voice.’”

What is it about puppetry? Eileen Blumenthal calls it “created actor art.” Puppetry, she writes, is “the most transcendent mode of performance” because it is made up of “inanimate objects endowed with vital force.” She sees puppets as metaphorical symbols of the human experience.

Think about it. I’m human and I’m assuming you, the reader, are also human. However, like a puppet, I perform as if I have a vital conscious awareness but I’m not always sure that I’m in control of myself. I often act against my better judgment. I often wonder why I do the things I do. I often act against what I would ordinarily declare to be in my own best interest. There seem to be unconscious motivations that conflict with my conscious intentions. C.G. Jung explains this phenomenon using the concept of complexes. He does not mean “complex” in the colloquial sense, as when we explain a person’s negative behavior by saying, “he has a mother complex, an inferiority complex, or a power complex.” Instead, for Jung, complexes are “feeling toned ideas.” Daryl Sharp writes that they “accumulate around certain archetypes, like ‘mother’ and ‘father.’” Constellated complexes can make us fall in love. Constellated complexes can make us feel extra confident, charming, or outgoing. Constellated complexes can influence our decisions because they create unconscious feeling reactions to everyday events. For example, mundane activities, like choosing a breakfast cereal, could be inextricably mixed up with deep childhood feelings about my mother. Sometimes — perhaps all the time — I am a puppet of unconscious complexes.

And, like a puppet, at the end of my performance I become matter, a lifeless body, a corpse. Puppets are a metaphorical reminder of the idea that my material body is on loan to an operator that some people call the “soul,” or the “psyche.”  For this reason, puppets, like effigies and masks, play a major part in the death and funeral rites of many cultures. The operator or puppeteer serves as metaphorical reminder of the vital life force that animates a human being. Depth psychologists use the word “psyche” to describe not just the operations of the physical brain, but also the force that gives life to our material existence: our inner puppeteer. Psyche is the Greek word that means soul. The soul/psyche is the part of the self that speaks the language of the imagination. By engaging in the world of images — the imaginal — I make meaning out of everyday experience. I soak a material reality in the moisture of imagination.

The Muppet Movie was made in 1979. I was two at the time. I didn’t watch the movie until it was available on VHS video. Likely I watched it on the 27 inch SONY Trinitron set in the family room of my childhood home. Sony’s Trinitron technology, which produced brighter, clearer images, was introduced in 1966 but it didn’t become popular and common in every home until the 1980s. The name Trinitron is a combination of “trinity” and “electron,” because it combines three different types of electron cathode ray technologies. I consider myself lucky to have seen the movie on a TV set rather than in a movie theater. In some ways, I think the physical television adds another dimension to the film’s layered messages.  The Muppet Movie uses puppets to explore the ambiguity between the magic of the imaginary and the inherent reality in show business’ construction of fantasy.

The imaginary can be slapstick: a karate chopping pig wrestling an evil mad scientist (played by Mel Brooks) into his own brain-sucking machine. The reality of show business is full of frustratingly ironic choices: the easiest and quickest way for Kermit to accomplish his dreams of singing, dancing and world fame would be to work for Doc Hopper.

Throughout the film these poles – magic and constructed fantasy — get closer together and in the end a rainbow becomes the symbol that holds the tension. Puppets are like rainbows. They “are visions, but only illusions.”

Yes, rainbows are just prisms of light reflecting off moisture droplets in the atmosphere. And yes human perception and meaning-making also render rainbows more than just physical events that can be attributed to photons or light waves. But the magic of the phenomena is not any less awe inspiring when we understand the laws of physics.

Likewise, a puppet is simply a manufactured object that becomes meaningful in the context of its relationship with puppeteer and audience. The puppet becomes meaningful when placed in a liminal space – an in between, transitional space — between real and imaginal. Or in the words of Gideon Haberkorn, the Muppet “exists only when the liminal space opens up – it exists, therefore, only during the process of performance. A puppet is not just crude material; it is performed material” (Garlen 2009, p. 30).

Kermit’s famous rainbow song, “The Rainbow Connection,” (written by Paul Williams with Kenny Ascher and Jim Henson for the movie) is quick to remind us of the ambiguity between the real and the imaginal: “So we’ve been told and some choose to believe it, I know they’re wrong, wait and see. Some day we’ll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers and me.” The rainbow connection is what we find when we engage in depth psychology. Or, when we engage in what James Hillman calls Psychologizing. “Through psychologizing,” Hillman writes in ReVisioning Psychology, “I change the idea of any literal action at all – political, scientific, personal – into a metaphorical enactment” (1977, p.127). By psychologizing we find (or make) meaning out of what was and is taken for granted, like the refracted light of a rainbow or the textiles that are sewn together to make a puppet.

We often laud Kermit the frog for his singing, his dancing, or his sense of humor. Perhaps his real skill, however, is his aptitude for psychologizing.

I’ll be honest.  Even as an adult with children of my own, I get tears in my eyes every time I watch the The Muppet Movie. It could be simple nostalgia. The film is associated with many memories. I popped it into the VCR on early weekend mornings while my parents and older siblings were still sleeping and unwilling to play with me. I performed the songs on stage at middle school assemblies. My wife and I watched it together on video for our first date. Now I watch it with my own children. We project the movie onto a 100inch diagonal screen using a Optoma HD66 DLP video projector. The movie streams using WIFI from the itunes software on the upstairs desktop computer through an Roku HD media device. My three year old is much more technologically savvy than I am and he can already work the remote. He selects movies himself, recognizing Kermit, Fozzie, Gonzo, Miss Piggy and the rainbow that appears on the screen. I’m always happy when he chooses The Muppet Movie.

The older I get, the more the movie’s psychological and philosophical themes grab me. Plus, I love the irony that puppets posit ideas worth pondering. I’m glued to the screen as I recognize the theories of depth and archetypal psychologies dramatized with fur and fuzz.

The Muppet Movie is a fictional account of how the Muppets became famous. The central narrative is told as though it were autobiography: made by Muppets, about Muppets.  It tells how Kermit leaves the swamp, meets his Muppet cohort, and heads to Hollywood to follow his passion. He discusses his dream during the big show down that takes place about halfway through the film. The scene is constructed like a Hollywood back lot parody, exhibiting all the signifiers of the western cowboy movie genre. Dust blows; tumbleweeds tumble; Kermit is wearing needle-sharp spurs; lone whistles punctuate the soundtrack.

Kermit:

I’ve got a dream…

Kermit is face to face with the film’s antagonist, Doc Hopper.  They stand on the main road of a ghost town inhabited only by the goofy scientist/inventor Professor Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant Beaker. Doc Hopper has been chasing Kermit the entire film, halfway across the country. He’s got Kermit and his fuzzy friends cornered, held at gunpoint. Doc Hopper wants to make Kermit the spokes-frog for his corporate chain of French fried frog leg restaurants.  But all Kermit can see is “millions of frogs on tiny crutches.”

Doc Hopper:

All my life I’ve wanted to own a thousand frog leg restaurants, and you’re the key, Greenie.

Kermit’s voice is unmistakable. It is nasal and squeaky. It is fun and child-like. But it is also full of wisdom and pathos. He pleads with Doc Hopper,

Kermit

I’ve got a dream, too, but it’s about singing and dancing and making people happy. That’s the kind of dream that gets better the more people you share it with, and, well, I’ve found a whole bunch of friends who have the same dream, and it kind of makes us like a family…

…I don’t think you’re a bad man, Doc. But I think if you look in your heart, you’ll find you really want to let me and my friends go, to follow our dream.

Kermit’s sentimental monologue is nice. It reinforces the traditional American-Christian rhetoric that we hear in self-help seminars and read in best-selling spiritual paperbacks. It emphasizes a focus on community and a do-unto-others mentality that seems to resist a cultural standard of might makes right – a cultural standard where profits come before people, or frogs. But Kermit (and Jim Henson) know that anti-corporate dogma is not necessarily resistant. In fact, a quick survey of New York Times bestsellers list, a flip through hundreds of cable television channels, or a glance at the blogosphere shows that Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington attitude is as prevalent (and profitable) as unchecked commerce in our capitalist democracy. Like two sides of a nickel, corporate greed and anti-materialism go hand in hand like David and Goliath. After all, doesn’t the underdog always beat the establishment in every fairy tale made by corporate behemoth Disney? The righteous meek-shall-inherit-the-earth dogma saturating cartoons not only led the Walt Disney Company to become a global entertainment conglomerate (which now owns the rights to Kermit and the Muppets), it also served as the revolutionary ideological bedrock on which the United States built an oligarchic empire.

No Kermit’s sentiment is not special. In fact, it can be understood as the same old swamp to riches American dream story with a little do-good thrown in for public relations purposes.  And Kermit knows it. The Philo Farnsworths of this world never get the credit they deserve, even after winning decades of legal battles. That is why in the Muppet’s reality, like our own, monologues don’t save the day. No, that honor is reserved for puppetry of the absurd. Animal grows into a giant fuzzy and frightening monster because he has eaten Dr. Honeydew’s insta-grow pills. He scares off Doc Hopper and his thugs.

Animal is a Muppet that might be described as half cave-man and half kind-hearted, untamed beast. He is like the Freudian uninhibited Id covered in yarn and frizz. He is at the whims of his instincts and emotions. His desires are not filtered through the censorship of civilization. Animal does not dress up for weddings and holidays. Animal does not conform to cultural mores. Instead, Animal takes joy in destruction like a toddler toppling a tower of blocks. When I watch him I’m reminded of my childhood temper tantrums: the elation of unfettered sentiment. I imagine my arms flailing. I can feel my throat sore from screaming. I imagine the tickle of salt-tears flowing down my face as my nose wells up with snot (not the thick mucousy kind of snot, but rather the thin liquid that flows like water).  I can feel my heart race and my muscles tighten.

Like temper tantrum personified, the ground shakes and Animal’s giant head breaks through the roof of the building that houses Dr. Honeydew’s lab. Animal belts out a huge growl and smiles a rebellious childish grin. Doc Hopper and his men run.

Kermit

Okay everyone, on to Hollywood!

Then, according to one of the multiple layered narratives, the movie ends when Kermit and his gang of Muppets arrive in Hollywood. Orson Welles, in the role of movie producer, hands them the “standard rich and famous contract.”  The Muppets head straight to the back lot.

They fill a soundstage with hand painted, cartoon like, set pieces that reflect sequences from the film. The characters prepare to shoot the Muppet movie that the viewer has just seen. Under Kermit the Frog’s direction – he barks into a bullhorn and sits with frog legs crossed on the classic director’s chair – they wheel in a plywood swamp, a constructed county fair, and giant wooden rainbow. It is another nod to Kermit’s autonomy.

Is Jim Henson proposing that autonomous Muppets deserve the credit for this work? Is the visionary puppet master commenting on the gap between his own persona and an authentic Self? Or, are Kermit, Fozzy, Gonzo, and Miss Piggy like tangible self-determining voices of what C.G. Jung would call active imagination? Are they inward self-determining, and autonomous voices that speak from deep within the psyches of their operators?

James Hillman, founder of post-Jungian archetypal psychology, writes, “Just as we do not create our dreams, but they happen to us, so we do not invent the persons of myth and religion; they, too, happen to us” (1977, p.17). The film seems to be playing with the implicit ambiguities of Hillman’s suggestions. Who has whom: is the puppeteer in the puppet, or is the puppet in the puppeteer?

In the finale of The Muppet Movie, Kermit reprises the opening number. He sits in a soundstage swamp and sings once again, “Why are there so many songs about rainbows?” The other Muppets join in, adding a new verse, “Rainbows are memories, sweet dream reminders; that’s part of what rainbows do.” We, the audience, get the point; the movie Kermit has dreamed of making is, in fact, the movie we have just seen – the movie we are still watching.

The camera tracks Gonzo, holding balloons, levitating to the giant rainbow set piece. “Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers, and . . . ” The voices of singing puppets trail off with a smash and a crash, the set is destroyed, the dream falls, one plywood prop at a time. First the rainbow crashes. Then the sky blue background collapses. The cardboard bus (painted to look like the tour bus that carries Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem) falls down. The fake palm trees tip. The paper El Sleezo saloon is left in pieces. Chaos ensues: broken lights, electric sparks. Explosions bust through the sound stage ceiling. The dream has come crashing to the floor.

Magically, however, just when we accept that all reality may be nothing more than fantasy constructed, a real rainbow slides in through the hole (Real? At least within the implied reality of one narrative: this rainbow is not a soundstage construct).

Harps strum and Kermit sings: “Life’s like a movie, write your own ending.”  Life is fantasy, the arrival of one set piece after another, but that doesn’t make it unreal. “Keep believing, keep pretending.” Construct it consciously, but believe in your construction. What is made (puppets by puppeteers) and phenomena that present as if from nowhere (rainbows) are both of equal validity. The Gods are internal and external.  The line between the divine and the material becomes obfuscated when we approach the world archetypally.

As Kermit finishes the song, I can barely hold back the tears when suddenly a six-foot puppet creature named Jack rips through the movie screen (remember this is a movie inside a movie).  Jack cuts through the sentimental and emotional tension screaming “Hollywood!” The implication is that this monster has been chasing Kermit and his pals since the beginning of the film. They met him while trading in Fozzie’s uncle’s Studebaker. But we are also reminded that scenes of Muppets viewing The Muppet Movie premier have framed the entire narrative.  Audience is jolted from one narrative reality to another, reminded that there is always another layer to see-through.

In this case, the audience is asked to see-through the moral banality of Kermit’s rhetoric. Yes, Kermit offers a message familiar to audiences in the U.S.A. raised on Hollywood blockbusters: follow your dreams; you can do anything you can imagine. However, the Muppets’ strength and authenticity is located in their felt covered pathos. Frog and friends are not satisfied with the one sidedness of candy-coated wishes. By breaking through the fourth wall of the puppet proscenium, when one layer of narrative breaks through the next, Kermit and his furry friends are creating a web of meaning-making. They are reminding us to be cynical by de-literalizing one surface narrative after another. They are even skeptical of the songs’ lyrical rhetoric. Muppets reject their own literal moralities, acknowledging that an alternate mythical reality lies directly beneath each surface. Soon the newly revealed reality is exposed as fantasy.

The Muppets’ believability, what makes them life-like, is their complexity of meaning. They consistently see-through their own crayola colored moral dogma severing the suspension of disbelief with unorthodox dramatic devices. They recognize the precariousness of their puppet world and the dubiety of their own autonomy.

The film premier that frames the story is actually a narrative about the film’s larger scenario that references the narrative itself. It is a film-within-a-film-within-a-film that presents itself as the autobiographical work of Kermit, Fozzy, Gonzo, Miss Piggy, Scooter, and friends. Yet even in the opening screening room scene, when Kermit’s nephew Robin asks his uncle if this is really how the Muppets met, Kermit tells him that they took some liberties with the story. The audience is never sure where to focus its belief in the absurd.

I’m reminded of a famous Muppet sketch. Kermit and Fozzie are chatting. As if from nowhere, a startled Fozzie panics. “Don’t look!” He warns Kermit, looking downward, “but there’s somebody underneath you, and he has a beard . . . oh my god, there’s somebody underneath me too!” The irony is perfect. Fozzie is pathologizing the puppeteer. He sees his operator as a kind of illness. He sees frank Oz as something like a hideous blemish, a wart, a growth, a pimple. From audience perspective the puppeteer is natural, even healthy and necessary. A puppet without a puppeteer would be a criminal aberration fit for a late night horror film. However, from the puppet’s perspective, strings are pathological. Fozzie tries not to look and advises Kermit to do the same. As if the puppeteer might just go away if he elects not to pay attention to it.

Of course, when two puppets openly discuss the invisibility of their puppeteers, pretending not to notice, the phenomenon manifested is, in fact, the visibility of, and increased attention to, the operator. The interdependence between Kermit and Henson, between Fozzie and Oz, becomes obvious.

Kermit and Fozzie often talk to Henson and Oz in full view of the camera.  Puppets witness the puppeteers and vice versa. The pole that controls Kermit’s arm can always be seen hanging from his hand, acknowledging the puppeteer that drives and operates the being. The puppeteer is like the complex, the dream, the symptom. What would happen if Kermit or Fozzie eradicated Jim Henson’s or Frank Oz’s hands? They would find themselves limp, inanimate. They could ignore the hands, but then they would become blind instruments operated by another’s autonomy. The best bet is dialogue.

Kermit teaches us amphibiousness. He calls for a dialogue between puppet and puppeteer, between outer and inner. Kermit teaches us to listen. Listen to the symptom — the complex, the hands that control us — to see where they want to go. Kermit teaches us to join them willingly and actively.

Kermit teaches us that sentimentality won’t save us. Platitude is pretty but life’s perfect song and dance numbers are often interrupted, dues ex machina, by the unpredictable, the silly and the absurd. Kermit teaches us not to be like any old puppet, but rather, to be a Muppet.

Most importantly, however, Kermit brings awareness to the puppet proscenium. In Kermit’s case the proscenium is the movie screen or the bezel of the television. He makes us ask what goes on inside the box: GE’s Octagon, the Zenith model T1816R, the Porta-Color, the Sony Trinitron, the Optoma HD66, and today’s 3D Flat-panel, Plasma, LCD, LED, rear-projection, jumbo diagonal, net-connected, DVD combos. Are there little people in there?  Wearing little costumes? Controlling little puppets? Who’s telling the stories, and who’s listening?

The cultural metaphor I’m writing around is trite and obvious. Who are the puppets and who are the puppeteers? We live in an age when desires are manufactured into needs by savvy marketing departments. Thanks to an advertising mega-machine, technological wonders that we didn’t even know we wanted a decade ago are now necessities. Political pundits on TV and radio tell us what to think about social issues. Newspapers tell us how to talk about yesterday’s “current” events. Pop songs tell us what romance is supposed to feel like. Amazon and the New York T

imes tell us which books to read.

Carl Jung counseled each of us to ask what is the myth that we’re living? Kermit the Frog counsels us to ask who’s writing it and who’s performing it?

Jim Henson (or Steve Whitmire) looks into Kermit’s ping-pong ball eyes. One hand controls a fabric amphibian’s mouth; the other hand controls his arm.  Muppet and Muppeteer together tell us always to remember the physical characteristics of the puppet theater and to be willing to knock it down if need be.

Mother Knows Less: How the Food Media Colonized our Kitchens

Photo courtesy of Caroline Clough: http://mealsihaveeaten.blogspot.com/

In my house, one night a week is always pizza night. The day changes, but the recipe does not. The chewy dough is flavored with extra-virgin olive oil and a dab of pesto. It is cooked in a hot oven and nestled within the scorching edges of a cast-iron pan. I top the pizza with a homemade tomato sauce made mostly from sweetened tomato paste speckled with red pepper flakes and fennel seeds. Fresh mozzarella is melted until it spreads out gooey and starts to brown beneath the hot flames of the broiler. The cheese blankets the surface just above some handcrafted wild boar prosciutto from Philadelphia’s Italian market. Maybe, if I’m in the mood, the pie is also sprinkled with juicy pineapple chunks. Finally, a dusting of shredded Parmagiano-Reggiano cheese accompanies cheap garlic powder, onion powder and a sprinkling of dried basil.

Photo courtesy of Caroline Clough: http://mealsihaveeaten.blogspot.com/

The final result is thick, almost an inch tall. It is more like focaccia than traditional Pizza. The olive oil creates a rich almost cake-like crumb that browns against the hot cast iron pan and creates flakey edges resembling pastry. The bottom crunches between my teeth and the hot messy mixture of toppings challenges me to get it into my mouth before it slides off onto my plate or drips down my lip, scorching my chin. If I miss, I lift the bubbly goop with my fingers and make sure it lands on my tongue in time to compliment the crust. I feel it starting to scorch the top of my mouth, so I cool it down with a sip of Brunello. In my opinion, this is pizza perfection.

Of course, oenophiles might complain that Pizza is too complex for me to taste the subtleties of the legendary Montalcino wine (Brunello di Montalcino, “nice dark one,” is a red Tuscan masterpiece that usually accompanies rich and heavy meat dishes). Wine snobs might call it flavor pornography that sacrifices vino-eroticism for pure gastronomic perversity. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed fireworks: I like when pungent, sweet, sour, bitter and salty smack me in the face.

But my wine pairing is the least of my problems. Gourmands, for example, might complain about the pizza’s skillet shape. It is not deep dish like Chicago’s. It is not flat and flexible like New York’s. It is not crisp like the original Neapolitan. It is not square like Sicily’s. Furthermore, my combination of ingredients is too pedestrian to qualify as gourmet like Wolfgang Puck’s trendy California version: no wild mushrooms, no arugula, no avocados.

Also, some folks may take issue with the mozzarella. This grocery store purchase is not made from the milk of the water buffalo. It is not even hand crafted or packed in water. No, it comes shrink-wrapped from Wisconsin and branded with a name that ends in a vowel – i or o, maybe both — and a logo colored red, white and green: some marketing department’s attempt to conjure emotions related to Italy.

No, neither my pizza, nor its ingredients are authentic. It is a bastardization of the original and it hardly resembles the well-established American counterparts. Dough tossing pizza professionals from both continents would likely laugh at my pie. Yet, I continue cooking it my way. I’ve worked as a professional chef for so many years that I feel absolutely confident about my creation. Otherwise, I’d probably obsess over it, attempting to achieve some sort of cultural-culinary purity.

I remember this anxiety well from my youthful years in the kitchen. I purchased specialized ingredients from a variety of ethnic grocery stores because I wanted to make genuine food: corn husks and masa harina for true tamales, Japanese short grain rice for real sushi, red bean paste for bona fide steamed buns. I had an obsession with trying to make the real thing. Real paella. Real Waldorf salad. Real buffalo wings. Real Pizza.

What is real pizza? Is it the thin crusted one made in Naples, Italy? Most food historians agree that the tomato topped flat bread originated in Neapolitan cuisine centuries ago. Cheese wasn’t added until the late 1800s. Does this make all subsequent versions bastardizations? No, unlike other foods, pizza has become such a staple of the American diet that we generally do not worry over questions of authenticity. What about other, less ubiquitous, ethnic specialties?

The Burrito, for example, doesn’t really exist in Mexico. There is a traditional Burrito in the Northern Mexican town of Ciudad Jauréz. However, I’m told it barely resembles the overstuffed American meal-in-a-wrap. More akin to a hoagie, submarine, grinder, or muffaletta the Tex-Mex burrito is not authentic Mexican cuisine. Rather, critics might call this an example of U.S. restaurants appropriating indigenous food.

But I could just as easily flip this accusation around. I could say that the very notion of authentic food is a colonization of the family kitchen. From this perspective, cookbooks, food TV and celebrity chefs have robbed the family household of its food authority. Mother is no longer the expert. The expert is the expert. The celebrity chef is judge and jury.

You might argue that it is unfair to vilify restaurants, publishers and famous foodies. You might say they are anthropologists for the masses. They allow us to experience far away places through our taste buds. They give us the opportunity, literally, to consume distant cultures. Before Julia Child, some people argue, Americans knew little about France and even less about its cuisine. French food meant Kraft mayonnaise and canned or frozen Haricot Vert (thin French string beans). Gastronomic gurus made us cultured and worldly. They introduced us to far away places. Furthermore, identifying what is ethnically authentic actually increases the value of unique cultural attributes. In other words, by giving a voice to “humble peasant food” we grant it authority as an acceptable cuisine.

Wait! This statement begs to be challenged: acceptable to whom? It was already acceptable to the families that ate it. In some cases it ensured the survival of generations of eaters. By defining it, don’t we imprison a culture into a cookie-cutter Jell-o mold? Don’t we rob the household of its ability to construct its daily dish according to familial nutritional needs? Now the inability to cook according to the officially sanctioned and so-called authentic recipe – whether due to lack of technical knowledge, or lack of funds to purchase ingredients – marginalizes the home cook.

In fact, while Julia Child, James Beard and M.K. Fisher are often credited with bringing good taste to the USA, one might say that what they actually brought was the idea of an authoritative and elitist voice that chooses the good food, dismisses the bad, and defines sophisticated taste for the rest of us.

What is this “French” cooking? Why should we master it? And what makes it an art? Certainly Julia’s Parisian French recipes were not more genuine than the home cooking done by mothers, grandmothers and peasants in regions throughout France. But Mrs. Child was on TV, PBS even: that ad-free bastion of educational programming. She was an authority. Did her wealthy background — Vanity Fair’s Laura Jacobs describes her as “from wasp stock” — and Smith College education give her a more refined palate than the rest of us?

Or did it just give her articulate speech and the ability to convince a nation that her subjective taste preferences should also be theirs? Because despite the mythology, America ate well before Julia. The new world was extolled for its bounty of exotic ingredients. In fact, many early colonial dishes, particularly the Southern ones, are now experiencing resurgence in international fine cuisine. Virginia’s salt-cured country ham, for example, is often praised with enthusiasm historically reserved for Spain’s dry-cured Jamón Serrano and Italy’s Prosciutto di Parma.

This Smithfield, Virginia creation predates Julia Child. Legend has it that Native American methods of salting, smoking and aging venison were adapted to the razorback hog by the Jamestown colonists when they first arrived on the new continent over two hundred years ago. Furthermore, the process of making Virginia’s Country Ham is hardly unique when compared to the process used to make Spain’s and Italy’s. The differences are mostly a result of the idiosyncrasies of regional climates and their effects on the grains and water fed to the hogs, the salt used to cure the meat, and microorganisms in the dark atmosphere of the aging cellar. Intangible or invisible factors, whether chemical or spiritual (as in ‘the soul of the Parma infuses a unique kind of love into a smoked hog leg’), are the biggest differences between one culture’s dry-cured ham and another’s.

Cooking methods are as universal as human ingenuity. For every pizza, there’s a flat-bread with regional toppings on the other side of the globe. While the Burrito may use ingredients indigenous to Mexico, the citizens of Ciudad Jauréz certainly did not invent the idea of wrapping up their food. Maki and Spring rolls are two Asian examples of rolled food. For every Pâté there’s a meatloaf or Kofta. Industrious home cooks all over the world are adept at modifying local foodstuffs into original creations, even if they don’t all bear the Escoffier or Cordon Bleu stamp of approval.

The codification of authentic ethnic cuisines stinks of the same nationalist ideology that eliminated the spoken dialects of impoverished regions and replaced them with the King’s English, Spanish, French, German, Italian etc. In fact, the refined cooking techniques of France come straight from royal court. Taillevent, the famous cook to Charles the V of France, and La Varenne, author of France’s first book of haute recipes passed their knowledge on to generations of royal chefs whose techniques have been updated, modernized and christened with fancy names. Julia Child eventually took the baton (or should I say baguette?) and taught U.S. TV viewers and cookbook readers authentic fancy French names and regal cooking techniques. She also brought European culinary aristocracy to a new continent. Or as Laura Jacobs wrote in the August 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, what Julia Child introduced to the American home cook was:

Principles—a belief in a right way as opposed to a wrong way. Just as Emily Post’s Etiquette set forth a blueprint for civilized conduct, an ethical structure, if you will, that anyone—no matter what their birth—could learn, so Mastering set forth the structural verities of classic French cooking.

Although the birthright becomes irrelevant, the very notion of principled gastronomic authenticity defines upper, middle and lower class palates carving them into class divisions unequally distributed like white and dark meat poultry. Gourmet sophistication becomes like poetry, ballet and opera — high-art used as economic segregation — for a generation of middle class baby boomers raised on Bob Dylan, Alvin Ailey and Leonard Bernstein. The peoples’ entertainment had taken the ‘high’ out of high culture. Mid-Twentieth Century artists and their pseudo-socialist revolutionary ideology had eliminated the performing arts’ ability to divide the proletariat and bourgeoisie. However, an upwardly mobile generation of white-collar hippies still needed ‘culture’ for the same reason the Nineteenth Century’s Victorian aristocracy did. It separated them from their darker skinned, lower paid or less educated compatriots. Food culture met the prerequisites. It became the new high-culture. A flock of gastronomes, book publishers and TV producers was ready to profit off the new (and gigantic) generation of American elite. An industry established a new set of ‘high’ standards, to which ‘low-culture’ citizens could ‘buy-up.’

Food personalities like Julia Child (followed by Jacque Pepin, Madeleine Kamman, Paul Prudhomme, etc.) inadvertently partnered with the food industry. We tend to forget that the food media developed right alongside the modern industrial food complex. For most of human history, knowledge of nourishment and nutrition was kept in the family: passed from one generation of home cooks to the next. Food and its preparation, recipes and home-remedies, were passed from parent to offspring, from elder to child. But when the daily meal became ‘cuisine,’ when soup became ‘potage’ and beef stew became ‘bourguignon,’ the maternal (or in some cases paternal) link was cut. Family heirlooms, culinary and agricultural, were tossed to the compost heap. Grandma no longer taught mother to bake biscuits. Grandpa no longer taught father to smoke stag meat. Feeding expertise moved outside the home. Corporate interests took the reigns. Factory sealed aluminum cans replaced Ball canning jars. Cryovac and flash-frozen fish replaced salt cod.

Julia Child — then an iconic symbol of American matriarchy – helped the food industry mark its territory. She did not make cooking simple. Instead, she wielded a wallop of a maternal guilt trip, showing women just how luxurious dinner could and should be. And all the while, she pretended it was easy. Now if you don’t have time to fashion a four-star fancy French feast, why bother cooking at all? Buy dinner instead! Restaurants were happy to serve take-out and delivery. Frozen TV platters were plentiful. Hamburger helper, Frito pie and Tuna Casserole were quick fixes that required purchasing packaged and processed provisions. The gargantuan food industry was more than happy to reap the dividends of the new home cook’s insecurity and learned helplessness. Meanwhile industrious parents with time, money and higher education, were elated to learn the new culinary arts. Epicurean expertise not only became a signpost of superior sophistication, it also proved that privilege was the paragon of good homemaking. Or in psychoanalytic terms, the ‘good’ breast flows with gourmet milk.

This is how an unintentional partnership between our favorite foodies and a corporate food industry created a national cuisine that perfectly fits our capitalist culture. I disagree with the critics who claim that the USA – because it is always dipping from a multicultural fondue pot of immigrants at the forefront of a global economy — can never develop its own food. They say it will always be just an amalgam of everything — including the sink. However, I’d argue there is a National cuisine. But it has nothing to do with ingredients and recipes. It is not about hamburgers, apple pie, Cajuns, California or barbecue. Instead, it is a consumerist cuisine: food fit for commercialism.

It is seen in value added products with surnames like imported, organic, local and authentic. These products insure a dynamic market where bread is no longer just bread. Instead, it is a commodity with multiple price points. Wheat. Multigrain. Artisan. Like a car, an electronic gadget, software, or a hedge fund, there are different versions that range in price from cheap to outrageously expensive. And each version’s value is related to the authority granted to it by celebrity chefs and cookbook authors.

Part 2: Sustain us!

Too Many Lobbyists in the Kitchen: The Bitterness of Gastro-political Activism

Julia Child, following in the footsteps of France’s Escoffier, made the Twentieth Century the American age of culinary opulence and value-added luxury with Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). Michael Pollan, following in the footsteps of a new generation of chefs like Alice Waters, has set the Twenty-First Century on the track to an age of epicurean ethics. Every bite is political. You vote with your fork. It is a new mythology of mastication that resonates with our capitalist ideological foundation. Table manners are reconstructed into political lobbying.

Although this new gastronomic grass-roots activism seems to be in resistance to the corporate control of our agricultural food system, the implications are more complicated and potentially problematic.

Retailers like Whole Foods and authors like Michael Pollan,  Eric Schlosser, and Jonathan Safan Foer – although admirable in their intentions – have inadvertently sown the seeds of the political food movement in the same noble soil of entitlement that sprouted the separation of eaters along class lines. These heroes of culinary activism neglect to point out that it is in the backyards of wealthy hosts that marginalized party guests suffer from the toxic run-off of the exclusive cocktail hour. In other words, the national food system that has caused obesity and diabetes epidemics with commodity corn sweeteners and cheap subsidized calories is in fact the flip side of the culinary sophistication heralded by TV personalities and cookbook chefs.

Consider that one advantage to mastering the art of an ethnic cuisine is that it invalidates the kitchen antics of the average family cook and widens the gap between classes. Despite Grandma’s old world origins and the hardships of the boat ride she made from the homeland, her unsophisticated ‘macaroni’ smothered with tomato ‘gravy’ and topped with the cheap pecorino Romano is inauthentic now that she resides in an urban immigrant neighborhood. Never mind that South Philadelphia and Boston’s North End can claim direct culinary lineage to Italy. Because Mario Batali has defined regional Italian cuisine for an audience of food network junkies and Manhattan restaurant patrons, Nonna is an imposter. Her lack of interest in truffle oil is indicative of both financial and culinary inadequacy. And now, in the age of gastro-political activism, not only is her so-called non-traditional cooking mediocre, it is also ethically and nutritionally suspect.

Clearly, it benefits the narcissistic interests of affluent eaters to increase the oppositional space between authentic and fallacious food — and to equate that opposition with simple moral parallels like good and bad, or political parallels like local and corporate agriculture.

TV chefs are not the only offenders. Scientific food engineers also inadvertently help increase the divide. Synthetic flavor enhancers, for example, are increasingly used to trick taste buds, preserving and augmenting the polar divisions in the process. Empty laboratory constructed calories masquerade as nutrients, fooling neurotransmitters on microscopic levels. Evolutionary biologists argue that artificial food dyes and flavors deceive our hard-wired instincts to eat what’s good for us. Meanwhile, government subsidies increase the economic distance between vitamin rich vegetables and sugary soda pop. A liter of coke is cheaper than a head of Swiss chard. The poles get further apart. As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, so healthy gets healthier and junk food gets junkier.

However, we should not blame only the corporations like Cargill, Kraft, Sara-Lee and Philip Morris. The ambience of the American consumerist cafeteria lunch line seems to be the only logical next chapter in the culinary myth that began with the epicurean elitism of the Twentieth Century. Therefore, we should look critically at both the corporate industrial infrastructure of the U.S. food supply and the popular intellectual movement that resists it.

Not only is local, organic and/or ethical the new higher-priced luxury prefix signifying opulence on national menus, it is also a moral marker of piety preserved for people of privilege. Now upper class, educated articulate speakers (following in the footsteps of Julia Child) – calling themselves healthy eating advocates, nutrition educators, and political activists – can act like missionaries saving poor savages. No longer do we teach the infidels that our God sustains life better, now our food provides a more nourishing experience.

Give us each day our daily bread, but make sure its whole grain and unbleached. Sure, it is more expensive. However, hard work is rewarded with dollars. And dollars bring everyone closer to enjoying the everlasting benefits of upper class moral superiority. Yes, only the rich can digest the divine rewards of the new consumerist culinary religion. Fast food, soda pop and commodity corn (and increasingly, animal based proteins) bear the markings of a new heathenism.

Unfortunately, this political food movement confuses its socialist tendencies with free-market opulence and progressively mythologizes local, organic and small-scale food processing as the new road to Mecca. They have forgotten the great depression’s soup lines. They ignore the fact that the U.S.A currently eats better than any society in human history. They’ve repressed memories of the hunger citizens endured just a hundred years earlier. The centralization of the national food supply fed millions of hungry people and has all but eradicated starvation in developed countries (albeit at the expense of the third world).  Thanks to the subsidization of commodity crops, the average U.S. consumer need only spend 9.8% of his disposable income on food.  And clearing the table of precarious and vulnerable local food economies is precisely what enabled a national bounty. Do the pundits of the new political food movement see that they are merely advocating that history plays like a bad song on repeat? The pendulum moves in the opposite direction. From local to global and back again, we swing from one hyperbolic extreme to the other.

Of course, there is nothing new about this debate. It is a county fair pie-eating contest between centralized hoarding and individual autonomy. It is not only a central paradox of our democratic capitalist economy (social welfare state or corporate manifest destiny and the unequal distribution of wealth?). It is also the principle enigma facing the socialized animal: individual or cultural sovereignty. This polarity and its psychological ramifications are symbolized in many ancient stories. As staples for human survival, food and water are ideal ingredients for an mythological repast.

For example, our current food and agricultural infrastructure is based on the same metaphorical edifice as the prudent advice of Joseph the dream interpreter (Genesis 41:31). He counsels Pharaoh to store the bountiful harvest’s grains in preparation for the inevitable seven years of famine lurking right around the corner. Let us not forget that, like biblical Egypt, the U.S.A. streamlines, stores and industrializes the food supply not only to satiate the appetites of corporate fat bellies, but also to fortify the nation against the threat of famine and crop-killing natural disasters. Likewise, the authors and activists who try to resist the corporate food economy have unconsciously built their argument upon a mythological foundation. Like Moses, they attempt to liberate the chosen people from an overly indulgent and exploitative corporate and government Pharaoh.

In this retelling of Exodus, however, the chosen people are not enslaved. Instead they are sophisticated and privileged. They are a select few who have the advantages necessary to heed a message that perpetuates class-based moral separatism. The media validates them. The restaurants cater to them.
It is not blood that they will smear on their doorposts but rather zesty arrabiata sauce made from organic vine ripened tomatoes and flavored with Niman Ranch pancetta. Growth hormones and antibiotics will smite the first born of the unsophisticated and undereducated. The liberated elite will part the waters of high-fructose soda pop, shedding the shackles of common cuisine and heading off into the desert.

The unleavened flat bread of the new Israelites is not the bland matzo my grandmother served. It is pizza in its ‘authentic’ new American manifestation.

Hopefully, they’ll use my recipe:

RECIPE FOR PIZZA PERFECTION

For the Dough:

1 7-gram packet active dry yeast

1 ¼ cups warm water

1 TBS Pesto

1 TBS Sea Salt

3-5 Cups of Flour

Fit your mixer or food processor with the dough kneading blade or paddle. Inside the mixer bowl, dissolve the yeast in the water. When it starts to bubble and smells yeasty, add 2 cups of flour. Mix to combine. Allow the batter consistency concoction to double in size. (This step is called making a sponge. It gets the yeast going and helps develop gluten). Add salt and pesto. Add 1 cup of flour. Knead adding small amounts of flour until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Coat the dough with olive oil and allow it to rise until doubled in size.

For the sauce:

In a blender or food processor, combine 1 6oz can of tomato paste with 2 TBS of sugar, 1 tsp Sea Salt, 1 TBS of Pesto, 3 TBS Red Wine, ½ TBS Fennel Seed, and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Blend until smooth.

To assemble the pizza:

Turn on oven at highest setting (450-550 degrees Fahrenheit). Place a large cast iron skillet on the stove at medium-low flame. Stretch half of your dough (reserve the second half for another pizza) out so that you have a disc the size of your pan. Lay dough on the hot skillet. Spread half of the sauce evenly with a rubber spatula. Cover with cheese and toppings of your choice.

Bake the pizza in the hot oven until the cheese is gooey and bubbling. Turn on your broiler and brown the top of the pie for 1-2 minutes

(careful not to burn it!).

Open a bottle of red wine. Pour. Drink.

The preceding is an excerpt from a proposal I’ve written for a book entitled:

Eat. how food became religion and why we’ll never feed our hungry souls.

If you are in the publishing business and interested in reading the entire proposal, please email me: jordosh@gmail.com

A song has been playing over and over again. It has been blasting on the car stereo as I drive. It has been floating from itunes into my headphones as I browse the internet. It has been wafting through the speakers of the home stereo.

I wrote the song three or four months ago. The basic chord progression was discovered by accident while fiddling around with the guitar. But the song didn’t really take flight until I started working it at the piano.

Until that moment, I hadn’t really played that particular piano much at all. Perhaps I couldn’t find the time. Maybe I didn’t have the desire. It is not a Steinway or a Bösendorfer, but it is my dream piano.  A Boston built Ivers and Pond’s from 1924, it displays the structural integrity of an airship. When I bought the piano, bizarre lead weights on the back of each key kept the quality of my playing tethered to the limited physical strength I could muster from my fingers. After the weights were removed my hands could launch sound and timbre just by gliding across the synthetic ivory key tops.

However, it is not the instrument’s sonic, mechanical or decorative properties that give it its oneiric qualities. In fact, the piano’s tone lacks the jet-like speed, intensity and brilliance that place better pianos on runways of their own. Instead, its value is in the circumstances of the piano’s acquisition. This small grand is the first piano I purchased with my own earned income. This is the piano I imagined at 13 years old. The instrument is the culmination of boyhood dreams in which I lift off into an ethereal adult existence as orchestra conductor, rock star, or classical composer.

No matter that the piano was purchased not with proceeds from a professional career in music, but rather with money earned flipping pancakes in a diner. When the movers carried it into my house and reattached the legs and damper pedals, it represented an arrival, a landing. It was evidence that the slow conclusion (at 30 years of age) of an elongated adolescence was underway. Hard work and responsibility had paid off and the instrument was material evidence of happiness. Or was it?

In late 2007, the piano sat surrounded by extraordinarily expensive guitars crafted from fine Indian rosewood and Sitka spruce. I pushed my hair out of my eyes. The new haircut was intended to resemble John Lennon’s in Bob Gruen’s famous New York City T-shirt photo, or the mad-scientist-like locks that flew around Leopold Stokowski’s head as he set an orchestra afloat with the wave of his baton. But in its infancy the ‘doo looked more like the frizzy synthetic fuzz that sits atop a child’s troll toy. Whether I would have admitted or not, inside of me there was a ‘tween-ager acting like a new school year was about to begin; he believed that hairstyle held the mana of coolness.  So I ran my hands through my rock and roll coiffure and I glanced at the piano. It was clear that the instrument was more like an over-inflated balloon taking up too much space in the living room of my small Philadelphia row house than the beacon of maturity it was meant to be. Clearly the symbolism was not strong enough to provide a smooth touch down on firm individuated adult tarmac.  Instead, it sat unplayed — used mostly as a shelf on which to stack books waiting to be read.

Yes, I kept my emotional distance, but I physically played it often. After 20 years of practicing scales, arpeggios, jazz runs and blues riffs, any piano beckons to be touched. But I never had my heart in it. Sure, after studying the structural dynamics of counterpoint and harmony, I feel compelled to plow through the technical foundations of each song or melody that intrigues me, tilling the musical loam for buried treasure. But at that time the piano was nothing more than an abacus on which I counted seeds of theoretical harmonics and melodic ingenuity.

That is until this song brought the piano and me into the same atmosphere. The song reinstated my sentimental relationship with, not only this hunk of wood, felt and copper-wound steel, but also any other set of 88 black and white keys tuned to the western chromatic scale. Furthermore, it reacquainted me with the sonic, emotional, unearthly and soulful possibilities that those keys represent.

It is an old conflict. One where even the most stubborn of modernist rationalists are not afraid to use words like ‘soul.’ Music can be played with or without soul; and the majority of folks, aware of the expressive limitations of simple technical mastery, still tolerate the immeasurability of the mystical properties that define a ‘good’ or ‘soulful’ musical performance.

This paper focuses on ‘soulful’ performance.  Locating ‘soul’ in the space between performer and audience, I attempt to understand the lived experience of the performance relationship. I apply post-Jungian dreamwork techniques as a method to understand the experience of performing and I use of a variety of depth psychological concepts in order to describe the actual relationship between performer and audience. First, however, I must discuss what is meant by ‘soulful’ performance.

Colloquially we describe music as coming from the soul. A musician adept at performing music from a ‘feeling’ perspective, rather than a bland mathematical or technical perspective, is considered soulful. The better dancer, one who can feel the music in his body, has more rhythm and ‘soul.’ Languaged in Jungian psychological terms, we might say a soulful musical performance flows, uninhibited, from the unconscious of the objective psyche (soul).

But even in Jungian terms, we are only using fancy esoteric terms to describe something that is ultimately indescribable. John, a 59-year-old blues harmonica player and front man for the Dukes of Destiny told me,

I can spin a whole lot of words, ya know, but I don’t think I can logically explain it . . . but I think there’s beauty in not knowing. And you try — you strive to kind of understand it, recognizing that you’ll never really fully understand it, because it’s beyond human comprehension. That’s why it hits in such an emotional way because you can’t rationalize it, you can’t look at it. There are musicians who in one context, they’ve got the same chops and all that, but there’s some vital spark, there’s some type of soul lacking. And in another context same chops, same musician, they have that soul. (Colgan-Davis, 2009)

John was my eighth grade history teacher. He crooned “bingo-bango,” clapped his hands and pointed excitedly with his index finger every time a student called out the correct answers to his questions. I remember his American History class fondly because his teaching, unlike so many of my other instructors, exhibited – for lack of a better word – soul.  

John and I had our reunion on Labor Day in a local coffee shop called Infusion. He was smaller than I’d remembered. Or perhaps, out of context – without the mythos of the classroom or the heart pounding bass of a 12 bar blues progression — he had only the stature of a regular guy ordering Sumatra Mandheling. We both sipped coffee in the back courtyard of the store talking music and doing what absorbed music fans generally do together. We discussed the indescribable quality that makes a musician good, or soulful.

Although our intellectually elitist language was laced with academic mumbo jumbo, the conversation was just like most casual conversations about music or pop culture. It was saturated with personal opinions. In casual coffee shop talk, either one of our taste preferences was evidence enough that a performer, in John’s words, could “hit that same spot.” Presumably, he meant the soul spot.

The ease with which we allowed the subjectivity of our musical preferences to permeate the discussion is not indicative of frivolity or theoretical remiss. On the contrary, as Simon Frith writes in his 1998 book, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, “part of the pleasure of pop culture is talking about it; part of its meaning is talk, talk which is run through with value judgments. To be engaged with pop culture is to be discriminating, whether judging the merits of a football team’s backs or an afternoon’s soap’s plots” (p.4).

Yet it is precisely this propensity to let personal opinion and value judgment inform our understanding of pop culture that I have tried to avoid in my earlier writings.

Adopting an archetypal or mythopoetic perspective, I’ve imagined the rock star, or performer, as a product of collective projective identification. This perspective describes a successful performance as one that, for better or for worse, simply engages the audience. In this way, by assuming that the performer’s skill is a mysterious ability to reflect and embody the contents of his or her audience’s unconscious, the artistic content becomes only one piece of a much larger text, or phenomenon, worthy of study. Furthermore, whether an artist receives praises or criticisms is irrelevant. What interests me is the collective unconscious energy that is constellated around him, because I believe that understanding the roots of that energy can potentially illuminate quite a bit about our collective psyche. For example, consider Michael Jackson. The products he sold — his singing, dancing and showmanship — have become the subjects of his eulogy. However, I would argue that his biggest contribution to culture was his image; and much of the power that his image held was located in his often-denounced lifestyle. Although we condemned the aptly named King of Pop for an obsession with modifying his own visual appearance, this behavior (and particularly the motivations we imagined for it: Jackson never completely explained why) perfectly reflected the extremely narcissistic adolescent superficiality of our consumer culture. So much so that while most of us would agree that ‘the culture’ is just as ‘freakish’ as we often claimed Jackson was, few of us see our own contributions to the creation of — or take personal responsibility for the continuation of — a consumerism that vainly attempts to ‘whiten’ the wide-nosed, dark shadows with easily purchased goods and services. Instead, we project it on to others: celebrities, politicians and the mythical mainstream other (to which nobody claims total membership).

A pop star like Michael Jackson, therefore, is for modern culture what a Greek god was for ancient Athenians. The combination of artifacts around a specific performer represents a compensatory illustration of non-integrated aspects of collective (or specifically, the particular group of fans’) unconscious material. Consider, for example, the androgynous physical image of male rock stars from a mythological perspective. These guitar warriors who always get the girl (or boy) seem to blend and challenge cultural concepts of masculine and feminine in a way that is not acceptable anywhere else in our cultural milieu. Elvis wore tight sequined jump suits. The Beatles pushed the envelope of acceptable boy haircuts and admittedly emulated the girl groups of the fifties. David Bowie wore glam make up and tight unitards. Robert Plant’s voice, stage choreography and long golden locks might simply be described as effeminate. In these cases, the androgynous image seems to function as a collective projection of what C.G. Jung would call alchemical conjunctio, or psychic union of opposites.  “Jung noted that most people do not wish to see their own contrasexual sides. Instead, they tend to project these, and both positive and negative aspects of themselves, onto someone else” (Douglass, 1990, p. 67). The androgynous image of the male rock star signifies the incorporation of unacceptable feminine qualities into the male psyche. I am not arguing that every male rock star has incorporated his own feminine qualities, but rather that the image of the rock star symbolizes the union of masculine and feminine for the fans. Thus, the rock and roll fan projects his unlived and unconscious potential — and the collective’s unlived and unconscious potential — for a union of contrasexual opposites. Jung writes that “projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face” (Jung, 1951/1978, p. 9). In this case, the unknown potential for psychic wholeness is projected onto the performer. It is this projection that gives the performer his bewitching power, or mana.

This line of thought certainly holds a grain of truth. However, its exegesis of living beings as purely mythological material is two-dimensional and limited. It looks at the performer as if he were a text, a scripture, an idol.  In fact, the performer is a person with flesh, imagination and soul.

Certainly, one could make the argument (as I have elsewhere) that even at a rock concert the performer is so isolated from the fans through stage lighting, sets and security that he cannot possibly be experienced as a flesh and blood being. In other words, we could say that the projection onto rock stars is almost identical to the projection onto marble statues of Greek deities or other forms of idolatry. However, this limited way of understanding the rock star is only partly true. While it is helpful in illuminating the archetypal roots of an audience’s experience, it neglects to take into consideration the performer as a living being with his or her own experience.

It seems, therefore, that it would be beneficial to look at the performer’s experience with an ultimate goal to explore the phenomenological relationship between the rock musician and the audience.

One way to do this is by imagining the relationship from an alchemical perspective. In his 1998 book The Mystery of Human Relationship: Alchemy and the Transformation of Self, Nathan Schwartz-Salant writes,

The true mystery in relationship lies less in the quest for understanding who is projecting what on to whom and more in the exploration of ‘third areas,’ the ‘in between’ realm which was the main focus of ancient science in general and of alchemy in particular. (p.x)

Perhaps that ‘third area’ is what John the harmonica player referred to as “that same spot.” Perhaps the mark of a good performance is its ability to engage in relationship.
John described his band’s relationship to the audience:

It becomes this energy exchange, this feedback loop, ya know, we put out a certain presence, a certain energy. Audience picks up on it and they feed us and we put out that energy – more energy, ya know, it becomes this – this like loop, but its gotta start with us getting the audience to that point where that exchange can really start to happen. (Colgan-Davis, 2009).

John’s statement is congruent with the writings of Marie Louise Von Franz in Projection and Re-collection in Jungian Psychology. She writes, “One of the oldest ways of symbolizing projection is by means of projectiles, especially the magic arrow” (1987, p. 20), and she reminds us that, “whenever projection takes place there is first of all a ‘sender’ and a ‘receiver’” (p.20). From talking to John, it sounds like both the performer and the audience do their fair share of sending and receiving magic arrows.

Frankie, the 32-year-old front man for a local Philadelphia folk rock band called The Discount Heroes (Cheap sandwiches? Second rate comic book characters?), described the energy exchange this way, “you can just see, you can hear and see as people get more into it, because they’re feeding off each other and giving each other this really good, positive, honest energy” (Tartaglia, 2009).

Frankie and I have been close friends since we were both children. We’ve written songs and performed music together since puberty. In fact, he co-authored and sang the vocal part on the recording of the song that I’ve kept on repeat, the song that’s been playing over and over again while I write this.

Frankie is an owner of a South Philadelphia music venue through which undiscovered indie rock bands trudge during what can barely be likened to rock and roll promotional tours. He spends so much time performing on his own stage that he told me, “It doesn’t matter where I am because whatever stage I get on, I’m on that stage” (Tartaglia, 2009).

Frankie has been performing nonstop since early childhood and is regularly admired for his stage presence. Glow? Magnetism? Pick whatever word suits you – any word that can connote the mystical feeling you experience when engaged with a compelling performer. Perhaps it is simply the performer’s ability to cultivate relationship.

The Jungian analyst Schwartz-Salant, writing about the clinical therapeutic interaction, imagined “a relationship as — to use a mathematical phrase — a field that both people engaged and which, most mysteriously, moved and molded their processes, both individually and together, as if these processes were mere waves upon a larger sea” (p.x).  This seems similar to the way John described an energy feedback loop. By imagining it as an energy field Schwartz-Salant locates it in a three-dimensional space, enabling us to use almost tangible spatial, material and geometrical metaphors in order to observe and describe it.

Winnicott also made this jump from the ethereal to the spatial when writing about relationship when he “used the term transitional to describe the ‘intermediate’ or ‘third area’” (Johns, 2005).  Winnicott’s idea of transitional space is helpful for understanding the performers’ relationship to audience, especially when described by Jungian Analyst Ann Belford Ulanov in her 2001 book, Finding Space: Winnicott, God, and Psychic Reality:

In his discovery of transitional space, Winnicott witnesses to the location of the numinous in the space between self and other, in the human realm, and between the human and the divine, in the religious realm. What Winnicott discovers as pivotal for the beginnings of our lives, as infants with our mothers, extends to the making of our whole life as adults, even up to death. Are we related — as Jung asks — to something infinite, or not? Or do we avoid that space by refusing to enter it or by stubborn reification — making an idol or a fanatical religion? (p.5)

Fusing Jung and Winnicott’s theories, she succinctly explains how projection factors into ‘third area’ relational experiences. She writes, “Projection is our contribution to the spaces of illusion in which we plumb the deep nature of the real” (p.11). Furthermore, she explains, “for reality to be real to us, it must partake of illusion, says Winnicott, meaning that we must contribute to its construction or it will possess no sense of the real for us” (p. 11). Yes, the real relational space is not something one can step into, but rather something to which all participants must contribute their illusions.

It seems, then, that in order to adopt a spatial image of relationship, we need to abandon the one-sided notion that the musician has the mysterious ability to create a captivating performance.  Instead, we must envision the performer — and the audience — as both sender and receiver. Expanding Schwartz-Salant’s metaphor, we might imagine both parties as bobbling buoys on the collective sea, both tossed around chaotically by an autonomous world soul.

I recognize that the sea metaphor steps dangerously close to the old fate versus free-will debate. However, that trite dichotomy is based in the notion of causality: that there must be a cause or first triggering action from either within or without. In order to deepen our understanding of the phenomenon of performance relationship we will need to escape the comfortable grip of the concepts of individual agency and rational causality. Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes:

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgement, and action, organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively — both against other such wholes and against social and natural background — is however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures. (1973, p.34)

And since no individual — neither the audience nor the performer — is the primary triggering force in the relationship, the notion of causality becomes a useless chicken or egg riddle or a brain-teasing carousel. Besides, causality is more or less grounded in the same ‘superstitious’ theology that positivist rationalism claims to eradicate. As Marie Louise Von Franz writes,

The alleged absolute validity of causality in the natural sciences, which was first dethroned by the uncertainty principle in quantum physics and had to give way to the idea of statistical probability, stems ultimately from the theological God-image. Descartes, the father of modern thinking about causality, based the validity of the causality principle expressly on his conviction that God would always and absolutely hold himself to his own rules that he had established once and for all. (1987, p.63)

Therefore, can we conceive of performance as an autonomous exchange of energy between equals? And does locating the relationship in a three-dimensional space without causality make it any easier to talk about? Not necessarily. When I sent Michael Stipe, lead singer for the popular rock band R.E.M., a SMS text message, asking him if he’d talk to me about his experiences with the psychic energy exchange in the field between performer and audience, he understood exactly what I meant, but nonetheless responded, “I can try. It’s pretty ummm . . . hard to describe I guess” (Stipe, 2008-2009).

This is a problem I come up against with any performers I talk to.  And from my own knowledge of performance, I can relate. The actual experience of playing music in front of a group seems to happen so fast, in an other worldly fashion, that it might be compared to being in a trance or a dream. You kind of feel it and go with it.

Katie, a Philadelphia singer-songwriter who fronts the band the Sleepwells had a distant look in her eyes when we met in the control room of a local recording studio that her husband owns (the same studio where that repeating song was recorded). Surrounded by mixing boards, microphones and other gear with mysterious blinking LED lights, she described performing as “a sensory overload on all aspects of the spectrum” (Barbato, 2009). As I asked each question, her eyes would roll back a little and then I seemed to be left all alone in the room while she surveyed Boston’s House of Blues in her imagination.

What appeared to be Katie’s aptitude for psychic space travel might be explained by assuming that the performer experiences a kind of ecstatic state in which the “inner rock star” takes over control of the body from the ego perspective. The performance is not actually enacted by the habitual consciousness of the person on stage. Therefore, engaging in a discussion with the habitual ego of the performer in a traditional interview setting is tantamount to speaking with a witness, observer, or fan. It is like trying to understand the performers’ lived experience by talking to an audience member. Except that while the audience member was actually there, the habitual ego-self was left in the green room.

Any performer can attest that a ‘different person’ shows up on stage. While sitting backstage after an R.E.M. show, drinking French beer in a dressing room that had the cinderblock-walled aesthetics of a high-school locker room, Michael Stipe spoke in a soft timid voice with the breathiness of a gentle whisper. The squeaky, vulnerable vibrato tone — that sounds both awkwardly human and strangely like injection molded plastic – in which he sings, “that’s me in the corner/that’s me in the spotlight, losing my religion/trying to keep up with you/and I don’t know if I can do it/oh no, I’ve said too much/I haven’t said enough” (R.E.M., 1991) was nowhere to be found. We were discussing his sculpture: bronze castings of obsolete technologies from 1980s: VCRs, Cameras, Cassette tapes.  I asked him if he thought his artwork could ever transcend its marginalized status as a rock star’s hobby in the public’s perception. He seemed confused by the question, he answered, “I don’t think of myself as a rock star, I think of myself as an artist” (Stipe, 2008-2009) No, the rock star is simply the personality that is in control when he’s on stage doing his job. Its just one medium the artist works in. This is common sense. After all, how many trial attorneys feel like trial attorneys all the time? Only the workaholics. How many real estate agents are in open house showing mode all day long? Not the healthy ones. How many psychoanalysts are interpreting twenty-four hours a day 7 days a week? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Yes, we’d like to define ourselves by the singularity of our professions. We’d like to believe that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  However, not one of us carries such a limited tool belt.

Instead, we are each made up of a compendium of different personalities. This is James Hillman’s idea of a multiplicity of selves: imaginal individuals make up the big Self. Or, as Mary Watkins states in Invisible Guests (2000), “the Self is that world of characters whom one entertains and/or identifies with” (p.2). In his 2007 book Embodiment, Robert Bosnak defines the idea of a multiplicitous psyche:

A vision based on a network of simultaneous subjectivities points beyond self-centered psychologies to a network of selves, like cellular clusters constantly shifting shapes, associating and dissociating in the magma of embodiment. Such a psychology does not originate in a paradigm of a single self that fractures, but in the metaphor of a more or less cohesive community of subjectivities in various states of interaction, communing with one another, with other humans around, and with the physical world (pp.65-66).

The concept of a multiplicitous self is congruent with most people’s experience. John, the harmonica player, said it nicely, “we talk to our boss one way, we talk to our friends another way, we talk to our spouses another way, we talk to our kids another way” (Colgan-Davis, 2009). I’ll admit to staring in the mirror and having conversations with myself. Hell, I’ll even admit there are stylists inside of me debating which outfit to put on in the morning. I have publicists and lawyers in my head coaching me about which things to say and which things to keep silent. And I have inner talent agents and managers considering how my actions will contribute to tomorrow’s headlines in the imaginary tabloid that circulates my immediate social group.  There’s a whole entourage of characters that have been consulting with ‘the performer’ and my habitual ego-consciousness ever since we hit puberty and started worrying about how we appeared. Then, I stared at my awkward reflection in a sliding glass door that lead out to our small inner city yard. I listened to an internal panel of producers having a debate while I tried on different swaggers, hairstyles, t-shirts and bedroom eyes. Now it happens while shaving, or in the shower, or in the dressing room at Bloomingdales while a tailor measures my inseam. I’m in constant dialogue with my own inner performer and don’t really see any reason why I can’t also converse with somebody else’s.

In order to interact with somebody else’s performer, however, it is helpful to approach him as if he is a dream character, a cellular cluster, an autonomous subjectivity or one self who shares a body with many others. Therefore, I set out to speak directly with the imaginal performer by trying to meet him in his natural habitat: the stage. Using a guided imagination technique we entered a performance together, one with lights and microphones, sounds, smells and tastes.

Sure, you could argue that the performer’s natural habitat is on the stage in a bar, a coffee shop, a theater or some other crowded venue that is not the same as an imaginary place. However, I am operating within a Jungian paradigm that assumes that the “inner world is just as real as the outside world with which we are familiar; in fact more real, for it is infinite and everlasting and does not change and decay as the outside world constantly does” (Hannah, 2001, p. 5). This is a jump necessary to work within the model of the performance relationship as interactive field. It requires that we “not take refuge in a scientific model of objectivity which is ultimately limited to sorting out the mutual projections” of performer and audience. Instead, relationship “is characterized by an essential subject-object merger, a state in which the question of ‘whose contents’ are being experienced cannot be determined” (Schwartz-Salant, 1998 p.26). Furthermore, for those readers who require the comforting familiarity of scientific materialism, recent brain research has shown that neurologically (bio-electrically and chemically) there is no difference between listening to a song in your imagination and actually listening to it broadcast from your ipod into a pair of headphones. As far as your brain is concerned, a few moments ago when you ‘heard’ the recorded version of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” in your head while reading the lyrics, it might as well have been blasting from your car’s stereo. The human brain displays the same physically measurable behavior in both cases (Levitin, 2007, p. 150).  Since the embodied response to musical events in the imaginal world is the same as the embodied response to musical events in the (so-called) real world, it is safe to say that interacting with a performer within an imaginal landscape can at least give us a good approximation of the lived experience of performance in a material landscape.

So, when I met with performers, I started with a progressive relaxation technique. I counted down backwards from ten and suggested that the subject feel him or herself entering the space between dreaming and waking. Following Robert Bosnak’s lead, I referred to the state they were entering as “hypnogogic” or “sleep onset.” These pseudo-scientific (read magic with implied semantic authority) terms enabled the subject to easily feel comfortable embracing the imaginal space, because the notion of ego responsibility had been eradicated. In other words, there’s no need to try and sound cool while you’re being hypnotized, because you can’t be held responsible for the things that you say in altered states. Curiously, like a drunken boyfriend caught with his pants down and pleading that the booze (spirits) made him do it, the ubiquitous concept of the singular-Self acknowledges other autonomous voices but makes no claim to ownership, or even cohabitation. For my purposes, therefore, introducing the concept of a trance state allows me to overcome the biggest disadvantage to working with performers: they are practiced at making split second judgments about the audience’s — in this case the researcher’s — desires and tailoring their performance accordingly. By adopting a technique that bore a minor resemblance to hypnotic suggestion, I hoped I was turning off the ego’s inclination to direct, produce, censor, etc. Or, in Robert Bosnak’s words, I hoped to “loosen — dissolve — the grip of the fusion between identification and habitual consciousness” (Embodied Imagination, 2009).

In fact, the techniques I used for guiding the performer into an imaginal performance landscape were almost identical to the embodiment techniques developed by Robert Bosnak.

Bosnak works with dreams and memories. He moves his clients into the imaginal space with the intention of affecting transformation by getting to the embodied root of the emotion or dream feeling. Bosnak, along with Janet Sonenberg, has developed a process of doing dreamwork with actors that attempts to create a stage performance that comes directly from the autonomous imagination. According to Sonenberg and Bosnak, the actor dreams for — and ultimately embodies — a ‘real’ and autonomous imaginal character (one that presumably exists beyond the pages of the script). My work with music performers works backwards from here, assuming that the performer ‘accidentally’ learns to ‘host’ the imaginal character.

My intention was to engage the imaginal character directly – the performing self — and to undertake a phenomenological study of his or her experience.

To do so, I guided each of my subjects through a performance as if it were a dream. With eyes closed, the musician described a gig in the first person present, during which I asked questions, focusing on details.
For example, questions might have included:

Describe the lighting.
What do you smell?
Are there sounds besides the music?
Can you taste the aluminum of the microphone?
How does the stage feel under your feet?

Once I felt that they had entered the imaginal landscape as if it were the present, I shifted my focus explicitly to the performer’s body. I hoped that my subject would embody the performer in an imaginal space. Then he or she could begin to feel or sense into the experience and share the details with me. My intention was to “patiently tease out the strands” of the brief, distant and fast moving memory of performance until it became “a sentient environment” (Sonenberg 2003, p. 64).  I attempted to make each individual subject sense into a performance fantasy, and experience their embodied landscape and ultimately switch perspective and sense into the body of the audience or of other musicians. Because the guided imagination allowed me to “watch” the performance in slow motion, I was free to interrupt and ask questions while the performance was ‘happening.’ Armed with the power to distort and augment imaginal performance time, I was able to achieve a much more nuanced understanding of the experience.

My work with Frankie provides a good illustration of the process. We sat in his second floor apartment in the Italian Market neighborhood of South Philadelphia. I had seen him perform the night before and I knew he was preparing for a gig that weekend. I liked that I was meeting with him between these two gigs. I figured he would have a fresh performance in his mind while mentally preparing for the next. I hoped that would make the active imagination easier.

He settled into the relaxed space quickly but he had trouble talking about the performance in the first person present. He was trying to remember what happens and provide me with the data he assumed I was looking for.

He was talking about his usual process instead of observing the imaginal experience. He was speaking from an ego-centered perspective and I felt like the experiment was out of my control. I wasn’t getting the type of results I’d expected. My lack of experience at enacting the embodied imagination process was an obstacle but ultimately I was able to refine my technique as we proceeded. After he told me some details about the performance, I realized that it was going to take considerable effort on my part to slow down the story and ask questions that would allow Frankie to feel immersed in a true performance landscape.

He had been trying to fabricate the experience out of a compendium of memories and because of this his talk was a combination of pseudo-theoretical observations about what usually happens and why. In other words he wasn’t immersed in ambient imaginal reality. I asked him to try and be in the moment and tell me what’s happening, to watch it unfold as we’re talking. “I can try,” he says. I suggest he not interpret, only tell me what he sees. “How does it start?” I ask.

“ I step into the light, people are tuning up, they’re trying to figure out their amps, Joe’s – you know, screwing in cymbals. At which point I usually look for the nearest alcohol that’s on the stage” (Tartaglia, 2009).

I realize he’s already stepped out of his creative imagination. He’s fabricating. He’s creating the experience instead of observing it. The “at which point I usually” was the tell sign. I want more details. I want to know if he feels tension or nervous energy that makes him feel like he needs some alcohol to take the edge off, and I want to know in which part of his body he feels it. His shoulders? His neck? His back? I want to know if he feels dryness in his throat that screams, “take a drink.” Instead, he acts on habit. He looked for a drink because that’s what he always does. But he skipped the details. This is probably similar to the lived experience from his habitual ego consciousness standpoint. But the habitual attitude is just a witness trying to make sense of the internal performer’s actions. I want to talk to the performer.

“That’s good,” I reassure him, “but you’re talking about what you usually do, I want you to actually imagine you’re there right now and just describe what you see.” I can tell this makes him nervous. It is a level of Zen-like mindfulness in the present to which most of us are not accustomed. Without experience it can feel kind of ‘trippy.’ Nevertheless, he tries. He takes a deep breath and I can tell that he’s sinking deeper into the moment.

Frankie: Um, wires being plugged into guitars, Joe is screwing a wing nut into a cymbal and, um, I step over to the microphone and I thank everyone for coming out and I remind them of the wonderful array of, um, other acts that have played already tonight that were really fantastic and, uh, it starts raining.
This is really difficult, I can’t really do this.

Jordan: Okay, let me guide it then.

You step onto the stage and you see the bright light?

Uh-huh

Where is it?

Up to the left.

Are there any smells?

It smells like, you know, cigarette smoke and, you know, stale beer.

As you step onto the stage, does it feel different under your feet?

Its much more hollow and it feels like I’m on a stage, like I’m elevated. Like there’s air beneath the plank of wood.

Okay. And the first person you notice is Rob?

Um, no, it’s probably Joe at this point.

You said he’s screwing on cymbals?

Yeah he’s getting his drums. He’s putting his drums together.

Is he making any, are there noises coming from him?

Um, hmm.

What kind of noises?

No, I’m not hearing any noises coming off of Joe, I’m hearing guitars.

Guitars tuning up.

Yeah.

Whose guitar do you notice first tuning up? Do any come forward?

It could be Ron or Rob’s, I can’t really tell.

And then I start hearing the bass. And that’s pretty, um, I always know when I’m hearing Ian. I mean it’s a very different sound.

Can you feel it? Can you feel the bass anywhere in your body?

Yeah.

Where?

In my chest below my . . . above my belly and below my heart.

Okay.

But deeper, more in the pit of my stomach.
(Tartaglia, 2009).

He’s settled into the imaginal present now. He’s feeling it in his body.

The process looked similar with each of the subjects. When I worked with John it was a constant dance, moving back and forth between the imaginal present and the ego centered experience of trying to interpret the performance techniques and actions. When he was settled in the sentient performance landscape I could see his posture shifting as he imagined playing the harmonica or singing. Playing the harmonica involved holding his shoulders higher. I watched him move them unintentionally. When he was singing he displayed looser neck movements, as if his head was not attached with bone, flesh, muscle, but rather as if his chin floated like hovercraft on top of his shoulders. He barely reported any feeling in his neck or shoulders (when he did it was minor). Watching him, however, with his eyes closed, you could see the differences in his body.

Katie, who works as a therapist when she’s not on stage singing, had a professional fascination with the embodied imagination process. Her inner therapist turned out to be an obstacle, knocking her right out of the imaginal landscape to express her professional interest. For example, she described moving from the green room to the stage. I tried to focus on the moment right before she sang the first note. I wanted to slow it down. I wanted to get every detail of the felt experience of pre-song anticipation. When I told her it was almost time to start singing she unintentionally moistened her lips and swallowed as she took a deep breath. It was an almost involuntary action. I knew then that she was fully embodied in the moment. Her habitual consciousness, however, was still in the room with us observing and interpreting. “I definitely just took a deep breath and pursed my lips just now, so I’m sure that’s what I do right before I start singing,” She said.

“Are you aware of the first breath?” I inquired.

“I always am, it’s like taking the first breath before you dive into the water. I just take the biggest breath you can possibly ever take ‘cause I know I’m going on a ride or something” (Barbato, 2009). I was disappointed because she began to comment, theorize and interpret. I wanted her to stay in the imaginal space.

At times, these shifts in and out of the imaginal or dreamlike space felt like a failure on my part. Or worse, I wondered if my experiment was proving that my theoretical foundation was insufficient. The successful moments that surrounded the failures, however, seemed to prove otherwise. In the end, the inability to stay afloat in the non-ego (imaginal, unconscious, dream) world could most likely be attributed to the nature of consciousness. In other words, the ego-centered psyche, by definition, theorizes, interprets and analyzes. Only the complete elimination of ego-centered experience would make uninterrupted sojourns into the dream world possible. In his book Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement (1988), Gaston Bachelard writes,

When he has returned to a waking state, man rationalizes his dreams using the concepts from his everyday life. He has a vague recollection of the dream images, and already distorts them by expressing them in the language of his waking life. He does not realize that through the dream in its pure form, we come completely involved with the material and the dynamic imagination and, conversely, detached from formal imagination (p. 26).

Bachelard is talking about dreams, but for our purposes his description of the dissonance between habitual consciousness and the imaginal unconscious is helpful. This divide was the biggest obstacle I came up against.  In the end, I didn’t let it bother me. Instead, I continued to steer the dialogues into an embodied imaginal space.

As I journeyed into imaginal performance landscapes with each of my musician companions, I was shocked to discover how intimate the space felt. For example, when Frankie opened his eyes at the end of the exercise, they seemed wider than ever. I have known Frankie for almost 25 years, but as we finished the exercise his face looked unfamiliar. Paradoxically, however, I felt I now knew him more intimately than before. Has the reader ever had the experience of suddenly noticing particularities of the facial features of someone you’ve known very well for a very long time? This is what it felt like.
The experience with John was similar. He opened his eyes when we finished and his pupils and iris’ seemed to blend together into what looked like a dark brown tunnel to another world. His face seemed younger and the schoolteacher in my memory was completely missing. I wondered if all of the projected material that I had placed on John since eighth grade had dissolved in the shared imaginal moment. In other words, was I seeing the real John for the first time? No, both Johns were real. Instead, it was more likely that I was observing residues from an interaction with a part of him that I had not been privileged to meet before.

Katie and I did not know one another well at all before we started. Her husband and I had worked together on various music projects and Katie and I had both spent some time within the same circle of friends. We were familiar with the other’s songwriting, but the extent of our face-to-face communications up to that point had been limited to a handshake, a nod of the head or a brief hello and goodbye here and there. Guiding her into an imaginal performance turned out to involve an intimacy that seems uncharacteristic of an average everyday first conversation.

I remember clearly – as we finished and returned to the habitual world — not only that the deepness in her eyes was similar to what I saw in John’s, but also that her entire face looked different, as if I was suddenly sitting across from a different person. This was jarring and humbling, because I realized that I hadn’t seen Katie when we started. I like to think of myself as one who eschews making judgments solely based on superficial attributes. However, it was clear and a bit embarrassing to understand that my experience of her up to that point had been based on projections and assumptions. Like everyone does, she displayed a variety of social indicators: the way she styled her hair, the clothing and accessories she wore, her facial shape and body type, linguistic peculiarities, accent, dialect, physical movements, etc. I had unintentionally surmised that Katie was a compendium of all of the associations that I make – as a result of both personal historical experience and cultural or media persuasion — about her particular combination of individual artifacts. Yes, she was still an individual, not a stereotype, as she displayed a unique combination of personal artifacts. However, my experience of her was essentially limited to an amalgam of my own subjective experiences with the idiosyncrasies that she shared with others. And then, as her eyes opened I felt I was connected to a person that was a lot more than just her ‘image’ and my reactions to it. The split second decisions that her inner entourage made about how to present were suddenly irrelevant. She and I occupied a space together that seemed to transcend the everyday. Yet this was evident only upon returning to the everyday world.

Afterwards, Katie stood against the external brick wall of the hundred-year-old Philadelphia townhouse in which the recording studio occupies the second floor. We sipped Pabst Blue Ribbon beer on the fire escape and chatted about the imaginal experience that had just transpired. The flavor of watered down yeast and hops on the back of my tongue, the tipsiness, the pleasant beginnings of an enjoyable headache, and the awareness of masonry reminded me of the post concert conversation with Michael Stipe that I discussed above. It was as if I had just been watching her perform and we were now enjoying the after-gig energy blitz, one that felt exactly the same as it does when the concert takes place in a material, waking venue.

I realized, at that moment, that the connecting phenomenon that I had just experienced with Katie was identical to the experience of meeting in the transactional energy field between performer and audience. It involves a different kind of knowing, like meeting an old friend for the first time all over again. This is precisely what Elvis Costello describes so poetically in the quote at the beginning of this paper.

The mystical connected feeling in the space between performer and audience is responsible for the sensation that makes one fan in a stadium of thousands feel like the vocalist is singing directly to her. This explains why hearing the recordings of a particular artist can make us feel as though we know the artist or that he is our ‘friend.’ Yet, just as I know little about Mick Jagger’s private personas, my familiarity with Katie is limited to her inner singer-songwriter. Only her inner performer and my inner researcher fused in a relational energy field.

I could make the assumption that she and I connected on a soul level that transcends our multiplicitous selves and roots our interaction in an essential space where our true, authentic Selves meet. However, like using the term ‘soulful’ to describe an engaging performance, this metaphysical brain-leap involves applying archetypal structures of spirit, essence, God and divine Oneness that reveal more about cultural and unconscious proclivities towards Abrahamic monotheism than they do about the phenomenon of performance. Instead, it is sufficient to describe the phenomenon simply as a rare form of intimacy.

Intimacy may be the wrong word. Certainly the rock star would not describe his relationship to thousands of screaming teenagers as intimate. And yet the post-performance euphoria — which results from his energy exchange with the audience — seems to involve the same feelings as the post interview intimacy that I felt with my interviewees, specifically Katie.

Katie was not there when I arrived at the recording studio the next morning. The session had nothing to do with her.  We were recording the piano part for the song I’m listening to right now. After the technical arrangements had been made – positioning microphones, plugging in compressors and sound conditioning equipment – I removed my shoes and sat down on the bench.

Katie’s husband, Matt, suggested I remove my shoes while playing the piano months ago. At that time, I was contributing a few piano riffs for another band’s recording. My playing made use of syncopated rhythms and an exaggerated muddy sustain, creating an expressive, yet disappointingly restrained timbre. Matt didn’t mind the constricted nature of my playing, he was upset because the sound of my flip-flops’ impact with the polished sustain pedal was being picked up by the ultra-sensitive Neumann U67 tube microphone. We agreed that I should remove my shoes. Fortunately, playing with bare feet did more than just eliminate unwanted ambient sound. I discovered a freedom in my playing that I only experience when I’m either extremely inebriated or playing at home, as if any anxiety about hitting the wrong notes is removed along with my footwear.

Now, with my flip-flops sitting on the floor next to me, I’m ready to play. I can feel the cold metal on my naked toes as I curve them around the brass pedal. We are about to record this song: one that has become very important to me, because it re-launched a long forgotten passion for making music.  I position my fingers over the keys. I make sure that the middle finger on my right hand is ready to slide down in the correct place – that the edge of my finger will scrape against the spruce wood as I grace B-flat on my way to B-natural. I check that my left pinky and thumb can hammer out the bass line. I’ll start on G octaves and I’ll feel the tension and buoyancy of the strings move through the hammers to the keys, pulsing back into my sore fingers tips when I land on the Eb/B fifth (inverting a B triad to the third position). I close my eyes. I’m sure I’ll be able to navigate the keyboard without visual aid now that I’ve identified a starting point. I listen for the click track (a digital metronome) in my headphones.

The conversations with John, Frankie, Katie and Michael are in my head and I wonder if I can add the relatedness of a live performance to the recording by imagining myself on a stage. I block out the bright white walls of the soundproof room. I try to eliminate the cascading cables from the mental image of my surroundings. I try to ignore the guys looking at me through doubled glass over an enormous sound mixing board. Instead, I try to see myself on stage. I try to imagine what the matte black paint would feel like against the naked heel of my foot. I try to smell the stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer. I try to imagine the heat of bright lights against my cheeks, the beads of sweat rolling along my upper lip. I try to get lost in the immediacy and intangibility that goes with performing in front of an audience. Can I get lost in the performer’s trance state? Can I surrender the ego’s control to the inner performer? Can I feel intimacy with an imagined audience? I’m concentrating on the imagined atmosphere as hard as possible.

The song comes to an end and I hear Matt through my headphones, “Okay, man, let’s do another take. But can you play it like you have a pair of balls this time?” I snicker. This locker room style jab is a normal but ineffective way to try and instigate more passionate playing. I immediately consider his comment within the mythos of high school stereotypes and it reminds me that garage band teenagers are not so different from the touch-football-at-recess jocks. Both of us reinforce our sexual and gender insecurities through our hobby of choice.

“Okay, let me know when you’re ready.” I hear Matt’s voice again. He breaks up the intellectual polemic of habitual consciousness.

“Anytime!” I position my hands but decide to enter a different imaginal landscape this time. Clearly something was missing last time. I won’t direct. I’ll let the imagery present itself.

Before I know it I’m settled in an imaginal sexual encounter. The piano is my partner’s body and my hands trace each curve, each dimple. I can see the lines of her neck as the fingers on my right hand follow them to the clavicle. An open chord arpeggio walks my middle finger around to the last vertebrae at the top of her back. My finger slides off hesitantly, meeting my thumb. I open my fingers and dig them into her hair, taking a firm grip on a handful of hair as I massage the back of her scalp. Each black key and each white key call to mind a body part: the backside of her knees, the bumpy edge of the rib cage just below her breasts, the soft, nimble skin on the inside of her upper arm. I tenderly finish the musical phrase, allowing the palm of my hand to settle firmly on the imaginal flesh just above her hipbone. The rhythm, intensity and passion of my movements increase in both the piano solo and the love making that — despite its existence in my fantasy world — feels completely real at the moment. The track comes to an end before I’m ready. I keep my eyes closed and take a deep breath and exhale before I open my eyes.

“That was great. I could feel that.” Matt’s voice pulls me back to the recording studio, “why don’t you come in here and take a listen.”

After a couple more takes just like the last one, I’m drained. I can’t remember the last time I’ve used that much emotional or physical energy. I can’t remember the last time I played the piano so well. I probably never have. We order lunch and I’m only barely present for the second half of the session during which we record Frankie’s vocal part.

While Frankie is singing, I look at Matt and Mike sitting in front of the computer and the sound mixing board. They are engineering the tracks, coaching Frankie through his headphones. I settle into the moment and I realize that my relationship to these two individuals has changed today. The nervousness that I normally feel in my belly right before I attempt a performance will never be present again with them. The three of us have stood in the performance relationship space together and a new level of intimacy has presented itself. I’m struck by how, at once, the experience is so mundane and yet so transcendent. I take a deep breath, trying to hold the sensation in my memory. I smile and move my focus back to Frankie’s vocal performance.

Later, as I play the rough mix of the song for friends and family, they all ask me “why?” Why are we recording music? Implicit in their question are rolled eyes and skepticism. They are amused that I might still harbor dreams of rock and roll stardom. They can see no reason why I might expend so much time and energy recording something. The expectation of financial dividends is the only respectable motivation they can imagine. In the past, this would have constellated insecurity and feelings of worthlessness and failure. This time, however, I snicker silently at the irony – at the tension, the paradox — of a consumer culture that condemns an artist who performs solely for money as a “sell-out,” yet cannot imagine any other reason for the expenditure of creative assets.

I know now why I need to perform. Is it for the love of the music? No. It is because when I play the piano inner and outer experience meet intimately. I smile calmly. I know where I’ve been today. I’ve felt the sensate relatedness in my body, and I know that I need to go back there again and again and again.

References

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Barbato, Katie. Personal Interview, 2009.

Bosnak, R. (2007). Embodiment. New York: Routledge.

Colgan-Davis, John. Personal Interview. 2009.

Douglass, C. (1990). The woman in the mirror: Analytical psychology and the feminine. Boston, MA: Sigo Press

Embodied imagination in the work with dreams and memories. (n.d.). Retrieved August 13, 2009, from http://www.psychevisual.com/lecture.html?lecture=21

Franz, M. V. (1987). Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology: Reflections of the Soul (Reality of the Psyche Series). Lasalle, Ill: Open Court Publishing Company.

Frith, S. (1998). Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books.

Hannah, B. (2001). Encounters With the Soul: Active Imagination As Developed by C.G. Jung. Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications.

Johns, J. (2005). Transitional Object, Space. In A. de Mijolla (Ed.)International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, 3(pp. 1795-1796) Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA Retrieved September 12, 2009, from Gale Virtual Reference Library via Gale: http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=GVRL&u=carp39441

Jung, C. G. (1972). The relations between the ego and the unconscious. in H. Read, M.
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works of C. G. Jung (2nd ed., Vol. 7, pp. 123-305). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1928)

Levitin, D. J. (2007). This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York: Plume.

Looking for America: Elvis Costello. American Routes. National Public Radio. September 23, 2009. Retrieved September 31, 2009 from http://americanroutes.publicradio.org/archives/show/604/looking-for-america-elvis-costello-and-carla-bley

R.E.M. (1991). Losing My Religion. On Out of Time [CD]. Warner Brothers Records.

Schwartz-Salant. (1998). The Mystery of Human Relationship: Alchemy and the Transformation of Self. New York: Routledge.

Sonenberg, J. (2003).Dreamwork for Actors (Theatre Arts Book). New York: Theatre Arts Book.

Stipe, Michael. Personal Communications, 2008-2009.

Tartaglia, Frankie. Personal Interview, 2009.

Ulanov, A. B. (2001). Finding Space: Winnicott, God, and Psychic Reality. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.

Watkins, M. M. (2000). Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.

I’m imagining one of those manuals of etiquette and manners. It describes which fork to use with a fish course and how to tell the difference between a demitasse and a small teacup. It discusses acceptable posture at a formal luncheon table. In the section on acceptable subject of conversation, it states in bold capital letters, “it is best not to mention Sigmund Freud or any of his work in casual conversation.” My imaginary book is not an antique of the Victorian age; it is a modern Twenty First Century Amazon.com best seller. This bold warning about Freud does not surprise me. I have experienced the eye rolling. I am fully aware of the taboo. In a twist that would surely excite Sigmund, we have dismissed Freudianism on the ego level and yet the theories have crept into our unconscious experience.

It is not strange to hear conversations outside of academia in which folks dismiss Freud as a misogynist who contributed to nothing other than patriarchal sexism. I am amazed by how often people who have never read anything written by Freud consider everything he wrote to be wrong, if not offensive. I remember my mother once telling me that Freud was proved wrong years ago. Why, then, I wondered, did our pop psychology seem to be a vulgarized version of Freudian theory? The same people who dismiss Freud are also indelibly inundated with his theoretical understanding of the world. Freud is all around us, particularly in our popular culture artwork. Our popular stories locate the cause of all adult aberrations in early childhood trauma. This can be seen in our culture’s preferred dramatic structure.  The accepted structure of movie screenplays seems to be a vulgarized version of Freudianism combined with Aristotle’s Poetics (350 B.C.E.). Aristotelian catharsis is understood by modern Hollywood to mean emotional cleansing in an unsophisticated Freudian psychoanalytic sense—the uncovering of repressed childhood memories. For example, the plots of the majority of American films can be summarized in one of two ways.

Let us call the first way, “single traumatic event” theory. In these films, a single childhood traumatic event provides the primary motivation for all of a character’s actions. In other words, back-story seems to be defined as one event in early life that triggers the life’s trajectory toward the cathartic moment. Single traumatic event theory is almost always used in biographical films such as Walk the Line (Blomquist, Cash & Mangold, 2005). In this biography of country singer Johnny Cash, guilt about fishing while his older brother suffers a fatal table saw injury is presented as primary motivation for all of Cash’s future actions. Flashback is a common cinematic device used to tell the audience that current plot events are psychologically associated with back-story events. Whether or not the character is supposed to be conscious of these connections is often unclear, the important thing is that the audience realizes that the protagonist is motivated by a single childhood trauma. While American moviegoers may not necessarily believe that life is this simple, the fact that we both accept (by buying tickets, dvds, etc.) and reward (buy giving Oscars, Golden Globes, etc.) these narrative condensations of reality is illustrative of our cultural acceptance of a simplified version of Freudian theory.    

The second way we might summarize movie plot lines might be called  “repressed event” theory. In these films, the uncovering of a single past event either motivates the climactic action or the revealing itself constitutes the climactic moment. For example, in countless movies the action hero shoots the antagonist after a flashback to the death of a loved one. The flash back is an “ah-hah” moment— Aristotelian catharsis–that puts the final piece in a dramatic puzzle. Sometimes we have seen a series of memory events that don’t make sense until the climax adds the traumatic event to the flashback narrative.  We are to understand that the protagonist’s life up to this moment has been motivated by an unconscious need to reconcile the early childhood event. For example, the protagonist may need to avenge the murder of a loved one. When he becomes aware of the memory of the murder in the climactic scene, he will still kill the villain, but he is freed from the puppet strings of the unconscious. Or, in a vulgarized Oedipal variation, Luke Skywalker is devastated by the realization that he is destined to murder his father when Darth Vader says, “Luke, I am your father” (Empire Strikes Back, Lucas &  Kershner, 1980).

Although overly simplified, these are examples of the Freudian contribution to our perception of reality. Popular culture is ripe with Freudian clichés. The film industry is not alone in interpreting our experiences through unrefined psychoanalytic lenses; the music industry is also fertile with examples. In his book Rock ’n’ roll wisdom: What psychologically astute lyrics teach about life and love,  (2007) Barry A. Farber, identifies some examples of rock and roll lyrics which seem to analyze the world through a Freudian lens. The Who’s rock opera Tommy  (Townsend, 1969), for example, takes an unsophisticated look at repression.

We’re led to believe that a boy who has seen his father kill his mother’s lover becomes deaf, blind, and mute as a result. In ‘What About the Boy,’ Tommy’s father sings: ‘you didn’t hear it, you didn’t see it!/You won’t say nothin’ to no one ever in your life.’ Indeed, the boy is not haunted by these memories; he has successfully repressed them, and he has no conscious awareness that these actions ever  occurred.”(Farber, p. 86)

Pop culture unintentionally uses a Freudian lens to describe human experience. I wonder, however, if we could turn this model around. Is it possible to use a Freudian perspective to examine pop culture? Below, I will imagine some of the ways we could apply Freudian Psychoanalytic theory to rock and roll. I will not attempt to do this analysis in detail, but rather to imagine what the foundation of  such an analysis of rock and roll might look like.

According to Michael Brog, “the biggest names in rock history can be meaningfully linked with the biggest star of psychoanalysis’ past because they have all been concerned with the same sorts of stuff–the free expression of id-drenched feelings and images”(1995). But the Psychoanalytic study of rock and roll presents some problems. For example, with whose unconscious is the Psychoanalytic critic of rock and roll concerned? Are we to be concerned with the production of rock music or the consumption of rock music? If we were concerned with production, then we would understand the rock song as the unconscious material of the singer- songwriter. In her book Psychoanalytic criticism (1998), Elizabeth Wright writes,  “The aesthetics of id-psychology are grounded in the notion that the work of art is the secret embodiment of its creator’s unconscious desire” (p. 33). But we could also understand the purchasing of rock and roll albums as an embodiment of the consumer’s unconscious desire. In Constructing the self, constructing America  (1995), Philip Cushman explains how early twentieth century ad men saw the act of purchasing as an act of satisfying id desires (p. 155).  And Michael Brog writes,  “Music itself has long been recognized as carrying the power to instill deeply felt feeling states in the listener. These emotions may invite the listener to share in the artists’ emotional world or feel more forcibly thrust upon the listener. These communications can be considered to function as a projective identification”(1995).

Here, I will give a brief example of what psychoanalytic criticism of the production perspective would look like.

Bruce Springsteen’s song “Thunder Road” (1975) can be examined for its musical and lyrical content. Looking through a technical lens, I can study the ways that Springsteen uses unpredictable timing and contrapuntal piano arpeggios without veering from a traditional rock and roll tonic, dominant, and subdominant chord structure. Classical music exegesis illustrates the sonata structure of the song.  The lyrics can be analyzed separately for both the poetic structure and the content.  

Here, however, I will look at the poetic imagery—from a psychoanalytic perspective–as if it were dream imagery.
I imagine Springsteen as the protagonist. In “Thunder Road” he is clearly expressing sexual desire for Mary: “Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays.” The Oedipal themes are there. Is Mary just the name of an actual girl in Springsteen’s past or is he unconsciously drawn to the idea of the ultimate virgin mother?

There is sufficient evidence in the associations that the lyrics offer to suggest a connection to the Virgin Mary. There is a wealth of religious imagery throughout the song: “show a little faith,” “make crosses from your lovers,” praying for a “savior to rise from these streets,” “the redemption I can offer,” casing “the Promised Land.” Is Springsteen expressing an incestuous desire for the mother of Christ? I don’t think it’s a stretch to read it this way, considering the proliferation of evangelical language.

Springsteen’s words, “Climb in back, heaven’s waiting on down the tracks” call to mind the nostalgic vision of the 1950’s cultural understanding that sex, not acceptable in the home, happens in the back seats of cars and on rail road tracks. He boasts about his manhood, using his guitar as a phallic symbol: “well, I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk.” It is clear that he is not talking about his musical instrument when he again mentions the car and the events to take place in the car: “and my car’s out back if you’re ready to take that long walk . . . the door’s open but the ride ain’t free.” In a variation on the old fashioned idea that when a man buys a woman dinner he should receive sexual compensation, Springsteen says that he knows how to work is guitar (penis) and they can go to his car, but he expects more than just driving (“the ride ain’t free”).

Then Springsteen announces he is ready to commit the incestuous taboo, “tonight we’ll be free/all the promises will be broken.” Does he mean the promises of civilization, the repression of the forbidden infantile desire to have sex with the mother? Then in the middle of the song he sings, “Oh thunder road, lying out there like a killer in the sun.” Thunder road is the euphemism for incestuous sex with the mother. Thunder calls to mind the thunderbolt of Zeus, or in this case the supreme patriarchal power of Yahweh the ultimate father. But what of the “killer in the sun?” Is Springsteen acknowledging that consummating the infantile incestuous desire is symbolically akin to murdering the father? Is Springsteen himself the “killer in the sun,” “lying out there,” exposed for the world to see? Or is the act itself the killer, “lying out there,” tempting, beckoning? Either understanding validates the Oedipal nature of the song. As Freud writes in Totem and Taboo, “There can be no doubt that in the Christian myth the original sin was one against the father” (Gay p. 508).

In the final verse, Springsteen sings, “There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away/they haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets.” This could be understood as a reference to Oedipus’ wandering away from Thebes, just a skeleton of a man, with gouged out eyeballs when he realizes he is a slave to the oracle’s prophecies.

But Springsteen is not one of the boy’s she sent away. He believes he can manage the power of his libidinal drives. He does not need to repress the infantile desires. “So Mary, climb in/it’s a town full of losers, I’m pulling out of here to win.” Springsteen, as protagonist, is the “savior to rise from these streets.” Offering coital redemption, he is equating himself with Christ, son of Mary, in an incestuous fantasy. He is in competition with the other suitors, the “town full of losers.” The song can be understood like a dream, a fantasy of an Oedipal wish fulfilled.

Understanding “Thunder Road” as Bruce Springsteen’s fulfilled wish is a fun exegetic exercise, but it neglects to take into consideration the particulars of rock and roll. Rock and roll is a predominantly social medium, an interaction between performer and audience. In Psychoanalytic Criticism (1998), Elizabeth Wright discusses this shortcoming of the production type analysis.

Psychoanalytic aesthetics intermittently battles with this problem on two fronts: first how the work of artistic merit is to be distinguished from the ‘work’ involved in the construction of dreams and fantasy; second, how the work as text is to be regarded, now it is no longer property of a single author but produced in a network of social relations.” (Wright p.4)

Approaching rock and roll from the consumption standpoint means imagining the audience as patient and the product as the embodiment of his unconscious desires. Analyzing rock and roll from the perspective of consumer must take into account all of the artifacts of the rock and roll world, not just the song. The rock and roll fans partakes of a variety of other products including, but not limited to: concert tickets, television interviews, magazine articles, t-shirts, etc. The product consumed is essentially the rock star himself. The audience consumes rock and roll like a communion wafer: body of Christ, body of Springsteen. This is why it is important to imagine Springsteen as the protagonist of “Thunder Road.” We imagine that he is sharing the stories of his youth. He is a character in all of his songs. Even when the rock star sings from another perspective, it is understood that it is Springsteen wearing imaginary lenses, not an omnipotent narrator. Springsteen is the object of the consumer’s projective identification. Is it possible that Springsteen functions as a totem for his adoring fans?

Let us analyze the rock star from the perspective of consumption in which the product consumed represents the unconscious desires of the audience. Springsteen’s announcements in “Thunder road,” that he is the embodiment of unrepressed id drives, and that he can satiate his incestuous desires and still “pull out of here to win” (Springsteen 1975), make it crystal clear, from a Freudian perspective, why so many rock and roll fans and critics consider it one of the best rock songs ever written (“Thunder Road,” para. 1, 2009). What Springsteen is boasting about is the secret desire of every man. The “worship” of Springsteen is an example of the external embodiment of the fans’ internal desires. By worshiping the rock god the consumer’s ego satisfies its need for self-preservation because the incestuous id desires are not acted upon; they are transferred onto the performer.

This view of the rock star is radically different from that of most rock critics. For instance, Cornel Bonca writes, “Rock ‘n’ roll isn’t supposed to be about consequences, but Springsteen has turned it into a moral account in a way which forces its Dionysian passion to face the disasters that often follow in its wake” (2008). I would argue that Springsteen does no such thing. Instead, he trades bacchanalia – sex, drugs and aggression – for Oedipal stories from Heartland. Springsteen is the messianic savior who rose from the streets. He contains his fans unconscious desires so that they don’t have to.
Springsteen creates a fertile ground for transference by locating the myth of Oedipus within a Christian canon, and then placing himself at the center. In Springsteen’s Oedipus, Yahweh is King Laius. Mary is Jocasta. Christ is Oedipus. Then Springsteen fuses the myths – Greek and Christian – with American heartland nostalgia. Springsteen identifies and is identified with Christ (and Oedipus). He knows, unconsciously, that it is his Oedipal desires that cause his suffering. He starts “Thunder Road” by announcing the suffering: “Roy Orbison’s singing to the lonely, hey that’s me.” And then goes on to prescribe the cure. The suffering, he says, can only be cured by satisfying his unconscious incestuous desires: “and I want you [Mary/Mother] only.” Christ dies for his follower’s sins and Springsteen violates the incestuous taboo for his followers. The Oedipal nature of this work would be of no surprise to Freud, who insists in Totem and Taboo that, “the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus myth” (Gay p.510).

It seems, then, that rock and roll must be analyzed from a perspective that takes both production and consumption into account. The Oedipal content is produced from the unconscious of the artist. This is clear because the artist himself is rarely conscious of his work’s potential for cultural transference. R.E.M. front man Michael Stipe admitted this in a 2008 radio interview when he said, “I wouldn’t know a hit single if it was sitting in my lap” (R.E.M. 2008). The potential of the artist and the music to hold the external projection of the fan’s internal experience is nothing more than a happy accident. Or should I say the reasons are not accidental, but unknown, unconscious, to both producer and consumer. In order, therefore, to understand the unconscious drives that are at play in rock and roll, it is necessary to analyze both the production and the consumption.

Clearly, pop culture is ripe for a Freudian harvest. In rock and roll we find the id’s voice amplified like a Fender guitar. At the movies, we see a literary tradition that has absorbed Freud even as it dismisses him. I have only scratched the surface of this type of analysis in this short paper. For example, I have barely even mentioned the plethora of cultural artifacts that work together to create the Phenomenon that is Bruce Springsteen. A thorough analysis would need to look at many more factors. For example, lyrical analysis of more than one song, a thorough interpretation of the imagery of album covers, and careful study of stage choreography and costume choices would provide a much larger and clearer picture of the latent id content that is symbolized in Springsteen’s act. I do not have the space to do this analysis here. I hope, though, that this brief example of psychoanalytic criticism of pop culture shows the reader that a thorough study is necessary, especially considering the strong grip that celebrity worship has on our modern culture.

Lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”

The screen door slams, Mary’ dress waves
Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
Hey that’s me and I want you only
Don’t turn me home again I just can’t face myself alone again
Don’t run back inside darling you know just what I’m here for
So you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore
Show a little faith there’s magic in the night
You ain’t a beauty but hey you’re alright
Oh and that’s alright with me

You can hide ‘neath your covers and study your pain
Make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain
Waste your summer praying in vain for a savior to rise from these streets
Well now I’m no hero that’s understood
All the redemption I can offer girl is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow hey what else can we do now?
Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair
Well the night’s busting open these two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real, to trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back heaven’s waiting on down the tracks

Oh-oh come take my hand
We’re riding out tonight to case the promised land
Oh-oh Thunder Road oh Thunder Road
Lying out there like a killer in the sun
Hey I know it’s late we can make it if we run
Oh Thunder Road sit tight take hold
Thunder Road

Well I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk
And my car’s out back if you’re ready to take that long walk
From your front porch to my front seat
The door’s open but the ride it ain’t free
And I know you’re lonely for words that I ain’t spoken
But tonight we’ll be free all the promises’ll be broken
There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets
They scream your name at night in the street
Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet
And in the lonely cool before dawn you hear their engines roaring on
But when you get to the porch they’re gone
On the wind so Mary climb in
It’s town full of losers
And I’m pulling out of here to win

References

Aristotle. (350 B.C.E.) Poetics. (S. H. Butcher, trans.).
Retrieved January 5, 2009, from the internet classics archive:

http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html

Blomquist, A., Cash, J (Producers), & Mangold, J. (Director). (2005). Walk the Line
[Motion picture]. United States: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

Bonca, C. (2008). Save Me Somebody: Bruce Springsteen’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Covenant.
Retrieved January 6, 2009, from the killing the buddha:

http://www.killingthebuddha.com/dogma/save_me_somebody.htm

Brog, M. (1995). ‘Pop’ Psychology: Putting Rock and Roll Music on the Psychoanalytic
Couch. Psychiatric Times. Retrieved December 29, 2008 from:http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/display/article/10168/52461?pageNumber=1

Farber, B. (2007). Rock ‘n ‘ roll wisdom: What psychologically astute lyrics teach about life and love. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger

Gay, P (ed.) (1989). The Freud Reader. New York: W.W. Norton & Company

Lucas, G. (Producer), & Kershner, I. (Director). (1980). Star wars episode V: The empire strikes back [Motion picture]. United States: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

Springsteen, B. (1975). Thunder Road. On Born to Run [CD]. New York: Columbia
Records.

Springsteen, B. (1975). Jungleland. On Born to Run [CD]. New York: Columbia Records.

Townsend, P (1969). The Who: Tommy [CD]. New York: MCA Records.

Thunder Road. (2009, January 4). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved
January, 6, 2009, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunder_Road_(song)

“With ‘Accelerate,’ R.E.M. hits top speed again.” Fresh Air. National Public Radio.
April 9, 2008.

Wright, E. (1998). Psychoanalytic criticism: a reappraisal. New York: Routledge

I arrived in Los Angeles around 1pm and drove the burnt orange colored rental car an hour and a half to the hotel. I quickly washed my face, changed my shirt and headed out to a local wine tasting room just south of Santa Barbara’s State street underpass.

The Kalyra winery tasting room pours for me whenever I’m in the Santa Barbara area. I have a long relationship with the place and sipping there makes me feel grounded, as if the city were not so far away from home.

That afternoon, I felt like a local. I knew the wine well and I was chatting with two women from London that were touring the West Coast. I flirted with the Brits — a short curvy brunette whose fiery personality might force me to categorize her as the tough-girl-next-door and a tall skinny nutritionist whose shoulder length blond hair brushed against her freckled shoulders as she moved like a pixie. I was waiting for my classmate to send me a text message that she was ready to meet for dinner.

Dinner never materialized. Instead, I stumbled into a local hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant in which I was the only “gringo.” I order a burrito camarones, devoured it in my hotel room, took a hot bath and fell asleep.

A dream woke me at 4:00am:

I’m in a strange city, loading a couple bags of groceries into the back of the rental car. I am under an underpass and it is dark and I notice a couple of young guys in dark clothing bicycling towards me. I am nervous and think to get into the car quickly but I remember that the rental car does not have a remote power lock system and that I’m going to have to put the key in the door and that will slow me down.

The boys stop and they are not quite teenagers. They are very aggressive. One of them gets real close to my face and says, “What are you doing in my town?” I fall to my knees and plead, “I didn’t realize it was your town, I’m so sorry, I mean no disrespect.”
He moves quickly to strike me. I close my eyes. My hood is up now and my head is bent towards the ground. The moment of impact feels just like a big burst of air has hit my head and I wonder what happened.

“How did you get here?” he asks.

“I’m from Philadelphia, the East Coast. Please, sir, I didn’t mean any harm. I didn’t know. If you’ll just let me get into my car I’ll drive away and cause you no more disrespect. I offer my sincerest apologies sir.”

I see some girls driving by and try to make some eye contact so they will realize I’m in trouble. I notice one of the girls is wearing a pink floral sundress and has the general look of Winona Ryder in Welcome Home Roxy Carmichael.

The gang kid doesn’t like that I made eye contact with them and he swings a stick towards my head. Again I close my eyes and look towards the ground. This time the blow feels as if he was some how rattling a soft foam bully club inside my skull. It flutters.

I look up and the kid looks at me as if to say, you know better than to look for help.

Then I notice two of the woman, a skinny little woman with short (almost cut like Caesar) blond hair and a tight white ribbed tank top and the Roxy Carmichael woman walk towards us. They look at me and the tiny woman says, “every summer someone comes here in one of those cars,” pointing to my car “and they don’t make it home, they get killed.”

She walks away. The gang kid and I are shocked. He walks away too. I run after him and put my arm around his shoulder and lean in really close to him as if we are close buddies and I’m whispering something just for our benefit.

“And I promise, sir,” I say softly, “I will never make assumptions about you, based on your looks, like they did.”

He backs away and says, “I know, that was crazy, right? I’m not a murderer.” I notice he has a very bad shave as I step away.

I head back to the car, which is my Jeep now, not the rental car. And I think, about what the woman said and that I thought she was talking about a rental car, but it is my car. I try to get in but there is something blocking the door. So I go around to the passenger’s side, but when I open the door, the two women are already inside. The mini woman says, “c’mon, we’re gonna have some fun.” The Roxy Carmichael girl never speaks. I panic, because I think she meant before that she was the one who would kill me and I mistook her to be talking about the guys. I look confused. “Look,” she says, “we’re comin’ down and we’re bored, so get in.”

Next we’re in an underground subway tunnel or something. It is round and tubular and the walls are tiled in very colorful tiles. Lots of orange. We are walking and we see a group of young kids walk towards us in very colorful matching paint splatter outfits. They are a little bit smaller and younger than the gang from the beginning, but it is clear that they are the opposing rival gang. They look kind of silly with their pre pubescent bodies and faces, peach fuzz mustaches and serious faces, trying to look hard and macho. They walk buy us and the two women giggle.

We are off to one side of the tunnel lying on some pillows and again the tiny woman says something about drugs. Then we stand up and I turn the tables and I hold her arms behind her back. I forcefully move her back to the pillows and she looks at the Roxy Carmichael girl and says, “he’s gonna make us fuck him.” She sounds scared and upset.

I think, sex wasn’t on my mind at all, but maybe I should sleep with them. They are kind of hot.

It was immediately clear that the dream related to the uncomfortable feelings I had been having about my relationship to Pacifica Graduate Institute.

When I first began my studies at Pacifica, it seemed the perfect fit. It felt for me as if I possessed an inner princess awakening from a long bewitched slumber. Snow white had burst through her glass coffin. Parts of myself that had long been kept on the margins were able to move toward the center. I felt like I was walking proudly with my chest pushed forward. Larger than life, I was energetic and excited.

In the weeks leading up to the trip during which this dream took place, however, reality crept in. It became clear that I had mistaken one princess for the whole kingdom. The way of being that came to the forefront on the West Coast was not my own true authentic nature, just one (forgotten) piece of much larger whole.

Where was the East Coast cynic? Was anyone travelling within me that could (and would) point out the silliness of circle time, body tracings, and touchy feely blessings? Is this kindergarten for graduate students? All the community and compassion is a good thing, but there is a part of me that remains healthily skeptical – keeps attuned to shadow broadcasts. Marie Louis Von Franz once said, “too many people use the fit of compassion when they should use the sword of discretion” (The Way of The Dream, 2008). Is the discretionary cynic being pushed to the margins? Which parts of me don’t catch the flight on time? Which parts stay in the humidity and smogginess of Philadelphia?

Authenticity requires equal face time for Snow White: the wishy-washy yoga teacher (chanting the mantra, “Community, council, compassion” in her whispery sing-songy voice) and the East Village punk rock, steel-toed boot wearing, urban goddess (screaming, “fuck the world” on stage at CBGB’s while beckoning with seductive bedroom eyes). My classmates and Pacifica brought the Yoga Teacher out of her slumber, but the punk rock goddess is getting jealous. She wants some attention. The punk rocker points out Snow White’s flaws with her characteristically negative sarcasm. Snow White encourages me not to judge, to transmit love unconditionally, reminding me of the suffering that accompanied her nemesis’ previous reign.  Punk Rock asks why people spend so much time on make up, hair and clothing (even yoga clothing, she exclaims, twisting the dagger). Don’t they want to be judged?

It’s a battle of persona versus the imagined true self. And it is a difficult tight rope of opposites to walk. How can I choose one over the other? Both of these inner beauties turn me on. Only a psychic orgy including still unknown participants of my feminine nature will satiate my uncontrollable unconscious desires.

In his 1986 book, Inner Work, Robert A. Johnson writes:

Dreams are dynamic mosaics, composed of symbols, that express the movements, conflicts, interactions and developments of the great energy systems within the unconscious.  The unconscious has a particular capacity to create images and to use those images as symbols. (p. 19)

My dream images yoga-teacher-ness and punk-rock-ness  – these parts of my nature — as two beautiful women: Roxy Carmichael and mini-girl. These characters play prominent roles in the second half of the dream narrative. But are they just characters? In his 1986 book, A Little Course in Dreams, Robert Bosnak informs me “the dream story is not the dream itself. The dream itself is a texture woven of space and time inside which we find ourselves” (p.7).  These women are more than just symbols or metaphors. I must relate to them as psychic facts. I must approach them as real women: living and breathing within my psychic landscape. How do they move? How do they smell? How do they make me feel? What are they wearing?

Roxy Carmichael wears a pink sundress and high-top black leather army boots. The sundress barely hides her youthful beauty. She’s constantly adjusting the pink floral fabric, calling more attention to the accidentally exposed supple flesh of her breasts, shoulders and thighs than she means to. The boots call to mind an almost militant aggression, defending vulnerability with sarcasm and judgment. The leather laces up to just below her knees and suggests that my imagination write a romance novel beneath the soft pink fabric of her dress.

Mini-girl wears a tight white cotton tank top and jeans hinting at long slender legs that don’t touch at the thighs – instead they meet for the first time at her suggestively shaved pubic hair that I imagine while carefully being sure not to avert my gaze from her eyes. She walks confidently with the comically perfect posture of a yogic ballerina. Her arms are muscular. The strength of her body, however, can’t hide the unhealthiness of her anorexic frame. I am at once attracted and repulsed by the way her golden hair calls attention to her neck, clavicle and shoulders – the silhouette of veins and bones visible through her skin.

Mini-girl, like a constellated complex, holds me hostage in the dream. She is in control. She has hijacked my jeep (no longer a rental car), my way of moving through the world. I am a terrified tourist in an area she knows better than I. Roxy Carmichael is along for the ride. She is an accomplice, but silent and inactive. Why is she here, working with her nemesis, if she is jealous? Like at a drug intervention, have they agreed to put differences aside in order to wake me from my psychic stupor? I feel vulnerable and unsafe. There is pressure in my chest like a steam kettle ready to whistle. The steam here pushes on both sides – from inside and out — against the fragile rigidity of my imaginary body. My skin feels like glass, ready to crumble. I want to flee from the unknown. They will smother, devour, murder me. They are a threat.

But wait . . . what’s this . . . one fluid motion turns the thing around.  One super-hero-kung-fu-ninja move, so fast that even I didn’t see it and I’m holding mini-girl’s hands behind her back. I’ve got her by the arms in a position that is reminiscent of handcuffed wrists in a kinky role playing game. Like an adolescent schoolboy – nervous, inexperienced – I missed the signals.

In Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming (1996), Robert Bosnak writes:

Since the totality of a dreaming event consists of several simultaneously existing points of view, it is important to explore the potential of experiencing the memory of the dream not only from the point of view of the somebody referred to as “I,” but also, if possible, from the perspectives of other “somebodies” as well. (p.30)

Did I think to ask why my kidnappers and I were reclining on pillows? I don’t recognize the eroticism of the situation; they need to point it out to me. They need to hit me over the head with a satin covered, vibrating two by four. Without their assistance – without the benefit of their perspectives — I misinterpret the entire situation. I see the women as opponents instead of partners. I can’t empathize. All they said was, “we’re gonna have some fun.” Why did I hear danger? Why do I feel threatened? I am stuck in the “I” perspective.

The dream alerts me to other possible ways to interact with my inner feminine nature. The dream encourages me to look through feminine eyes. The dream suggests that the male ego take a more aggressive leadership role in a consensual psychic ménage à trios. My male “I,” however, is so bound to the view through its gang violence tinted patriarchal rational-discursive goggles that everything looks like a conflict. It’s like seeing the world through a cereal box Buck Rogers decoder ring in which everything is reduced to dichotomous opponents. Who will win? Who will lose? Who is man? Who is woman? I don’t even realize that my male centric porn film fantasies are right in front my face with willing participants.

My fears of discovering an internal misogynist have forced a sensual fantasy life into the dungeon. Have my concepts of masculine and feminine been hosting dogma in the shadows? The dream shows me the grey space.  The dream encourages me to approach from an aperspectival place that does not assume opposition or dissent.

There’s nothing overtly sexist about the fantasies that my inner high-school feminism club labels “chauvinistically perverted.”  I reluctantly admit that sexual union has been on my mind – has been quivering in my body — since the two women crossed my path beneath the state street underpass.

In Waking Dreams (1976), Mary Watkins writes, “Amplification can teach us how to imagine from the specific to the general and back again” (p. 138).  Can I amplify the underpass?

Clearly there is a connection between the State Street underpass and the rainbow tiled subway tunnel. Although the underpass is square in waking life, my dream images it as arched like the subway tunnel. They visually share the same tubular arched shape. A Freudian analysis might emphasize the visual likeness to the vaginal cavity. Taking the arbitrary sexual interpretation a step further, my anxiety about having to use my key in the rental car would be related to sexual performance anxiety – the key, of course, a direct reference to my penis. While this interpretation certainly informs the dream, to stop at the sexual level would greatly limit the possibilities for self-realization that the dream offers.

What if we were to take a Jungian stance and amplify the arch shaped tunnels? What historical or mythological arches come to mind? Rome, for example, is full of triumphal arches. The arches of Augustus, Gaius, Lucius, Tiberius, Titus, Septimius Severus and Constantine stand as monuments to military victory. They are monuments to the victories of combative rational-discrusive tunnel vision.

Architecturally, a single keystone holds an arch together. If one removes the stone, like a dogmatic attitude, the structure collapses, revealing the precariousness that was hidden behind the aesthetics.

The dream images a psychic arch. It shows me how dogmatic psychic structures, held together by a single keystone, have allowed my identity within the Pacifica institution and the K-track Cohort to appropriate my ‘self’ identity (and my own relationship to it) in the same way I allowed my previous profession as restaurateur to do it. One set of rainbow tiled tunnel-vision goggles merely replaces another. This is not embarrassing as the eyeglass switcheroo is what most people do most of the time. But I need to learn to acknowledge the entire Jordan consciously and be aware of the ways that some parts are subjugated and marginalized in certain situations. I need to see the ways it happens. I need to allow those parts an equal voice in my internal debates.

According to Jung, prospective dreams are “an anticipation in the unconscious” of some probable future result. They occur when the attitudes of the ego deviate radically from the norm. In such instances, Jung says, the compensatory function of the unconscious becomes a prospective function that guides “the conscious attitude in a quite different direction which is much better than the previous one” (Adams, 2009).

The dream moves me from one conscious attitude to another with imagery reminiscent of the Roman aqueducts about which I did my 6th grade research project.  These engineered channels carry water above arches. James Hillman writes that like water, “the soul does want to flow on and move through” (1979, p.153). The image of the arched underpass is like a psychic aqueduct, a channel that allows soul to navigate through my imaginal landscape. The arch supports my psychic plumbing, a reminder of the soul’s ability to irrigate a transition of consciousness.

The transition from oppositional thinking to aperspectival engagement is successfully imaged in the dream by my movement from outside the arch to inside the tunnel. Oppositional thinking vigilantly guards the ego-self’s interests in a frigid bubble of unrelatedness. Aperspectival engagement openly and non-judgmentally experiences the objective self.  In the first half of the dream — beneath the underpass — I am aware of the external aesthetic properties and architectural construction of the arch. This awareness images the rational-discursive oppositionalism that James Hillman describes as “so bedrock to the thought of our culture, from the pre-Socratics, Aristotle, and Neoplatonism, through scholasticism, to Kant, Hegel, and information theory, that we will not be able to escape its influence” (1979, p.74). In the second half of the dream – in the subway tunnel – I am inside the curved structure of the arch, experiencing its arch-ness from within.  The experience of arch-ness – and the implicit dyad of outer’s relationship to inner — is tantamount to a cultivation of the transcendent awareness of opposites, allowing me an opportunity to “know the self, not as an abstraction, but as a living reality that moves one out of the narrow confines of the ego and into the fullness of love, compassion, and mystery” (Schwartz-Salant, 2007, p.70).

The same shift of consciousness is also imaged by the similar move from a rental car to my beat-up old jeep — from one mode of psychic transportation to another. The women warn me that arriving in the rental car will lead to the murder of a psychic attitude. “Every summer,” Mini-girl warns,  “someone comes here in one of those cars and they don’t make it home, they get killed.” The dream predicts a homicide of the old conscious attitude; a new one comes to the fore. My relationship to Pacifica, the trips to Santa Barbara, and the psychic state of being that the travelling constellates is changed by the dream.

Jordan learns he is not Pacifica student or Depth Psychologist. Pacifica Student and Depth Psychologist are just paint-splattered t-shirts worn some of the time. Paradoxically, like a gang uniform, these outfits have as much to do with fitting in as they do with standing out. Gangs are like alternative social systems that, although marginalized, microcosmically reflect the same oppressive ideologies as the societies they resist. The uniform is like a passport or a driver’s license: papers that allow one to walk freely within the intangible gang metropolis. Pacifica and the cohort hold and contain me well when I choose to wear these shirts, when I’m carrying my papers. But what about the garments that are starting to smell like cedar and mothballs from the sabbatical they’re taking inside my closet?

Of course, the goal is not to wear all the clothing at once, that would be a hideous hodge-podge of clashing fashions. Instead, the goal is an internal dressing room – no, an internal wine tasting — where all my personalities meet up in tank tops, sundresses, leather boots and jump suits.  We are sipping Pinot Noir and flirting. We get to know each other well, and in the end we all end up in bed together – relating flesh against flesh — in whatever position feels best at that particular moment.

Since in Jung’s view the psyche is both a natural and purposive phenomenon, Jung understood dreams likewise, as natural and purposive, the spontaneous, undisguised expressions of unconscious processes. (Hopcke, p.24)

Sunday night, in the Holiday Inn Express, my dream personified a hostile dogmatic perspective toward myself and toward others with gang members. They threatened me beneath the dark grey State Street underpass because I parked the rental car in their territory.  It’s time to return the rental car. The jeep is beat up, dented and vulnerable – just like my Self (with a big ‘S’) – but it still starts up fine and makes it successfully from point A to point B, even if it does need a tune-up along the way.

References

Adams, Michael Vannoy. (2009). “What is Jungian Analysis?” The Website of Michael Vannoy Adams. Website. Retrieved May 12, 2009 from: http://www.jungnewyork.com/whatisit.shtml

Boa, Fraser. (Producer and Director). (2008).  The Way of the Dream: Conversations on Jungian Dream Interpretation with Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz [DVD]. Santa Cruz, CA: Windrose Films Ltd. and The Marion Woodman Foundation.

Bosnak, Robert. (1986). A little course in dreams. Boston, MA: Shambhala Books.

Bosnak, Robert. (1996). Tracks in the wilderness of dreaming. New York: Delacorte Press.

Hillman, J. (1979). The dream and the underworld. New York: Harper & Row Publishers.

Hopcke, R. H. (1989) A guided tour of the collected works of C.G. Jung.
Boston, MA. Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Johnson, R. A. (1986). Inner work: Using dreams & active imagination for personal growth. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.

Schwartz-Salant, N. (2007). The black nightgown: The fusional complex and the unlived life. Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications.

Watkins, Mary M. (1976). Waking dreams. New York. Harper Colophon Books.

Rock and roll critics often identify similarities between rock and roll and shamanism. For example, following the release of Patti Smith’s influential first album, Horses (1975), John Rockwell’s Rolling Stone magazine review was entitled, “Patti Smith: Shaman in the Land of a Thousand Dances.” Rockwell points to the evocativeness of Smith’s chanting and compares it to shamanic ritual. Laura Faeth, author of the popular book, I found all the parts: Healing the soul through rock and roll, takes it a step further, claiming rock music has the power to provide emotional healing: “ modern day rock musicians fulfill an essential mythic role for us, that of spiritual shamans/healers and messengers” (Faeth, 2009).  Jungian analyst Marion Woodman (1985) also identifies the similarity between a religious ritual and a rock concert, writing, “at the center is the rock star who stimulates the participants into a ritual frenzy until a combustion point is reached, and symbols appear in the minds of the believers” (p. 76).

Since it is intended primarily as big business entertainment, it is strange that rock and roll is often associated with folk healing. Why is there so much mythology surrounding popular music that has to do with spiritual soothing or psychological transformation? Is this modern phenomenon a compensatory attempt at filling a spiritual vacuum? In other words, in an empty consumer society, do we imagine that we can get our daily dose of spiritualism by buying records and concert tickets? Or, is rock and roll indeed mass-marketed folk healing? Of course, we can’t definitively answer any of these questions. We can, however, look in detail at some of the ways that popular music has incorporated archetypal motifs of the folk healer, specifically the shaman.

Looking first at one of the earliest examples of recorded popular music, blues singer Robert Johnson, I will examine the way the singer’s mythic biography incorporates characteristics and motifs of shamanism. By incorporating a Jungian psychological perspective in this analysis, I will also look at the way transformational folk healing has been appropriated by popular music. I will then speculate on the psychological function that this mythopoetic image making serves for the fans.

Robert Johnson (1911-1938) is widely considered to have impacted popular music more than any one else. “Considered by some to be the ‘Grandfather of Rock ‘n’ Roll,’ his vocal phrasing, original songs, and guitar style have influenced a broad range of musicians, including Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Johnny Winter, Jeff Beck, Jack White and Eric Clapton, who called Johnson “the most important blues singer that ever lived”” (Robert Johnson, 2009).

Many people have illustrated his influence on popular music by examining Johnson’s musical phrasing and the ways he constructed a song, a riff and a lyric. Here, I am not interested in his musical technique. Instead, I am interested in the mythic biography of the blues legend.

It is told that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his inimitable guitar skills. The story begins with a young, wide-eyed harmonica player from the Mississippi delta who played guitar so badly that he was booed off the stage whenever he tried to perform. Young Robert Johnson yearned to play six string blues in a way that would impress the other players in his community: Sam House, Willie Brown, Sonny Boy Williamson and other icons of early 20th Century delta blues. One night, following an especially pitiful performance, Johnson was frustrated. Defeated and depressed, he wandered into the woods. In the dark, humid and buggy fog of the Mississippi delta back woods, Johnson disappeared. For six months nobody saw the young man. Had he moved North? Had he given up music for a job in the cotton fields? Had he been killed . . .or worse lynched? Nobody knew, and nobody cared. After all, Johnson was a bad guitar player with no family and even fewer friends.

Then, one day, out of nowhere, Robert Johnson stumbled into town. His clothes were soiled and his knapsack hung over his right shoulder. In his left hand he was carrying an old beat-up guitar by the neck, his fist wrapped around the 6th and 7th frets. He went straight to the local juke joint and took the stage. The crowd went silent. Nobody lifted a drink. Everybody watched young Bob Johnson because there was something in his eyes. He lifted his guitar and strummed the first chord. Something mystical happened, something magical, something unreal. With a homemade bottleneck slide, Johnson not only played, he became the blues. “The young bluesman played his instrument with an unearthly style, his fingers dancing over the strings. His voice moaned and wailed, expressing the deepest sorrows of a condemned sinner” (The crossroads curse, 2009). His slide guitar skills were impressive, and his behavior was erratic. From then on, whenever he played in public he turned his back to the audience so that other guitarists would not see his technique. What was he hiding? There was something otherworldly about the riffs and sound he could produce with a guitar. Where did he learn this technique? How could Robert Johnson play the blues so well?

His musical talents seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Johnson himself filled in the details with one of his most well known songs, “Cross Road Blues” (1937).

I went to the crossroads, fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroads, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above, have mercy now, save poor Bob if you please.

Standin’ at the crossroads, risin’ sun goin’ down
Standin’ at the crossroads baby, the risin’ sun goin’ down
I believe to my soul now, po’ Bob is sinkin’ down (1937).

In this song that has been covered by thousands of musicians countless times since, Johnson refers to the crossroads of highways 61 and 49, in Clarksdale, Mississippi. At this intersection he sold his soul to the devil at midnight in exchange for expertise in playing the slide guitar. When the devil appeared, the story goes, Johnson handed him his guitar. The devil retuned the instrument and then handed it back. With it, Satan or Lucifer or Beelzebub or whomever, handed the skills that made young Bob famous. Of course, the devil never bestows gifts for nothing, and Johnson was eventually forced to pay his dues. Barely able to enjoy his own fame, Johnson recorded only twice (just 29 songs) during his short career and died at 27 years of age.

Whether or not we believe the Robert Johnson story is irrelevant. It is a tale that serves as the mythological genesis of rock and roll and is therefore worth our attention. We are not concerned with biographical facts. The success and positive critical reception of the 1986 film Crossroads – the plot of which revolves around the reexamination of the Johnson legend – is just one testament to the lasting impact of the blues man’s story. The legend has been told in hundreds of books, movies and songs. In a 2004 New York Times article, Eric Weisbard writes, “the image of blues man Robert Johnson standing at the crossroads in the Mississippi Delta, selling his soul to play guitar as though he had invented the instrument, has long epitomized the romance of American Music.” It seems that Johnson’s mythic (perhaps fictional) biography is better known than his music. This story, therefore, deserves careful attention. Examining archetypal and psychological elements of the story shows us that Johnson can be understood as the original popular music shaman who hands his craft down through generations of rock and roll performers. Looking at the ways that Johnson’s mythopoetic biography combines common motifs from multicultural sources, it becomes clear that fans of rock and roll have accepted and appropriated a shamanistic spirit possession story. Robert Johnson’s story sets the stage for a century long concert during which rock and roll is supposedly granted the ability to heal and enlighten. But is the rock star a contemporary shaman? Let’s take a closer look.

In rural Southern African-American communities of the early 20th Century it was well known that one could meet the devil at the crossroads. The place where roads meet is a common archetypal motif.

Throughout the world, the places where roads diverged or crossed have been regarded as unlucky or dangerous because of the presence of evil spirits, and in an effort to propitiate these spirits, deities have often been worshipped there (Garry, 2005)

It is not only the junction of two different geographical places that meet at the crossroads, but also, if we imagine a visual cross, the intersection between vertical and horizontal axes. The horizontal axis is representative of the ordinary world, the world where we work, listen to music and brush our teeth. The vertical axis is representative of the spiritual world, where spirits, deities and the unseen, or unknown, dwell. The crossroads, therefore, is the place where the human realm and spirit realm meet. It makes archetypal sense that Johnson would find ‘god-like’ skills at the entrance to the spirit realm. But there are many different deities in the spirit realm. Which spirit taught Robert Johnson to play guitar?
Who was the devil that Robert Johnson met at the crossroads? Here we see a combination of multicultural religious mythologies. Most likely, Johnson met the Voodoo god Esu (or Legba), who is a pillar in the belief systems of the Southern Delta and New Orleans Voodoo Religions.

The ubiquitous African trickster god known as Esu-Elegbara (Nigeria) and Legba (Benin) bears a striking resemblance to Hermes. He has spread throughout the African diaspora and appears in folklore of the Caribbean, South America, and the United States. He is the messenger of the gods, the guardian of the crossroads (Garry, 2005).

Esu/Legba is both the guardian of the crossroads and the master of the mystic barrier between men and spirits, [he] is described as a feeble old man in rags who smokes a pipe, slings a knapsack over his shoulder, and walks painfully with a crutch. He is terribly strong, however, and anyone possessed by him suffers a violent trance (Crapanzano, 2005).

This image of Esu/Legba fits well with the image of the old delta blues man. In films, album artwork and paintings, old time blues musicians are portrayed as feeble, unhealthy black men, smoking and clutching their instruments as if the guitar itself, like Legba’s crutch, holds the man upright. The delta blues man is imaged as a tramp, limping from juke joint to juke joint. With dirty clothes on his back, he carries only his beloved “gee-tar” as he hitches rides on empty locomotive freight cars. He travels with hobos and drifters and plays his way through beer taverns and brothels. In these two surviving photo’s of Robert Johnson, we can imagine him in the image of Legba, knapsack over his shoulder, stumbling down country roads.

Johnson seems uncomfortable in the pinstripe suit, as if he belongs not in records and photographs, but rather, at the barren crossroads. He should be playing his passionate music for, offering protection to, and accepting offerings from travelers who pass him by. Like a shaman, Johnson has conjured Esu/Legba at the crossroads, and the spirit has inhabited his body. As if participating in a séance, the deity speaks through poor Bob in the form of guitar skills.

If Johnson got his guitar playing skills from Esu/Legba, how did the story come to feature Satan, the Christian god of evil? We can see that the image of Esu/Legba goes with Johnson much better than the image of Lucifer. Dirty clothes and a knapsack fit Johnson better than horns and a pitchfork. We can only speculate about how these two mythologies came to be combined. It is likely that early Southern theologians and missionaries lumped all non-Christian gods together as “the Devil” or “Beelzebub.” Think of this as a kind of assimilation of folk deities into a mostly monotheistic Christian religion that has no space for multiple spirits. The church characterizes each spirit within the dissenting belief system as another one of Lucifer’s faces. Satan the shape shifter can wear many masks.

Additionally, as folks passed the story from town to town, they recognized the similarity between the voodoo manifestation of the archetype and the one that is imaged in Euro-Christian mythology as a Faustian bargain. The Esu/Legba character was renamed and became understood simply as “the devil.” Archetypally, throughout the world, “the divinities associated with crossroads were almost always deities of darkness” (Garry, 2005). So it makes sense that in Christianizing the myth, these Gods would become associated with Satan (the Christian god of darkness). In order to incorporate crossroads mythology into a Western-Christian perspective, therefore, the vertical axis must be imagined to link the earthly realm and hell.

This combining of the Esu/Legba motif with the Faustian devil bargain motif is unfortunate because it conceals an important story element that makes the genesis of rock and roll’s persistent obsession with shamanism crystal clear: Robert Johnson experienced a spirit-possession.
According to the Encyclopedia of Religion:

Spirit possession may be broadly defined as any altered or unusual state of consciousness and allied behavior that is indigenously understood in terms of the influence of an alien spirit, demon, or deity. The possessed act as though another personality—a spirit or soul—has entered their body and taken control (Crapanzano, 2005).

When people describe the guitarist as having “sold his soul to the devil,” they are unconsciously describing the motif of spirit possession. Understood archetypally, it was the presence of the deity that provided Johnson with his guitar playing proficiency. It was not Robert who played the blues so well, but rather Esu/Legba himself. And Johnson, now master of the crossroads, was able to call forth the spirit at will. His initial encounter at the metaphorical crossroads took place when he wandered into the dark backwoods. Crapanazo (2005) writes, “A first possession may be conceived of as an articulatory act. The possessed is thrust into a new symbolic order. His or her initiation frequently takes the shape of a dramatic illness . . . or contrary behavior, such as a wild and seemingly destructive flight into the bush.” After the initial encounter, Johnson was able to self-induce a kind of trance state in which he could produce unearthly music from his ordinary instrument whenever he pleased. In Jung and Shamanism (2007), C. Michael Smith writes, “numerous individuals in traditional societies may claim to have helping or guiding spirits. The shaman is only distinguished from these in that he or she commands these spirits, and does so for specific purposes” (p .27).

Using Mircea Eliade’s classic model of shamanism, we can see that the Robert Johnson legend is essentially a “shamanizing” of blues music. Eliade’s model identifies three aspects of shamanism: a trance state, an astral journey, and communication or possession by spirits. In order to understand how these three characteristics function in the case of the rock and roll shaman, we must not understand the Robert Johnson legend as a journey myth, but rather as a shamanistic instruction manual for rock and roll, blues and popular musicians. Johnson announces, for all subsequent musicians, the way to play truly soulful music.

Understood metaphorically — and as an instruction manual — we can see how the Johnson legend is what Eliade would call a “technique of ecstasy.” Smith (2007) writes, “shamanism is a set of techniques and an ideology which becomes attached to a religion (or tribal mythology) and which has its own history and system of beliefs” (p. 14). It is not a stretch to consider rock and roll a religion with its own unique mythology. The Johnson legend offers a specific technique for musical performance. In other words, musicians learned from Robert Johnson that they must enter a trance state from which they can journey, metaphorically, to the crossroads – the junction between the earthly and the spirit realms – before playing their instruments. Only there, can the spirit of the music possess them. Then, the musician can deliver a soulful performance. What is meant by a “soulful” performance? From a Jungian perspective, this would be a musical performance that flows, uninhibited, from the objective psyche (soul). Colloquially we describe music as coming from the soul. A musician adept at performing music from a “feeling” perspective, rather than a bland technical perspective, is considered soulful. The better dancer, one who can feel the rhythm and music in his body, has more “soul.” The Robert Johnson legend is a primer on how to access the soul for the purpose of passionate musical performance.

The Robert Johnson system for shamanistic ecstasy is seen repeated in popular music again and again. The frequency of alcohol and drug use is one example. Musicians often use substances or liquid “spirits” to prepare for performances. These “spirits” place the performer in a trance state. It is insinuated that only through the use of a substance can the performer summon the music from the soul. Often, in the same way that Johnson became known for his journey to the crossroads, iconic performers become well known for their trance inducing substances. For example, Doors front man Jim Morrison was known to over-indulge in whiskey; Janis Joplin’s name is synonymous with Southern Comfort; Jimi Hendrix was arrested for the possession of heroin and hashish; Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain was heavily addicted to Heroin. The public reception of these four performers’ stories mirrors the collective obsession with the Johnson legend.

Each performer’s substance use can be equated with Johnson’s trip to the crossroads. The substance itself is tantamount to the trance inducer that allows the spirit or devil to possess the performer. These four popular performers have all been placed in the annals of popular culture history as hugely influential personalities. As Johnson is considered to be the granddad of rock music, these popular musicians have been credited with ushering in their respective eras of rock music and cultural ideologies. Like Johnson, their behavior was known to be erratic, and their stage performances have been described as evocative and otherworldly. And each of the four iconic performers died, like Johnson, at the early age of 27.

Popular music mythology has embraced the number 27. Citing the number of popular musicians who die at the age 27, many fans imagine the age to be indicative of the performer’s pact with the devil. Their deaths are the initiation rite into what is popularly termed “the 27 club.” This is an extension of the Johnson legend and another attempt to assimilated the archetypal motif of shamanism into rock and roll.

The 27s idea can be understood in two ways. One is as a Faustian bargain between the earthly realm and spirit realm. From this perspective it is understood that the spirits will grant performers the power to conjure in exchange for limiting the duration of the performer’s earthly lives. This perspective reads the Johnson and the 27 club myths through Christian lenses. Seeing the spirit as Lucifer, god of evil and darkness, the acceptance of the gift can only be imagined as a sin. Satan takes his due by jerking the sinner off stage and into hell as if holding the hook from the Gong Show. From this perspective the soul is imagined almost as a real estate title, the possession of which grants one the right to live. By trading your soul/title to the devil, he owns you for eternity.

In an attempt to offer a more positive view, fans unconsciously incorporate shamanism into rock and roll culture. Fans of the 27 club members do not believe that the spirit gifts are evil. Accepting them is not a sin. Rather, possession of these skills is a blessing. The trade off is that using the techniques of rock and roll ecstasy is so exhausting that life is drained from the healer as each performance brings them closer to their death. Or, the lasting fame that the gifts bestow is equated with spiritual and historic immortality bartered for tangible, biological life. From this point of view the meaning of soul can be understood the way Jung described the psyche/soul. Jung’s objective psyche/soul is equivalent to the individual or collective life force and the doorway to the spiritual realm, the “crossroads” to the spiritual realm. The conjurer learns how to use his soul — or offer his soul — as a doorway through which a spirit can pass. Johnson, understood this way, offered his soul to Esu/Legba as a doorway through which the deity could play the blues on the frets and strings of Johnson’s instrument. The shamanistic musician, therefore, always plays from the crossroads.

It seems to me that rock and roll’s unconscious attempts to assimilate shamanism and folk healing are ultimately a failure. Like television evangelism (claiming that spiritual current can be passed through electric airwaves), rock and roll is not able to offer personal transformation on such a large scale. While Robert Johnson and other musicians may in fact conjure true spirits from mystical realms, the spirit is isolated from anyone other than the performer. The argument can be made, quite convincingly I think, that the performer certainly possesses shamanistic skills. C. Michael Smith (2007) writes, “the shaman is a technician of the sacred.” Defining the sacred potency, the rock star is full of sacred mana.  However, the big business of the record industry does not offer a healing path through these shaman guides to the crossroads. Instead, they provide a materialistic solution in which consumers can buy records (theoretically souvenirs of a performance) and artifacts that offer only the semblance or illusion of a true encounter with the sacred.

Rerferences
Carliner, M., Woods, M, Zinnermann, T (Producers), & Hill, W. (Director). (1986). Crossroads [Motion picture]. United States: Sony Pictures Film Corporation.

Cross Roads Blues. (2009, March 22). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved April 12, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cross_Roads_Blues

Crapanzano, Vincent. (2005 “Spirit Possession: An Overview.” Encyclopedia of Religion. Ed. Lindsay Jones. Vol. 13. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA. 8687-8694. 15 vols. Gale Virtual Reference Library.

Mircea Eliade. (2009, April 2). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved April 12, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mircea_Eliade

Faeth, Laura. (2008) I found all the parts: Healing the soul through rock & roll. Sound of your soul publishing.

Faeth, Laura. (2009) “Sound of your soul: Oh where, oh where have our archetypes and myths gone?” Idea Masters: Stuff you should know about (website). Retrieved April 14, 2009 from http://www.ideamasters.net/1011_FA_135.html

Garry, Jane. “Choice of Roads: Motif N122.0.1, and Crossroads, Various Motifs.” (2005) Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature. Eds. Hasan El-Shamy and Jane Garry. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. 333-341. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale.

Johnson, R. (1937). Cross Road Blues. On Robert Johnson: The complete recordings (1996). United States: Sony Records Corp.

Robert Johnson (n.d.). In Robert Johnson and the crossroads curse (website). Retrieved April 12, 2009 from http://www.stormloader.com/users/crossroads/

Robert Johnson. (2009, March 30). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 31, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_johnson

Rockwell, John. (1976, February) Patti Smith: Shaman in the Land of a Thousand Dances. In Rolling Stone Magazine.

Segalstad, E. and Hunter, Josh (2008) The 27s: The greatest myth of rock & roll. Berkeley Lake: Samadhi Creations

Smith, C.M. (2007) Jung and shamanism in dialogue. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.

Weisbard, E. (2004, October 31) The Ancestors of Pop. In The New York Times

Woodman, M. (1985). The pregnant virgin: process of psychological transformation. Toronto, Canada: Inner City Books.

Why did Walt Disney focus on Mickey’s hair when forced to imbue a cartoon mouse musician with excitement and personality? Have hair and musical performance always been linked? Walt was likely just satirizing the popular musicians of his time, poking fun at orchestra conductors like Leopold Stokowski with his signature white hair that rivaled Albert Einstein’s in wildness. “Whenever Stokie [Stokowski] flashed his magnificent profile toward the audience and turned his head skyward, that immense puff of silver fluff seemed to float above the podium like a cloud in heaven” (Dreyer 2004). But how far off was Walt’s gag? There does seem to be some relationship between hair and musicians.

When examining the symbolic relationship between hair fashion and performers, specifically rock and roll musicians of the 20th Century, it becomes clear that rock stars function as hooks for the collective and individual projections of unconscious material.  First, I will explain some Jungian psychological concepts and the ways they can be applied to an interpretation of the cultural artifacts of rock and roll from a mythopoetic perspective. Then I will survey anthropological and psychological literature that examines the symbolic significance of hair in order to further identify the archetypal material that is reflected by rock gods.

I use the term “rock gods” in order to emphasize the spiritual implications. It seems to me that we interact with rock stars in the same way that I imagine ancients interacted with their temple priests. When we talk about temple gods, we imagine sacrifices and people bowing on their knees. Sometimes these exact images are actually right on the surface of rock and roll. Anyone who has been to a heavy metal concert has seen the religious zeal with which the fans react and interact with their rock gods. Imagine a room full of screaming teenagers suddenly silenced by the sound of a single note. Imagine 20,000 cigarette lighters lit in unison, swaying to the beat. The colored stage lighting is reminiscent of stained glass. It rivals the beauty, magic and mystery of a Catholic basilica at high mass. Marion Woodman (1985) writes of rock concerts, “at the center is the rock star who stimulates the participants into a ritual frenzy until a combustion point is reached, and symbols appear in the minds of the believers” (p. 76). Woodman also explains, “the accouterments of ritual are all there—masks, jewelry, tattooing, ritual garments, suggestive symbols, dance—all these held together by the insistence of the musical beat and the shriek of heavily amplified guitars” (p. 75). Each rock and roll superstar’s popularity is the result of a collective projection onto the performer. The rock concert is both a modern religious ritual and a travelling temple to which worshippers make pilgrimages.

The purchasing of albums, the participation in celebrity gossip, and the many other activities that take place surrounding rock and roll all hold religious and transformational significance for the participants. The ritual frenzy and public worship of rock and roll culture seem to illuminate a sacred interior connection that we have with our rock gods. In other words, the rock star functions as what C.G. Jung termed the “mana-personality.”  Jung defines mana-personality in Relations between the ego and the unconscious as “a being full of some occult and bewitching quality (mana), endowed with magical knowledge and power. All these attributes naturally have their source in the naïve projection of an unconscious self-knowledge” (p. 227). In other words, fans project some inner psychic energy onto the rock and roll mana-personality; this energy is so strong that it is often experienced as a bewitching supernatural power. In the case of rock stars it can be a collective projection, often simultaneously experienced by thousands of fans.

When looking at worldwide sensations, such as the Beatles, we might ask what energies lurking in the collective unconscious were personified by the Fab Four so universally that Beatlemania was able “bewitch” the youth of the entire world in 1963? We often credit artists like the Beatles for influencing the collective and bringing about historic changes. Wikipedia writes of the Beatles that “clothes, style and statements made them trend-setters, while their growing social awareness saw their influence extend into the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s” (“The Beatles,” 2009, Para 1). Understanding John, Paul, George and Ringo as mana-personalities, however, implies that the Beatles were simply hooks on which youth culture hung the projection of their own collective revolutionary energy. Does this negate the talent of these artists? Are they just empty vessels for a culture’s unconscious material? I don’t think so.  Clearly the Beatles were talented musicians whose skills were honed with thousands of hours of practice. However, it seems that their monumental success (as opposed to their artistic achievements) should be attributed to a collective projection rather than to their innate talents. From a perspective of psychological pathology, Beatlemania could be understood as a compensatory collective projection of unincorporated unconscious energy. In other words, some collectively unconscious energy that society was unable to access or accept – for simplicity’s sake, we can call it revolutionary energy — was experienced through projection onto the Beatles.

In Jungian terms we would say that collective shadow material was projected onto the Fab Four. The shadow can be defined as “hidden or unconscious aspects of oneself, both good and bad, which the ego has either repressed or never recognized” (Sharp, 1991, p.123). According to Jung’s theories, there are both collective and personal shadows. It is therefore possible to simultaneously relate to a mana-personality both collectively and individually.

Likewise, people seem to have both collective and personal relationships with rock stars. Many movie sequences have depicted the individual’s relationship with rock and roll. For example, in intensely private moments, folks are shown singing into a hairbrush while looking in the mirror. Also, Air guitar and the popularity of video games like “Rock band” and “Guitar Hero,” in which the player acts out the rock star part, are indicative of a private relationship with a mana-personality. These types of activities can be seen as a physical conjuring of spirit akin to séance or speaking in tongues.  In these cases the fans are experiencing their shadow material through direct engagement with the image of rock star. Participating in these rock and roll séances allows the unconscious energy specific to the particular rocker to consume the fan. This practice functions psychologically in a similar manner to Jung’s practice of Active Imagination in that the participant is in a direct relationship with an unconscious, or inner, energy. The difference between these activities and Jung’s Active Imagination, however, is that “Jung intended the individual to take a receptive but active role in encountering and confronting various unconscious archetypal elements within his or her psyche” (Hopcke, 1989, p.33). In the case of rock and roll video games, or just playing air guitar, the individual — although actively “conjuring” the spirit of the rock star – is not aware that the rock and roll spirit is an aspect of his own unconscious. Instead, the fan believes he is simply mimicking the rock star. What the fan experiences, however, are his own shadow energies projected and personified by living performers. In my own opinion, since individuals rarely have personal relationships with the celebrities, the rock stars can barely be called living beings within the context of the fan’s relationship. Instead, they are more like inanimate objects that are supplied background story and mythology through celebrity gossip rags, biographical liner notes, and the lyrics of the songs. Even at a rock concert the performer is so isolated from the fans through stage lighting, sets and security that he cannot possibly be experienced as a flesh and blood being. I see the projection onto rock stars, therefore, almost as identical to the projection onto marble statues of Greek deities or other forms of idolatry.

Idol worshippers believe that objects, icons and images hold divine power.  In Jungian language: these objects, icons and images receive projections of unconscious shadow material. The bedrooms of teenagers are wallpapered with photos and posters of their favorite rock stars. Are teenagers merely attracted to good looking celebrities, or is this a form of idolatry? My own private pre-teen relationship with rock star images was not simply physical attraction. Instead, these images helped me to relate to my body as I went through the difficult physical transitions of puberty. I remember comparing my lips to Mick Jagger’s in the bathroom mirror, comparing my upper torso, shoulders, and clavicles to a photograph of a topless Jim Morrison. My preadolescent body was not so pathetic when measured beside Steven Tyler’s muscle-less, anorexic-schoolgirl-like frame. The androgyny of rock stars is comforting in a culture that polarizes masculine and feminine with unrealistic ideal body images. The wide-framed, muscular, Herculean body of sports stars would never fit on me. I would never own the defined muscles and warrior figures of comic book super heroes. The men who seem to have the highest degree of success, however, were these rock gods who live in total freedom. These guitar warriors who always get the girl seem to blend and challenge cultural concepts of masculine and feminine in a way that is not acceptable anywhere else in our cultural milieu. Elvis wore tight sequined jump suits. The Beatles pushed the envelope of acceptable boy haircuts and admittedly emulated the girl groups of the fifties. David Bowie wore glam make up and tight unitards. Robert Plant’s voice, stage choreography and long golden locks might simply be described as effeminate. Am I the only person for whom rock and roll provided an altar on which to incorporate the feminine into a masculine psyche through worship at the feet of rock gods? I doubt it.

The androgynous physical image of rock stars seems to function as a collective projection of what C.G. Jung would call alchemical conjunctio, or psychic union of opposites.  “Jung noted that most people do not wish to see their own contrasexual sides. Instead, they tend to project these, and both positive and negative aspects of themselves, onto someone else” (Douglass, 1990, p. 67). The androgynous image of the male rock star signifies the incorporation of unacceptable feminine qualities into the male psyche. I am not arguing that the rock star has incorporated his own feminine qualities, but rather that the image of the rock star symbolizes the union of masculine and feminine for the fans. Thus, the rock and roll fan projects his unconscious potential — and the collective’s unconscious potential — for a union of contrasexual opposites. Jung writes that “projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face” (Jung, 1951/1978, p. 9). In this case, the unknown potential for psychic wholeness is projected onto the performer. It is this projection that gives the performer his bewitching power, or mana.

Androgyny is not the only aspect of the rock and roll image that is symbolic of a union of opposites. The projection of potential wholeness is apparent in the prominent position that hair fashion holds in rock and roll imagery. On the surface it would appear that hair on rock stars – specifically long hair on male rock stars — is just another instance of androgynous imagery. However, a survey of the anthropological and psychological literature on the symbolic meaning of hair yields a more interesting picture of how hair factors into an archetypal interpretation of rock and roll mythology. Likewise, this information sheds some light on the link between hair and musicians that Walt Disney satirized in that early Mickey Mouse cartoon.

Hair is rich with symbolic meaning.  Freudian Psychoanalyst Charles Berg examined it in detail in his 1936 article, “The unconscious significance of hair.” Berg argues that there is a symbolic unconscious connection between hair and male genitals. He claims that a man’s head is the symbolic equivalent of the male phallus and the hair is linked to semen. Cutting hair, then, is equivalent to castration. Long hair is associated with sexual potency. Berg sees the shaved heads of Monks, for example, as a symbolic signifier of celibacy. He sees neglected hair (i.e. dreadlocks or matted hair) as “the ascetic repudiation of the very existence of sex” (Leach, 192). Certainly this link between hair and sex is present in the mythology of the male rock star. It is common for male rock stars to have long hair and they are envied for their sexual prowess. The Urban Dictionary defines “Rock star sex” simply as “the best sex ever” (Rock star sex, 2009). Clearly, the long locks contribute to our imagining of male rock stars as super sexual beings, but the link between hair and genitals is only one piece of a more complex puzzle.

Anthropologist Edmund Leach, in his 1958 essay, “Magical Hair,” looks at the role hair plays in ritual situations. Leach directly addresses Berg’s thesis, “the anthropologist and the psychoanalyst are in agreement that certain types of symbol are ‘phallic emblems’ in a universal rather than an accidental way” (p.195). Arguing that Berg’s argument is too narrowly focused on the sexuality and genitals, however, Leach expands on Berg’s work. Leach agrees that, “an astonishingly high proportion of the ethnographic evidence fits the following pattern in a quite obvious way. In ritual situations: long hair = unrestrained sexuality; short hair or partially shaved head or tightly bound hair = restricted sexuality; close-shaven head = celibacy” (p.187). However, he believes that the model needs to be expanded. “It is quite true that a change in hair style is, in most societies, an easy and obvious way of indicating the otherwise rather delicate matter of a change in socio-sexual status. But this is only because the genital organs themselves have been invisible by a taboo” (p. 186). He continues, “head hair is a visible symbolic displacement of the invisible genitals” (p. 186). Leach argues that Berg’s assertion that in cutting hair we are “abreacting our aggression by directing it against our aggressive hair” (p. 182) should not be understood as an illustration of the Freudian Castration complex, but rather for its surface value.  Leach believes hair should be seen “as a separable part of the body, in not only a symbol of aggression but also as a ‘thing in itself,’ a material piece of aggression” (p. 196). In support of this argument, Leach offers that “Not infrequently, in a ritual context, we find that human hair is used as ‘the royalty of Kings,’ ‘the divinity of gods,’ ‘the fertility of crops,’ ‘the power of sorcerers’” (p.196).

Jung agrees with Leach. In Visions: Notes from the seminar given 1930-1934, Jung states, “hair is understood by the primitives to have mana, and they are therefore very careful when they cut their hair, to collect every bit of it” (1997, p. 198). There is a distinction, however, between Jung’s view of hair and Leach’s view of hair that is important for our purposes. While Leach characterizes the hair’s energy as “aggression,” Jung calls it “mana.” Mana, originally a Polynesian religious term, can be understood as any kind of supernatural energy, not only aggressive energy. The Oxford English Dictionary defines mana as, “an impersonal supernatural power which can be associated with people or with objects and which can be transmitted or inherited” (Mana, 2008). Later in the vision seminars, Jung describes hair as “mana irradiation or emanation from the head, so it often means thoughts”(p. 823). At first glance it may seem that the concept of hair as mana of thinking doesn’t fit with the rock star. We rarely consider our rock stars intellectuals. Consider, however, that the Beatles were lauded for their revolutionary vision and their ability to think outside the box.

In fact, isn’t thinking outside the boundaries of the collective precisely where the image of rock star as rebel comes from? Rock and rollers rarely break the law. We are impressed not by their practical counterculture actions, but by their ability to challenge the social status quo ideologically. Wikipedia describes folk singer Bob Dylan as, “an informal chronicler and a reluctant figurehead of American unrest…” whose songwriting is known for “…defying existing pop music conventions and appealing widely to the counterculture” (Bob Dylan, 2009).  It is Bob Dylan’s nontraditional poetry and anti-establishment thinking that earned him his celebrity status. Before even experiencing the product – Dylan’s songs – biographical information about Dylan as the thinker is expressed by the packaging: Dylan’s image on album covers, magazine photo ops, etc. His hair is one visual signifier of his rebellious thinking. Jung states, “combing the hair means straightening out the thoughts, cleaning or putting the hair in order means putting the mind in order” (Jung 1997, p. 823). It is precisely the image – or visually signified biographical mythology – of Bob Dylan as a performer, songwriter, and thinker that refuses to be categorized or put in order, that has made him a mana-personality. One way the rebellious nature of his thinking is symbolized is in Bob Dylan’s hair fashion. Milton Glaser intuited the symbolic power of Dylan’s hair and emphasized it in his 1967 poster/illustration. It seems to me, however, that Glaser’s “Dylan” is redundant, as the songwriter’s wild and unkempt hair already announced his unrestrained, open-minded thinking before the addition of the psychedelic colors.
(Dylan, 1967)

Dylan had a head full of mana the day he threw out his comb. It is significant, however, that Glazer chooses to put Dylan’s face in silhouette, illustrating only his hair. It is as though, for Glazer, all of Bob Dylan’s mana is located in his hair.

When thinking about rock star hair, I prefer to think of mana in a way that combines Berg, Leach and Jung’s thinking. Understanding “mana-hair” as symbolic of creative or revolutionary potential allows for the inclusion of the genital symbolism. The non-traditional hair that is common for rock stars, understood using Berg’s model, is equivalent to extreme sexual prowess. This rock star sexuality can be seen as symbolic of creative potential, as in the potential for biological reproduction through sexual intercourse. In other words, for rock stars sexual prowess is not only the ability to attract and copulate with groupies, but also – using a gender specific euphemism — the ability to spread seed. Metaphorically, we can understand “spreading seed” as having to do with the creation of new forms of consciousness, usually brought to form in thinking, understanding and interacting with the world that are outside of the culturally accepted boundaries. The idea that rock and roll is tantamount to rebellious thinking is consistent with the ways we’ve seen the Beatles and Bob Dylan identified as revolutionary and culturally influential.

Another way to think about what is implied by “hair-mana” is to consider the behavior of hair. Hair does not stop growing. Like urinating and defecating, the growth of hair is an automatic function of the body; it is something that comes out of us that is beyond our control. Uniquely, hair comes out of our head. The unconscious is often imagined as being located in our heads. Thus, hair growth can be understood as the symbolic equivalent of the production of authentic unconscious content. Society expects that we wash, comb and trim our hair. Caring for hair, when considered in contrast to the habits rock stars, is symbolically equivalent to arranging unconscious content according to social constrictions. Making distinct, or non-traditional, hair choices is like allowing your vision (artistic or revolutionary vision in the case of rock and roll) to flow naturally. In Leaving my father’s house, Marion Woodman explains that “hair comes straight from the head as ideas come straight from the head. In dreams, as in life, the coiffure, the cutting, growing and dyeing of hair are symptomatic of significant changes in the psyche (soul) or persona (the mask we show to the world)” (Woodman, 1993, p. 10). Organizing hair according to societal custom is symbolic of the creation of persona based on cultural boundaries. When the rock star makes a hair fashion choice that would disappoint his grandmother, it is understood that he is allowing his psyche (soul) unrestrained movement. Again, I am not arguing that the rock star is not influenced by cultural restrictions. Rather, the fans project their own potential for uninhibited psyche/soul experience onto the rock star.

The view of hair-mana as unrestrained unconscious content is what Walt Disney was emphasizing in “Just Mickey.” Mickey Mouse begins the film with stage freight. He is nervous, bashful and unable to produce any worthwhile sounds from his instrument. The mouse cannot access the part of himself from which soulful musical performance flows. Colloquially we describe music as coming from the soul. A musician adept at performing music from a “feeling” perspective, rather than a bland technical perspective, is considered soulful. The better dancer, one who can feel the rhythm and music in his body, has more “soul.” How does the musical mouse find his voice despite the critical heckles of the obnoxious fans? He finds the switch on the back of his head. When Mickey lets his hair down, he allows his soul to sing.

Understanding Rock and Roll (and popular culture) as a projection of the collective psyche’s shadow has far-reaching implications. In rock and roll’s formative years critics attacked the music, calling it noise, satanic and evil. It may sound delusional and crazy to a 21st century adult who has been raised on television and popular music, but I don’t think we are so different today. It is easy for us to own predominantly positive projections like Bob Dylan and The Beatles. They represent images of a more integrated psychic wholeness. But are we ready to own the negative images of patriarchal aggression and violence that seem to dominate today’s pop culture? Musical celebrities push the limits of what is culturally acceptable. In rock and roll and hip hop music the envelope being pushed today often holds images of sex and violence. Each new superstar attempts to present an image more shocking than the last. Like early critics of Elvis’ undulating hips, we tend to question whether or not the lyrics and behavior of these stars set a responsible example for our impressionable youth. Understanding pop cultural as a collective projection, however, would mean that the images on our televisions and in our magazines are not influencing or creating our culture, but rather reflecting parts of ourselves that we are not willing to see. Are we ready to take a long hard look at the collective shadow that’s right in front of our faces? Or, would we prefer to see popular art simply as the creation of the performers’ individual psyches? We can give each individual credit for his or her artistic achievements, but the wild success – the mana-personality status – is a product of collective shadow projection.

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