Musings of a Musicophiliac

Although Sigmund Freud never played a musical instrument and, by all accounts, did not particularly relish musical performances, the vast majority of mental health professionals whom I know both professionally and socially cherish musical experience deeply. In one clinical organization to which I belong, we boast an eminent classical composer who has written pieces for the British royal family, but who now practices full-time as a clinician. In another of my professional organizations, we count as one of our members a retired operatic baritone who also works full-time with patients. And in still another organization for which I have long served as a Tutor and Training Therapist, two of my colleagues participate in a jazz ensemble that has recorded a much-admired suite of music in memory of the late Dr. John Bowlby. Many of my psychological colleagues have married musicians—my own partner, incidentally, has sung professionally for the whole of her career. Indeed, as a frequent concert-goer in London, I would be hard pressed to recall a recent visit to either the Royal Opera House, the English National Opera, the Barbican Centre, or the Wigmore Hall—temples of British classical music—at which I did not encounter one or more psychological professionals (whether psychotherapist, psychologist, psychoanalyst, or psychiatrist) in the interval.

Perhaps psychological workers have a natural affinity for music because both mental health professionals and musicians have an acutely developed auditory capacity, a heightened sensitivity to sound and its importance. Elsewhere I have written (2005) about the crucial role of the psychotherapist's voice as a curative ingredient in clinical practice, based, in part, on observations of admired mental health professionals who have speaking voices that I would describe as colorful, textured, layered, and rich, with a capacity to attune to subtleties of affective states within the session through a careful modulation of vocal pitch, cadence, key signature, rhythm, and so forth.

As a musician myself, trained first as a classical pianist and subsequently (in my spare time) as a classical singer, musicality has always played an important role in my daytime work as a psychotherapist. From my earliest student days as an intern in a psychiatric hospital, I attempted to use music therapeutically as a means of making contact with severely regressed, catatonic schizophrenic individuals. I shall never forget the first time I stepped onto the ward of a psychogeriatric unit in a ramshackle provincial psychiatric institution, nearly thirty years ago. Most of the patients suffered from the gross psychomotor effects of tardive dyskinesia, and many could not, therefore, control their tongue movements; hence, their tongues dangled out of their mouths, dripping copious amounts of saliva, contributing to a greater sense of "freakishness" and alienation. As a neophyte, the sight of so many elderly tardive dyskinesics frightened me, and after failing miserably to make contact with these individuals through traditional verbal means, I sought refuge behind the battered, out-of-tune upright piano, tucked in the corner of the Day Room, whose dust-covered keyboard suggested the same kind of neglect experienced by the patients themselves. Keen to hide behind a familiar object, I seated myself on the cold, plastic chair, and began to play some songs from the 1890s and 1900s, which, I reasoned, would be known to these geriatric patients, many of whom had spent the bulk of their lives on this very forgotten long-stay ward.

As I launched into an impromptu rendition of the old classic jaunty waltz "A Bicycle Built for Two," I suddenly saw three nurses running in my direction. "Damn," I thought, "my first day in a psychiatric institution, and I've blown it already." I soon turned round from the keyboard and observed the nurses crouching over an elderly catatonic patient called "Joe." Apparently, something in my performance had caused Joe to burst out warbling at the top of his lungs: "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true / I'm half crazy all for the love of you." One of the nurses called to me in disbelief, "What did you do to him?" I shrugged my shoulders innocently, as the nurse replied, "This [End Page 96...