Psychotherapy's Polyphony: 

Flow and Improvisation as Transpersonal Healers

Charles Holton


I. Allegro ma non troppo

pianissimo; poco a poco crescendo

Music has always opened worlds to me before my other senses could, opened deeper or more subtle sensibilities, awakened astonishment, cultivated patience, inspired discipline. As a child at the keyboard discovering scales, chords, keys, how tunes worked with accompaniments, how diatonic harmony worked before I could name it; as a teenager bonding with friends over learning rock songs together; as a young man at university hearing the astonishing novelty and integrity of the sound world of Bartok's Fourth String Quartet and wondering, How did her hear this in his mind before he wrote it down? Hearing South Indian Classical music for the first time and being transported to a place of mystical stasis I would rediscover only years later in meditation practice or hearing Alfred Brendel play Beethoven's final piano sonata. My thirst remains nearly unquenchable for grasping the arc of composers' creative lives, the evolution of their languages, their idiosyncratic syntheses of the musical worlds they are born into and how they transform them. 

 

II. Andante religioso

sempre legato

 
I was not expecting a transformation when I attended a Steve Gilligan workshop in San Diego in 1993, but the seed was planted and would shortly bloom. His notions of hypnosis as an experience free of symptoms, free of the binds of merely linear understandings were not new - anyone working from an Ericksonian perspective or up on their reading of Bateson had heard these ideas before. But his blending of Jungian dynamic psychology with Gendlen's emphasis on felt sense and Ericksonian hypnotic principles was poetic: he quoted poetry in a kind of seamless weave in his narrative: one moment he was jamming on archetypal energies flowing through us whether we liked it or not and the next minute he was in the middle of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets like he owned them. This was an awakening of the aesthetic principle of psychotherapy I had not experienced before. It would become central in my practice, both explicitly - encouraging clients to find the effortless solution - and experientially, as I describe later. 

 

III. Scherzo

delicatissimo, subito szforzando 

 
Composing music is a magic enough experience, but collaborative composing was an even broader unveiling of how Mind flows through us, and how lacking is the descriptive model of individual ego. Composing a piano concerto with my friend Pamela St. John, the most frequent arguments we had were about who was responsible for what material, but not the way you might expect. "I really like that section you came up with, Pamela." "But you wrote that part, Chuck." "No, that's not remotely in my style, that's your work." "I'm certain I didn't write that, I think I remember when you improvised it, in fact." And so on. The discipline of weekly meetings generally consisted of nearly two hours of frustration as dead end after near miss after failed attempt would finally yield a brilliant gem of thematic development or connecting thread or harmonic variation. And we would never agree as to who came up with it. It's much easier in solo composing to - mistakenly - take the credit. I'm grateful for the direct experience of flow passing through two minds at once in the process of artistic creation. 

 

IV. Rondo: Vivace

con moto

 
 

In his biography of Charles Ives, Jan Swafford describes the value of his training at Yale as "when he learned to think symphonically," that is, in long musical ideas, stretching over an hour, with formal, tonal and structural connections at multiple levels. When I notice myself in my psychotherapy practice grimacing internally at a client's whining or stuckness or numbness or shrillness I ask myself to sink into symphonic listening, and suddenly I'm hearing the first theme of a great dissonant concerto. Where will this theme re-emerge later? How will it develop? How will it blend with the other themes that will arise later? How are all the themes connected? Will this concerto end in dissonant despair, or will a thread of subtle triumph arise from the chaos? What is my part in the structure? Am I melody or accompaniment? What key should I enter in? Is that an opening for my first notes or do I wait and let the silence resonate? What is being said, really? What notes are being avoided? Where is my being vibrating, and what wants to sing? 

This kind of aesthetically driven, collaborative, relationship- and flow-based consciousness is to me far richer than a technique-based performance of hypnosis or dynamic or Jungian therapy as a process done by the therapist to the client. It is a way, as Gilligan has said, of falling in love with the client, or to my ear, hearing their song, joining in its music, adding my own voice, and discovering what the duet is we have to play. 

Just as in art, where expressive power comes from the dynamic balance of formal integrity with novelty of expressive means, in psychotherapy, sheer catharsis merely rehearses pathology and at worst retraumatizes the client. The presence of a stable and compassionate therapeutic container links the archaic wound with adult loving relationship, welcoming alienated experience into the community of human consciousness: that is true healing, and a music worthy of the name. 

 

13 March 2003