Lecture: The Musical Matrix (Sweet dreams are made of this)

Hello and welcome. I will be addressing the theme  ‘In Dreams Begins Responsibility’ through the lens of music. I am from the North, and we do a lot of marching during the summer. Protestants love marching in July – hence the sound of the Lambeg Drum you just heard. Catholics prefer to march in August, when the weather is slightly better.

The Lambeg drum is not just a musical instrument, it is a weapon of war. Its mission is to stir the blood of its soldiers, prepare them for bloodshed, and strike fear and dread into the souls of their enemies. Drums have also in ancient traditions been used to frighten away evil spirits, or to induce trance states in listeners. Perhaps into that place where we surrender to the unconscious as in Social Dreaming.

Dreams are usually thought of in connection with the future, but I am starting with the past and looking first at some of the developments and links between music and group analysis. The role of identity may also play a part in this.

We like to emphasise how man is a social animal, and that is why we prefer to work  in groups, and we can think of how we developed speech, language and music from earliest historic times.  Michael Spitzer (2021) has written beautifully about the ‘Musical Human’, and the idea that many millions of years ago, our progression to bipedalism, had many musical consequences. He suggests:

• the change in body posture meant the larynx dropped, which meant we have an increase in the range of possible sounds we can make
• rhythmic walking enhanced our sense of ‘time keeping’ (think of that initial drum beat), and co-ordinating of actions and group activities (think sea shanties)
• having our hands free meant we could make more tools and types of primitive instruments (think of bone flutes)
• lullabies could have a surrogate role for actual touching and holding
• independence of arms and legs would have enabled dancing
• synchronised music could lead to enhanced group cohesion and sharing of emotions (from wakes to weddings)
• this emotional attunement possible through music would have strengthened the theory of mind, and our capacity to intuit another person’s thoughts and feelings

So group analysis may owe more to our being musical beings than Foulkes may have realised.

I have started with rhythm – not just as an accompaniment to war. We already know a lot about the baby in the womb and its auditory capacity from only 6 weeks. If we play a sound of a heartbeat to a child, it will soothe, promote sleep and weight gain. I was curious to discover that children will prefer the rhythm they were ‘bounced to’ and get used to the metre of their home culture eg when babies are carried (as opposed to being pushed in prams) their culture is more likely to have more complex musical rhythms. I feel I have missed out!

How often do we listen to the rhythm of an analytic session. Do we feel we are waltzing along, in a relaxed or playful way? Do we appear to be off the beat? Just looking round the room can we sense quickening heart beats, or do we have people who appear to be on different time signatures? Rhythm can also be expressed in terms of speed. Some sessions are fast, and some are slow. Our perception of time in an analytic session can be very different.

Our Lambeg drummer performed a monologue, although Spitzer has argued :

“The natural state of human music is to sing or play together. Our music is never truly alone, because even a solo performance uses a language of musical conventions shared by the group”. Although music is seen as a ‘universal’ language, different traditions have evolved in different countries at different times with very different sounds. Western music traditionally, is very different from that in African or Asian continents, although colonisation waged by the expanding British Empire did in some cases kill off aspects of local cultures. The British believed the culture of indigenous people to be sinful, inferior. Luckily for us, people coming to us from other cultures have enriched our lives.

Tom Service (who does a fascinating weekly programme on BBC Radio 3 on different aspects of music) points out that in music, there is no such thing as ‘unison’ If you listen to a crowd singing “Land of Hope and Glory’ at the last night of the Proms, or a football crowd singing their personal anthem, everyone is on a slightly different vibration. We can only have true unison with electronic instruments, but then the music has a dead quality. Playing or singing to a different vibration enhances the quality of sound. In the same way, rhythm can be inexact: an orchestra can lag behind the conductor’s beat. When playing a Chopin nocturne on the piano, the right hand can be ahead of the left (referred to as ‘rubato’) and in jazz the melody lags behind the accompaniment.

In string quartets, (I am told) the violins and cellos follow the viola (Mozart and Beethoven played viola), but when time lags close, Spitzer points out,  it can signal a powerful moment, what he refers to as ‘Points of religious revelation’. This evokes comparison with Bion and his grappling with the concept of ‘O’.

The Lambeg drum instantly has meaning for Ulster Protestants, but might seem alien to someone growing up in a different culture. Traditional Irish music features the bodran, although it is a more recent addition to folk groups. Time perhaps, for a duet or ‘dialogue’.

Cue ‘A Gardener Now’ clip (See TouTube link below) Listen from 4 minutes in

Here we have musicians from 2 different cultural traditions having a conversation.

We are starting to build a musical Matrix. When Foulkes described the concept of ‘Matrix’, –  he referred to 2 different aspects: the Foundation Matrix and the Dynamic Matrix.

The Foundation Group Matrix is ‘created by past familiar, cultural, social and lingual experiences’, and the Dynamic Group Matrix is seen as ‘emerging through the interactions and the relationships growing during the group process’. So we can think about our immersion in the music of our own particular cultures when growing up, and the relational music we make when we come together.

We know that when we attend events like this, we are suddenly thrown together and have to quickly recognise and respect our different cultural traditions. But then, do we ourselves have a strong sense of our own cultures, are they rich and life affirming, giving us a strong sense of identity, or do we feel weare without roots?

I was deeply affected when I heard a group analyst, originally from the north of Ireland, say at an on line event, that she had grown up in a Protestant/Loyalist culture, but felt that culture was very lacking, unlike the Catholic/Nationalist culture which seemed very vibrant.

(I should explain. There are many ‘Christians’ in the north, although we are slowly becoming more diverse. Many Protestants are loyal to Queen and crown and see themselves as ‘British’. Many Catholics want Ireland to be a nation once again, and fully governed from Dublin. To make it more complex, some Protestants vote for all Ireland political parties and have Irish passports, and some Catholics want to stay in the UK!)

I understood what she meant. People are more likely to associate the former with marching bands (drums, flutes and bagpipes), and the latter with traditional Irish music (bodran, fiddles, uileaan pipes, flutes and tin whistles, the harmonium, and more lately banjos, mandolins, bazoukis) and an extensive archive of traditional tunes and songs. (I could say a bit about the links between Ulster and Scots traditions but that is for another time.)

We can feel disappointed in our cultures and envious of others. In my imagination I can sing like Nina Simone, and play bass like Paul Chambers. Alas, only in my dreams. I wouldn’t survive 10 minutes performing in a jazz club, but give me a piece by Bach or Gabriel Faure, and I’m just fine.

Foulkes of course introduced the idea of the ‘facilitator’ of the group being referred to as the ‘conductor’ and a lot of writers have focused on this and other concepts that can refer to both the group analytic group and the musical ensemble. You will see a range of articles in the Journal Group Analysis that reflect on these. Clearly we are trying to use music as a medium to better understand how we relate, as an important metaphor, although I wonder if we, like Bion, have a place in our comparison grids for the mystical.

For example, Koukis (2015) looked at similarities and differences between conducting a group analytic group and conducting an orchestra. Powell (1983) looked at ‘musical grammar’, Strich at how ‘music is an attempt to understand the patterns of human relationships  by symbolically re-enacting them’, (1983) Thygesen (2008), explored the concept of resonance, and de Carlo (2013) considered the ‘Rise and Call of Group Rap Therapy’! (Not my musical field)

I will highlight a couple of papers that you may or may not be familiar with. John Schlapobersky presented the 39th Foulkes Lecture “On Making a Home Amongst Strangers: The Paradox of Group Psychotherapy”, where the ‘three underlying dimensions of group analytic psychotherapy – the relational, reflective and reparative – are described and illustrated with clinical vignettes and music’. (2015, p 406) His choice of music was moving: Hugh Maseka, ‘Home is Where the Music is’, performed by political exiles in London in the 1970s; the Yiddish song, ‘Vilna’ composed in a Nazi created ghetto, where the occupants were used as a workforce, and executed when ‘redundant’ to purpose; Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo singing ‘Homeless’ about a longing to go home; and finally, ‘Va Pensiero’ a chorus from Nabucco by Verdi, also known as the ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’.

Even if you didn’t understand the words themselves, or their context, the music and performance evoke in us very powerful emotional responses. They speak to something and if we only listen with our whole beings, we can hear. The deaf percussionist, Evelyn Glennie, has pointed out that hearing is basically a specialised form of touch. My grandfather and his brothers worked in Canada as labourers, building the railways, the only work they could get, and others family members left Belfast to escape the conflict, so ‘Homeless’ tugs at my heart strings.

One of the respondents was Linde Wotton, who has a special interest in music. In her paper, ‘Improvising a Home Among Strangers’ about when we have to travel to a new land to find safety and security,  stated her aim was to ‘illustrate the difference between playing instruments together and really making music’. (p 448) In this she looked at attunement, alignment, identity, longing and belonging – and the link between them, and she quotes Stephen Malloch, who has suggested the term ‘communicative musicality’ to refer to:

‘innate musicality that allows us to be in time and in tune with others and so to construct joint meaning out of experience’ (Malloch and Trevarthern, 2009). A Self Psychologist would probably say that sounds like empathy!

She elegantly looked at how:

variations in pitch and rhythm in speech, formed patterns which build to narratives, and how accumulated intersubjective narratives, came to form our sense of self, and how these are co constructed from innate proto-conversations between carers and infants and how subtle variations across communities are culturally derived and elaborated.

The group is then seen as a musical vehicle, and it is our willingness to share our traditions that helps us to make a home among strangers, where the sense of self is co-constructed. She referred to the role of ‘improvisation’ in the process, and I found myself ‘going down a rabbit hole’  to earlier papers written by Linde, and Andy Thomas back in 2013, where he was respondent to a paper she had written.

When I looked at Linde’s earlier paper, ‘Between the Notes: A Musical Understanding of Change in Group Analysis’, I was fascinated to discover what I fantasised as a duet between Linde and Andy. His reply was ‘Transition in Tradition: A Response to Between the Notes’ . . .  On the one hand, Linde appeared to me to be writing from quite a classical perspective, whereas Andy was pure jazz. (I love both and attempt to speak both languages!)

Linde wanted to suggest that:

‘the formal similarity between music and the music matrix – when that is understood as a complex self reflective process (Stacey 2000) – means that the matrix is the true music of the group, where temporal patterns of tension and release act as the basis for resonance.’ (2013 p 49)

She also suggests that if we view the matrix in terms of musical process then:

we can view ‘the group analyst, not as a conductor but as a tonic or home note and a view of change as the development of greater flexibility in relating’ and she used the analogy of how meaning emerges in both music and group process and compared ‘the interval in music and the intersubjective space in the group’. (p 48)

(If you have seen ‘The Sound of Music’ you will have heard ‘Doe, a deer . .’ The tonic note is simply the ‘doh’ of ‘doh ray me etc and we can skip some of the steps in a scale to make melodies more interesting, or to play notes together to create harmony.)

Linde continues:

(it is) “. . . clear that I set the tone in my groups, and indeed it is necessary to do so, as it is the tonic stability in a piece that provides containment for the anxieties associated with conflict and change”. (p 58)

Enter Andy Thomas, who issues a delightful alternative from the perspective of Bion, and challenges the idea of the conductor as the ‘tonic note’. He suggests it would be too predictable to only start from there, as such a group would have

 “a ‘root restricted’ mind-set . . .  could be described as ‘playing in the metaphorical Bionic key of basic assumption dependency, reliant on the conductor to lead in a new direction’. (2013, p 88)

“In contrast, a work group in which all members are encouraged to take up positions of leadership may result in less predictable and more challenging musical output”. (p 88)

A feature of jazz is ‘improvisation’, although this is not a mindless playing of any notes in any sequence. It does follow certain ‘rules’ or ‘progressions’ which then provide context and holding for the musicians, or a ‘secure base’ from which to be playful. The ‘rules’ are not in the ‘leader’, they are in the fabric of the music. (Are we back to matrix?)

“To improvise is to do more than expected – it requires the ability and confidence to risk, tolerate, survive and repair being wrong, out of tune, sometimes to cringe level. It requires the critical internalising, recycling and sometimes discarding of existing knowledge to create something new”. (p 91)

Clearly there are as many ways of thinking and linking groups and music as there are our individual musical reference frameworks. I am still curious about Linde’s question – ‘what is the difference between playing instruments and really making music together?’ We have all been at musical events where we thought  ‘these musicians seem very skilful’, but the thought remained in the intellect. However, we can be at other events where eg the musicians might be very young, or inexperienced, or just hapless, but we find ourselves swaying or tapping our feet without even realising it. We are ‘possessed’ by something. Group Analysis isn’t very good at describing soul or spirit, where we cheerfully abandon our individual sense of self and surrender to something more primitive and transpersonal. Do we need to make sense of how something ‘works’ to be able to say “That was a good session!”

Gilbert Rose (2004) a Psychoanalyst with an interest in music, gives an example of some of the comments made about a particular piece of music. (Originally quoted by Kramer 1988) Could you guess what the music was from the reviews?

‘A symphony of pain and lamentation’

‘nothing but joy and animation’

‘rhythms and idioms of comedy’

an ordinary, mild piece of music’

‘Grecian lightness and grace’

‘fatalistic’

‘exuberant with rapture’

(Mozart Symphony in G minor)

Clearly these responses are not just accurate, impartial descriptions of orchestral music, but say a lot about the internal worlds and emotional states of the listeners at the time of listening!

Andy’s reference to a group seen in terms of a ‘constellation of object relations carried around as a ‘relational score’ from which we all need to expand or depart, made me think again of how I find the term ‘conductor’ doesn’t sit with me when I am working with a small group.

Linde cites Foulkes (1975) “I feel like a conductor but I don’t know in the least what music is to be played”. (p 292). This reminded me of my youth and my early involvement in traditional yoga – postures, breathing, meditation. (As opposed to more recent styles which emphasise postures). My teachers were from the north of India and would feature Kirtan – community singing where someone would play the melody on a harmonium. I remember ‘leading’ Kirtan at a very large international gathering (chosen because I played piano) and had no idea if I was directing the singers or being directed by the singing! Perhaps this is why my association to being the tonic note is more like being the lightening conductor, who is a channel for something.

In a small group, I also feel more like the member of an ensemble who takes on an additional function, whereas I appreciate better the idea of the conductor in the large group. There is a wealth of literature and anecdote about the relationship between the orchestral, or big band conductor, and the larger musical ensemble. Some of it deadly serious, and some disarmingly funny.

There are obviously dynamics that emerge between the musicians in an orchestra – sometimes between individuals, between different sections, long serving members versus new or temporary players. The conductor will sometimes have their ‘transferences’ to individual players, sections, or to the whole group. He or she also has a huge containing function for the anxieties associated with live performance.

I have taken part in a few ‘Shadow Workshops’, and am reminded of Spira Mirabilis,  a collection of musicians who come together once a year and who have been described as an orchestra without a conductor. The musicians sit in a circle, each has the full score, and they democratically come together to bring out the true music of the score. Tom Service would argue that:

“what conducting is really about is the creation of a culture of responsibility, of respect, of musical and social awareness, and of listening” (p 278)

During the classical period, the orchestra was relatively modest but as we moved into the late romantic and modern periods, orchestras became larger. When the Symposium was held in Dublin in 2008, we had 567 people in the large group. (From 39 different countries) As a comparison, the Requiem Mass (Grande Messe des Morts) by Berlioz, is scored for 429 musicians (218 instruments and 211 singers), but he stipulated the chorus could include 700 to 800 singers, though not all singing at once.

Spitzer has argued that ‘the ultimate aim of music is the expression of group solidarity, and that an individual’s keenest musical pleasure is to dissolve into a crowd’. Do we really have a desire for merger? There is certainly a very different experience when you are playing or singing in a large group! In Belfast, our local professional orchestra has a ’come and play’ day for amateur musicians, where you are playing well known orchestral scores alongside the professionals. It is difficult to describe the excitement, dread, and sheer joy when you are playing with a professional musician on either side of you. You don’t want to stop! It takes a long time to come down afterwards.

Andy has made reference to Bion and the idea of basic assumption groups, but Bion also has a lot to say about thinking, and in particular about dreaming. For him, thinking is not just ‘thoughts’ but also feelings, encompassing a wider realm of experiencing. He speaks of raw unprocessed thoughts and experiences as ‘beta’ elements, and it is our task to be able to transform these into ‘alpha’ elements (that are suitable for mental processing) using ‘alpha function’. Ideally, when infants, we have a parent who is able to help us with this transformation using their alpha function, but later in life it may well be the psychotherapist or analytic group that provides this function. It is a type of digestive process.

So we have thoughts in search of a thinker, and dreams in search of a dreamer.

For Bion, the patient who cannot dream puts ‘the dream-yet-to-be-dreamt’ into the analyst via projective identification. The analyst does not dream for the patient, but must ‘dream the session’ and Bion refers to the importance of the analyst’s capacity for reverie. Dreaming does not just happen when we are asleep, it also happens during the day. Day dreaming is usually dismissed and taken lightly, but Bion sees it as having equal value. Music has been described as a collective waking dream! If dreaming is a basic ongoing activity of the unconscious and therefore our thinking, we can invoke it by the process of free association.

We are all familiar with the concept of the social unconscious – Weinberg (2007) (his) ‘definition of the social unconscious is somewhat different from Hopper’s (2001) or Dalal’s (2001): the social unconscious is the co-constructed shared unconscious of members of a certain social system such as community, society, nation or culture. It includes shared anxieties, fantasies, defenses, myths, and memories. Its building bricks are made of chosen traumas and chosen glories (Volkan, 2001).

We can use the process of social dreaming to hold and explore this socio centric viewpoint. This approach has been developed by Gordon Lawrence, Hanna Biran, Robbi Friedman and others.

“It is knowledge of the environment that is important, as individuals face the tragedy, and comedy of being. This is outside the clinical situation”. Lawrence (2010)

The purpose of the Social Dreaming Matrix here is:

“transforming the thinking of the dreams by means of free associations so as to make links and connections between and among the dreams, and in this process be available for new thinking and new thoughts”. Lawrence believes that after a few sessions ‘the dreams flow as in a jazz group’. As in Bion’s approach, the hosts (as opposed to conductors) must access their own unconscious by themselves  “moving into a dreamy state”.

So what is the music of the Social Dreaming Matrix? We can get quite metaphysical.

Lawrence has written about the rhythmic patterns of the universe, and borrowed from Quantum Physics the idea of energy particles manifesting and alternating as waves and particles:

“dream-work is a wave function” and “when a dream emerges from the black hole of the psyche, it is a particle” Lawrence and Biran (2002). (Just as we can think of the Beta wave and the emerging Alpha particle).

So we seem to have at the beating heart of the SU some kind of pulsing life force, from which melodies and harmonies emerge. In 2021, a researcher at Harvard University, translated visual data from a Supernova into notes and rhythms, and assigned instruments such as piano, violins and bells. Brightness and distance determined pitch and volume “Letting us hear the symphony of space”. In ancient Greece it was believed that celestial bodies made music. In ‘string theory’, the smallest particles of matter, such as quarks and electrons, are seen not as minuscule points, but rather sub-microscopic “strings” that vibrate like strings on a musical instrument. Instead of producing notes, they produce particles, giving shape to the universe. Strings and particles reminds me of ‘nodal points in a network’!

Music is inherent in the matrix of the universe and we perceive only some of the music some of the time! But through activities such as SDM we open ourselves to the infinite, the numenous. And we can then translate what we perceive or receive into something tangible.

“The unconscious is manifested through the cultural artefacts of our civilisation. Every work of architecture, work of art, literature and the cultivated environment takes its shape and content because of the unconscious dreaming abilities of their creators”. (Biran and Lawrence, 2002). “Without dream, fantasy and imagination, the creative act and artefact would not have existence”. (ibid)

It is is noted that occasional amplification can occur when a dream is related to a film, novel or contemporary problems. As a result of the latest series of ‘Stranger Things’, the Kate Bush song ‘Running up That Hill’ has suddenly become essential listening, so it appears to speak to something important in the social unconscious.

Kate Bush was asked in 1985  ‘what is your song about?’ “If I only could, I’d make a deal with God, and I’d get him to swap our places . . “

She said it was about how men and women didn’t understand each other. If only they could see things from each other’s perspective, they would relate and communicate better. Maybe that speaks to a strong conscious/unconscious desire in our world at present, that world leaders and nations would have the courage and humility to do this?

Music can play a very important practical role in society, and can be a force for social or political change. Think, for example of Band Aid back in 1984 raising money and awareness about anti famine efforts in Ethiopia.  In Venezuela there was a dream of bringing people out of poverty through teaching disadvantaged children music – El Sistema. That endeavour has been both lauded, and felt to be over idealised, but the model has been used elsewhere. It was re-imagined in Liverpool, where an entire school, including children, teachers and dinner ladies were taught to play musical instruments, and they even rehearsed in the same building as The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Educational changes were measured. Children’s reading improved by 84% and their maths by 75%: “by putting a little bit of magic in the families lives, music enabled them to imagine new realities” Jude Robinson, cited in Spitzer.

Dame Chi chi Nwanoku, who is of Nigerian and Irish parents, set up the Chineke! Orchestra, which first performed in 2015, and is made up of a majority of black and ethnically diverse musicians. Sheku Kanneh Mason was the first black musician to win BBC Young Musician of the Year since it was launched in 1978 – he won in 2016.  He passed his grade 8 cello with the highest marks in the UK, aged only 9. We can only imagine the dedication required to achieve his personal musical dreams. Perhaps, more importantly you might argue, it is reported that he has donated significant sums of money to his former secondary school to enable 10 students to continue cello lessons.

The Paraorchestra, based in Bristol, is an orchestra of professional disabled and non disabled musicians, selected for their virtuosity in playing, whereas the Able and National Open Youth Orchestras, include profoundly disabled young people in their performances. The Ukranian Freedom Orchestra, which is performing at this year’s Proms in the Royal Albert Hall in London, is entirely composed of recent refugees. My local music college is actively involved in offering musical experiences to refugees.

It has been said that music is a collective waking dream. But musical dreams don’t have to be ethereal, like mist blown on the breeze. They can help us to fight social injustice, improve lives, and bring joy and opportunity.

I want to end by returning to Kate Bush, and will play you just a part of ‘Running up That Hill’. See if you notice anything?

The song is about communication, putting yourself in the shoes of the other, trying to respect and understand each other.

And yes,

you did hear a Lambeg drum.

REFERENCES

Bion – I suggest Sandler, P. C. (2005) The Language of Bion: A Dictionary of Concepts. Karnac: London for easy access to some concepts

de Carlo, A. (2013) ’The Rise and Call of Group Rap Therapy: A Critical Analysis from its Creator’ Group Analysis 46 (2) 225 – 238

Foulkes, S. H. (1975) Group Analytic Psychotherapy: Method and Principles . London: Karnac Books cited in Wotton (2013)

Koukis, A. E. (2015) ‘Group Analysis and Music: Similarities and Differences between Conducting a Group Analytic Group and Conducting an Orchestra’ Group Analysis 48 (3) 30 – 48

Kramer (1988) cited in Rose, G. (2004) Between Couch and Piano: Psychoanalysis, music, art and neuroscience. Hove: Brunner-Routledge.

Lawrence, W. Gordon. (2010) The Creativity of Social Dreaming. Karnac: London

Lawrence, W. Gordon and Biran, H.  (2002) ‘The Complementarity of Social Dreaming and Therapeutic Dreaming’ in Dreams in Group Psychotherapy. Neri, C., Pines, M., and Friedman, R. (Eds) Jessica Kingsley: London

Malloch, S. and Trevarthen, C. (2009) ‘Musicality: Communicating the vitality and interests of life’, in S. Malloch and and C. Trevarthen (eds) Communicative Musicality: Exploring the basis of human companionship: Oxford: Oxford University Press. cited in Wotton (2013) ‘Between the Notes: A Musical Understanding of Change in Group Analysis’. Group Analysis 46 (1) 48 – 60

Powell, A. (1983) ‘The Music of the Group: A Musical Enquiry into Group Analytic Psychotherapy’ Group Analysis 16 (1) 3 – 19

Schlapobersky, John, R. (2015) ‘On Making a Home Amongst Strangers: The Paradox of Group Psychotherapy’. Group Analysis 48 (4) 406 – 432

Service, T ‘The Power of One’ on ‘The Listening Service’ on BBC Radio 3. Broadcast Friday 4th March 2022 (Available online on BBC Sounds)

Service, T. (2022) ‘The Listening Service: 101 Journeys Through the Musical Universe’ Kindle Edition: Faber and Faber

Spitzer, M (2021) ‘The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth’. Kindle Edition: Bloomsbury Publishing

Strich, Sabina J.  (1983) ‘Music and the Patterns of Human Interactions’ Group Analysis 16 (1) 20 – 29

Thomas, A. (2013) Transition in Tradition: A Response to ‘Between the Notes: A Musical Understanding of Change in Group Analysis. Group Analysis. 46 (1) 84 – 94

Thygesen, B, (2008) ‘No Music Without Resonance – Without Resonance No Group’. Group Analysis 46 (1) 63 – 83

Weinberg, H. (2007) ‘So, What is this Social Unconscious Anyway?’ Group Analysis. 40 (3) 307 – 322

Wotton, L (2013) ‘Between the Notes: A Musical Understanding of Change in Group Analysis’, Group Analysis 46 (1) 48 – 60

Wotton, L. (2015) ‘Improvising a Home Amongst Strangers’. Group Analysis. 48 (4) 447 – 454

https://news.harvard.edu ‘Harvard scientist turns space images into music’.

youtube ‘A Gardener Now’ a musical dialogue between Ronan O Snodaigh and Richard Campbell. Myles O’Reilly 21 December 2021

For a comparison between a classical musical ensemble and a jazz ensemble listen to firstly Schubert “Trout Quintet’:

and secondly, Miles Davis

Christine Christie is a Belfast based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, Group Analyst, and Supervisor who has worked in private practice for 35 years. She also co-ordinated and taught on the Counselling and Psychotherapy trainings at Queens University Belfast, and has served on a number of committees, usually in the role of developing professional development. She has also been a keen amateur musician since teenage years, starting with piano and woodwind, and lately double bass, and is happiest when playing in a group. She is a big fan of Wilfred Bion and Miles Davis.

christinechristie25.9@btinternet.com