TRANCE

Trance conditions include the myriad mental and emotional states, dreams and ‘transcendental’ experiences that can also be called ‘reverie’, sometimes also called ‘waking dreaming’. Reverie can be either religious or secular in nature. The senses of sight, smell, touch and hearing, influence brain functioning and consciousness. Trance states induced by these sensory modalities are thought to be a way of accessing the unconscious mind for mindfulness relaxation, healing, psychotherapy and meditation/yoga. There is extensive research on the history of trance utilising ethnographic and anthropological case and field studies.

Trance, mystical chant and other forms of devotional music are thought to lead to direct communication, or communion, with the ‘Divine’. The ‘trance experience’ is essential to the mystical streams of Yoga (Samadhi), Islam (Sufism), Shamanism, Hinduism, Judaism (Hassidism and Kabbalism), charismatic Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, Balinese Hindu/Animism (Gamelan) and Australian indigenous traditions.

In Judaism, trance techniques play a role in forms of Kabbalist and Hassidic niggunim. A niggun is a repetitive, trance-inducing melody which expresses the mystical emotions of deveikut. Hassidism gave new emphasis to song as a form of prayer. As many niggunim are vocalisations without words, it is thought that the niggun can reach spiritual levels higher than words and reach ‘direct communion’ with the Divine. This ascetic path to direct communion through music is deveikus (to be attached, or ‘cleaved’, to God).

There are niggunim for personal meditation, often in prayer, called deveikus (Devekut) niggunim. These are slow with narrow pitch range and without lyrics. The intensity of the deveikus niggun magnifies over time and in some instances, for specific festivals, chanting continues for hours without pausing.

To describe the ‘sound’ of psychoanalysis is challenging. It is not one sound, feeling or mood. What happens in psychoanalysis, as in everyday life, is by nature dynamic and unpredictable. As difficult as its mood is to describe, it might be possible to apprehend it as a feeling or ‘atmosphere’ – with its ‘trance-like’ elements of reverie and dreaming.

Sharawadji – the aesthetics of plenitude
The term Sharawadji (Augoyard, 2005) is described as:
“a feeling of plenitude that is sometimes created by the contemplation of a sound motif for a complex soundscape of inescapable beauty”… “under the sharawadji effect, the mind is set in motion despite a certain fear, a certain discomfort”…Sharawadji, a semiotic effect, can manifest itself at the behavioural level by a temporary breathlessness, a hesitation between attraction and repulsion” (Loc 2239).
The Sharawadji effect uses more natural, ambient soundscapes to create richer, more encompassing, and more realistic ‘soundscapes’.
There are occasionally times in a psychotherapy session, and the reverie it evokes, where intersubjective interaction creates a feeling akin to Sharawadji. 
In musical terms, Sharawadji could exist on a continuum, ranging from, say, an orchestrally lush symphonic poem, to a more austere, but evocative, ‘unsaturated’ lyrical form.

Drone music (Augoyard, 2005) refers to the presence of a constant layer (often in the background) of stable or minimally variable pitch. This can also be perceived in the ‘music’ of urban and industrial soundscapes. The sound of nature is often dronal, too.

Drone, in contrast to sharawadji, can evoke feelings of darkness or emotional contraction as a result of its narrowly-pitched, visceral pulsing. Drone can also create emotional or spiritual uplift through incremental building of rhythmic and harmonic structures, while still maintaining a minimal, unsaturated atmosphere. Meditative chanting and other devotional music is based on drone, as is contemporary ambient musical styles.

Timbre and pitch play a large part in the experience of drone-based devotional music. This also applies to instrumental tonality in unsaturated music: voice, bass flutes, cello, marimba, nylon string guitar, harp, muted piano, flugelhorn and certain ‘treated’ synthesized voicings.

The soundtrack for psychoanalysis contains a wide palette of tone colours, forms and atmospheres. The content of the ‘musical’ psychoanalytic session is far from monotonous. The drone, or pulse, is a metaphor that suggests containment, timelessness and a space to ‘be’.

Lullaby

In psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut’s 1950 paper “On the Enjoyment of Listening to Music”, he contended that the infant, in the initial stage of life, is exposed to aversive auditory stimuli felt as ‘noise’, and then slowly over weeks and months learns to be calmed and soothed by sound and music, especially as moderated by the mother’s ‘musical’ vocalisations. Much research since has shown that the foetus and infant respond to modulations in loudness and other qualities of sound, especially in the mother’s tone.

”Sound and noise are the first representatives of the threatening and equilibrium-disturbing outside world. Noise thus becomes the greatest and earliest danger of total psychological destruction. In music the original threat is removed, since the disturbing chaotic sounds are replaced by organised and meaningful ones. The original noise-threat is relieved by the formal aspect of music. The chaotic, disturbing sounds are replaced by meaningful ones. Early associations support this accomplishment. Mother‘s voice is associated with feeding, and mother’s lullaby with drowsy satisfaction after feeding, rocking and rhythm become associated with and are developed into the pattern of musical experience. Pure sound cannot be mastered by secondary processes like verbalisation, it mobilises much greater forces; these can be channelised into musical experiences. The faculty for musical enjoyment consists in the capacity to confront the world of sounds without the aid of processes of verbalisation and without logic in terms of visual imagery” Sterba, psychoanalyst, 1965.