Jugian Psychology, Fascism, Mental Health, Rock and Roll, etc., etc.

I don't mind wearing ironed shirts and wetting my hair down, but doing so does make me feel a bit like a grizzly bear being made to wear people clothes. My classmates might have noticed that when I am not required to dress like an adult I wear black t-shirts that have something to do with horror movies or heavy metal. (I am careful not to wear the offensive ones to class.)  Of course, my taste in t-shirts is not a moral issue, but those shirts, which I wear when I am presenting myself as "regular me," do reflect an important part of my life: violent, morbid, antisocial art is very important to me. I like to spend my free time thinking about monsters, human or otherwise, and Why Good People Do Bad Things led me to think about how my aesthetic preferences, particularly my taste in music, might reflect something about my relationship with my Shadow. 

The particular passage that interested me was about how the Shadow exists in relationship between the interpsychic, the aesthetic, and the social:

"Did you ever attend a rock concert and find yourself swept up on the fervor of the crowd, perhaps deliberately seeking to losten the stricturs of your ego with pot of booze? [. . .] If you never attended a rock concert, did you ever attend a political rally in Munich? Did you ever join a lynch mob? [. . .] Rock groups seek to active and channel the youth's psychological need for separation, and to make a lot of oney at the same time [. . . ] Politicians seek to exploit fears and garner votes." (pg. 18-19)

The undercurrents of fascism and hate that one can find at big public gatherings like rock concerts, where groups of people deliberately surrendering themselves to a larger, amoral whole, have been noted by quite a few prominent rock musicians, including deliberately provocative artists like Marilyn Manson, but also by more mainstream artists like The Who, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and Pink Floyd, who have all used overtly fascist imagery in one way or another. Pink Floyd’s  film version of The Wall album (which is basically an extended riff on psychoanalytic theory and fame) includes a fantasy sequence where the main character spouts racist rhetoric over animated imagery of  marching hammers. That sequence inspired a real life Neo-Nazi group called the Hammerskins. Pink Floyd, of course, was not endorsing racism, as the hateful rhetoric in the film is  being spewed by an isolated, desperate character at the end of his rope. However, no matter how clear it is that the sequence is intended to be loathsome, there is real aesthetic power in the imagery, and the racist rant that accompanies it is compellingly aggressive, no matter how vile it is. It might seem ironic that a hate group chose an image that is clearly meant to be evil as its symbol, but evil is compelling .

From the racist fantasy sequence in Pink Floyd's "The Wall."

An image of a hammerskin patch.

Some of the the kinds of bands I enjoy define themselves as being "extreme," and the way that engage in the tradition of  "evil" imagery and fascist rhetoric is much more direct, amoral, and unapologetic than most rock music. I am particularly drawn to Scandinavian black metal, and the ugly side of Northern European history is a source of fascination for many of the more important bands in the genre. Marduk, for example, has released World War II themed albums with titles like “Panzer Division Marduk” and “Frontschwein," and onstage their fairly standard heavy metal presentation-- black t-shirts and corpsepaint-- is accented by militaristic touches like combat boots, bullet belts, and cammo.

A WWII themed album cover by Marduk

Black metal bands who do not directly engage in WWII imagery are prone to make the usually covert darkness that public gathering overt. At metal concerts, people pump their fists in unison, flash devil horns in unison, and look upward to their leaders for inspiration. Black metal bands are prone to emphasize the nasty subtext of those behaviors with morbid stage props, blood, and occult symbols.

Watain onstage

What is the value of enjoying performances that are sadistic, morbid, and deliberately “evil"?

For me, ugly art is thrilling because it gets directly the escape from the ordinary that all performances create. As Hollis writes, we like to "lose ourselves" in crowds. When I see a band like Watain onstage, I experience a bit of the thrill of taboo, but the bigger reason Watain appeals to me is that the strategies they use to make the underside of rock music overt allow their performances to be immersive.  As the text notes, there is a real relationship between mass events designed for escapism, like rock concerts or mardi-gras, and mass events designed to enroll people in political causes. Wholesome patriotic displays designed to enroll people into a collective, only they do not  emphasize the ways that crowds are dangerous. The Shadow is always present, and when it is not acknowledged, it is dangerous. I am much more comfortable in gatherings where the Shadow is given a voice than in gatherings where it is hidden.

I am a lot more comfortable with Watain. What does that say about me?

Of course, there is a complication with my perspective: I am very much drawn toward a somewhat radical notion of individualism, and as William Doherty notes in Soul Searching, this is a very capitalist, American perspective. (It has been claimed that the radically individualistic Church of Satan was the first American religion. I'd give the nod to Mormonism, but that's a different conversation.) Doherty, who advocates for a perspective that emphasizes social duty, notesrly in the book that "I owe much of the framework for my social critique of psychotherapy to social scientists who have written about the modern culture of individualism" (11). Contrarianism is, in our late capitalist world, a deeply conventional perspective that neglects the importance of community.

So what to do with these contradictions? How do we acknowledge the Shadows that exist in our lives, in our consumption of culture, and in our therapy rooms, while honoring the deep obligations that our culture often encourages us to neglect in favor of self interest? On some level this is simply a question of "validating" or "normalizing" difficult feelings, and therapists are used to thinking that way, but both Hollis and Doherty point toward deeper, more difficult work. I am not sure what that work looks like in the therapy room, but I think the tension between these two authors is a useful place to begin the conversation.

(Just for clarification. . . . there are actual fascist and racist black metal bands, but most racist metal bands are very obscure and have no audience outside of white power circles. I just want to be clear that is blog post is NOT about artist who engage in hate speech. It is about bands who are understand fascism as an ugly, but very normal, human impulse that can be powerful.

I would also like to not that I listen to a lot music that is not heavy metal. If you would ever like recommendations about metal, I can help, but I'd be more interested in talking about Miles Davis.

I would also like to note that I really can't stand "The Wall." I have an intense dislike for that record.

As the semester picks up, these posts will get shorter and less weird.)