The Music between Us by Kathleen Marie Higgins

Author:Kathleen Marie Higgins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Comfort and Joy

Music . . . it’s a form of communication and reassurance of feelings . . . what I get out of music is a feeling that I’m not alone.

ERIC CLAPTON, Official Tour Program 1998

ONTOLOGICAL SECURITY

Let us return for a moment to the musical mission of the Voyager project. In packing a selection of the world’s music and the means to play it on the Voyager spacecraft, the United States’ space program expressed openness to the possibility of encountering intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. This gesture says to any beings with the ingenuity to use these devices, “If you have minds like ours, we want you to know it. You are not alone—and neither are we.”

What does it mean to be alone in the world? Most often, people use this expression to describe someone bereft of family. Our very concern for such people indicates that they are not alone in the most extreme sense. But we recognize that a person experiencing new loss or multiple losses often feels that isolated. What such individuals feel is the lack of sharing on intimate terms the texture of the world they experience. Their sense of “we” as a supportive awareness has been undercut. They no longer feel connected because of the absence of others they belong with and to. To be alone in the world is to be devastated.

Although healthy individuals can come to feel separate from the world as a consequence of major losses, mental health generally involves confidence in having a place within the larger world. R. D. Laing describes individuals who have a basic sense of belonging to the same world as others as being “ontologically secure.”

A basically ontologically secure person will encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological, from a centrally firm sense of his own and other people’s reality and identity. It is often difficult for a person with such a sense of his integral selfhood and personal identity, of the permanency of things, of the reliability of natural processes, of the substantiality of natural processes, of the substantiality of others, to transpose himself into the world of an individual whose experiences may be utterly lacking in any unquestionable self-validating certainties.1

According to Laing, the lack of ontological security is a form of profound psychological disturbance. He describes schizoid and schizophrenic individuals as lacking this basic sense. “There is a loss of ‘vital contact’ with the world.” 2 Interestingly, Laing describes one of his psychotic patients as being at ease only in musical circumstances. “There was only one situation as far as I could judge in which he could let himself go without anxiety at not recovering himself again, and that was in listening to jazz.” Laing describes music (as well as quasi-mystical experience of God) as a special case in which some schizoid and schizophrenic patients can do what they are otherwise almost completely incapable of doing—overcoming a sense of deep isolation and a desperate need for protection.3

Provisionally, I submit that one

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