Listening to space

Communication presented at the 3rd National Congress of the Association Française d’Audio-Psycho-Phonologie*, by Dr Michel G. Mouret, psychiatrist, Centre Hospitalier Spécialisé of Pau (France).*

The subject has before him a space in which his inner world will be able to unfold, provided that he is offered a sheet of paper and pencils. These drawings have of course a projective signification, but they may also serve as an adjuvant to the sonic treatment. Beyond the fact that plastic language may enrich clinical data, the activity of expression is an agent of communication, of catharsis and of psychosynthesis.

Psychosynthesis is neither to explain nor to dissect, but to situate. Once drawn, the inner reality becomes an object of contemplation and of meditation, and so a possible transformer. Furthermore, as Bachelard says, archetypes are motor symbols.

In fact, it would be rather, at first, like tiny little seeds, insipid, dry, dull, ridiculous. Planted in the inner garden, secretly cultivated, they grow: your garden becomes dazzling with life, vibrations, sounds, colours, riches, perfumes, savours, ecstasy. The work the subject works upon shapes him in return, provided he has invested himself sufficiently in it.

When the work has found its balance, by following the way of archetypes and the voice of Tradition, the subject is in harmony with the universe. That is the whole principle of mandalas and of the great work, masonic or alchemical.

The space of the unconscious is a-spatial as it is a-temporal; thus the subjects, at the start of treatment, hardly possess it. It will be there at the end, when the intra-psychic space is oriented towards the light, lux, lug, the logos.

The symbol as re-presentation

The symbol is a re-presentation. It explains nothing, proves nothing, contests nothing: it reconciles. It suggests but does not expound. Instead of being based on the principle of the excluded middle as is conceptual logic, the symbolic on the contrary presupposes a principle of the included middle — that is, a universal complementarity. Symballein means to put together, in a more special sense: to plait (which contains the root: three).

Friends parting would break a small tablet, each taking for himself one of the two pieces, transmitting it if need be to their heirs. The pieces were called “symbols” and signified this alliance for the course of time. On the occasion of reunion, the pieces were re-fitted, attesting that the union had remained intact. This shows that the symbolic character implies an idea of re-cognition. To be re-cognised is to be born to the symbolic order. The Pythagoreans called “symbol” the password that enabled the initiated to recognise one another. In the mysteries, the password contained a truth carrying a guarantee of salvation. The essential summary of the way is called a symbol. Thus, the summary of Christian catechesis is called: the Apostles’ Creed (symbolum).

The symbol is therefore true because it accords with the original. It is in essence union and harmony. Symbolic knowledge is an intuitive grasp. There is a risk in wishing to interpret symbols: that of butterfly-hunting, where one pins them up afterwards. In the transposition into concepts, an incommunicable residue always remains. What in essence is synthesis resists analysis. As Heraclitus says: “God does not hide, does not reveal, but only points” (though to re-veal is at bottom to re-veil). And Aristotle: “One does not demonstrate principles; one perceives truth directly.”

In logic everything comes back to clear principles, to precise conclusions. It is therefore a work in which the sensible faculties have only a function of organ of reception. By contrast, the senses constantly collaborate with the mind in symbolic knowledge. It is revealed only to the senses enlightened by the mind and to a mind that leans on the senses. It escapes the mind that emancipates itself from the senses and the senses that seek only the sensible. Spiritualism is the enemy of the symbol just as much as materialism, by separating matter from mind. The symbol grasps the mind through the senses without keeping it captive. At the present hour, a wind of iconoclasm empties certain churches. Chinese proverb: “When a finger points at the moon, I look at the moon and not at the finger.”

The Word is Light and Life

In drawings, the therapeutic dynamic of intra-psychic conflicts appears — a dynamic announced in the very prologue of the Gospel of Saint John, which one cannot meditate enough (and which he takes up again in his first epistle):

The Word is Light and Life.

The Word is also the vibre, the vibrations, sound before being speech. “All vibrates, above as below”, says Hermes.

The word	φῶς (in Greek) Phoebus	= Light — Phos
(vibre)	βίος	= Life — Bios (the Sun)

The treatments by sounds bring out the solar thematic in those microcosms that are the drawings, and the process of healing is a phenomenon of light, as Tradition has not ceased to repeat for at least 6,000 years.

(We shall make a brief bibliographical tour in these forests of symbols with familiar winks, as Baudelaire says, but we shall retain only what concerns the sole Western tradition, essentially Christian, since it is the only living one with the Old and the New Testament.)

There is a structural analogy between the physical, the psychic and the metaphysical worlds, and the words of light and life there have the same functions.

From the mineral to the living

Subjects whose psychological organisation is in the obsessional mode have a mineralised and devitalised representation of the world. Through bios, life, they will pass from their fantasy world — whose contemplation brings them a mental enjoyment from which the body is excluded — to that carnal and sensitive world where love puts them in relation. But of course: “narrow is the gate, and constricted the way that leads to life!” (Matthew VII, 14).

It is a matter of hystericising (hysteria = uterus) the obsessional. The World is the waves (ondes). As an advert on television says: “colours, that’s life”. It is the living, the waters, the vegetables. It is the space containing the totality of virtualities; it is also the world of the unconscious, of the mother, of the sea (mer), of the cosmic mother, matter, the mater, the earth and the moon, the cycles, the return of the same, the compulsion to repeat, the mirror relation of Narcissus who drowns, the discourse of the Other, the mask, the person (the per-son: that through which it sounds). It is also the great mammal of children’s drawings and of cathedral capitals (whale, elephant, shark, etc.). It is the animal man, finally, whose ontogeny takes up phylogeny, born of water and who must still be born to consciousness — rebirth in the belly of the fish, another Pinocchio who finds his father in the belly of the monster. (The fish is, like water, a symbol of life.)

Empedocles (430 BC): “I was a plant, a mute fish plunging into the waves, a little girl, a young boy.” And Saint Gregory the Great, taking up the tradition of the Greek Fathers: “Man has something in common with every creature. He shares existence with stones, life with trees, sensation with animals, knowledge with angels. And if man possesses this common character with each creature, it is because truly he is, in a certain manner, each of them.”

Of the passage: the rainbow and the butterfly

After the theme of death-rebirth, from the mineral to the living, the following process of transformation will rather be under the sign of passage, of the bridge, the portal or the gate. It often takes the colours of the rainbow, symbol of the bridge between earth and sky, between the material and the spiritual. The colours of the spectrum may appear all together on the pretext of some multicoloured theme (feathers, flags).

The rainbow is the symbol of the Celtic Isis of the Druids, the virgo paritura, the black virgin who is to give birth, the archetype of the rebirth of which Jesus speaks to Nicodemus.

The butterfly is also frequent at this stage. In Greek, butterfly is psyche. At each stage, growth is not an enlargement, but a transformation. The butterfly is not a fat caterpillar. Perhaps the caterpillar’s dream was to become the largest in the forest? It will however have to shed its caterpillar body and a new body will be given to it. This passage is made through the mediation of air, of the volatile, of flying creatures. Birds are constant. As Luke (XIII, 18) says: “The kingdom is within you. It is like a seed in a garden; it grows, becomes a tree, and the birds come.” In psychology as in chemistry, it is sublimation, the passage from the solid to the gaseous, under the sign of the star (compo-stella: the field of the star); that of the alchemical field, when the philosophical sulphur (soufre/souffre), at the moment of its crystalline (christaline) starry form, indicates the way — that of the passage from lead to gold, from the vulgar to the sublimated, from instinctual drive to the sublimation of instincts.

“In the psychoanalytic literature, recourse is frequently had to the concept of sublimation; it is indeed the index of a requirement of the doctrine, of which one sees ill how it could be dispensed with. The absence of a coherent theory of sublimation remains one of the lacunae of psychoanalytic thought. A drive is said to be sublimated in so far as it is diverted towards a new non-sexual goal and in so far as it aims at socially valorised objects. Freud held the capacity to sublimate to be essential in the outcome of treatments, without, however, showing it concretely at work.” (Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, Laplanche and Pontalis.)

This passage is that from water to fire. Saint John the Baptist (Matthew and Luke), who at the summer solstice has replaced the archangel of fire Uriel (fires of Saint John), tells us: “I baptise in water… The one who baptises after me baptises in fire.”

For Plutarch, “water sanctifies” (that is, makes sain, before making sain-t) “and fire purifies”. Those whose psychological organisation is on the hysterical side interpose the body as the principal source of jouissance between themselves and their fantasies, thus avoiding all consciousness. To these, the light of Knowledge, of Wisdom must be brought: Phos.

As the Proverbs say (VI, 23): “The commandment is a lamp, teaching a light.” They are then in relation no longer with the world (the waves, the waters) but with the cosmos (the organised universe, oriented space).

From water to light

In Greek, the idea of order and beauty comes from fire (from the Phoenician phos — Phoenician is phos-niké, the victory of light). It is the passage from the Old Testament:

(Ps 124) “The torrent passed over our soul in foaming waters, the waters submerged us.”
(Ps 42) “The mass of the floods has passed over me.”
(Ps 69) “Save me, for the waters have come in unto my soul… let not the flood of waters overflow me.”
(Ps 144) “Pull me out of the great waters.”
(Ps 18) “He delivers me from the great waters.”

… to the New:

Simeon: “My eyes have seen thy salvation, a light to lighten.”
Luke: “Tenderness of our God who brings us the visit of the Rising Sun.”
Matthew: “The people who sat in darkness saw a great light. Upon those who dwelt in obscurity, a light has risen.”
Jesus in John (XVII, 35): “I am the light.”
in Luke (XII, 49): “I am come to bring fire.”
and Mark: “Have fire in yourselves.”
Paul to the Hebrews: “God is a consuming fire, who makes of his servants a flame of fire.”

It is thus that from the waters, through air, the drawing comes to light, a symbol of healing and salvation, which is sun, fire, temple. It is the symbolic of the Father, that third term that institutes the triangular relation, the cosmic father, God (who comes from the Sanskrit div: to shine, which gave Zeus, deus, dios). The sky is the house of the Father. It is time, the rhythms (Uranus-Chronos-Jupiter, jour-pater). It is the root aor, light; ur, fire. It is the chrism. “The seal of the living god is the sun”, say the Vedas. Zoroaster: “The ternary shines everywhere in the universe.”

Remember Christmas — the Neo-Helios, the new sun; the tongues of fire of Pentecost; the liturgy of fire of the Easter vigil.

The sun is therefore an agent of synthesis and the light of knowledge. It is the marriage of spirit and matter, individuality, the spiritual man. Paul to the Corinthians: “If there is a psychic body, there is also a spiritual body. It is not the spiritual that appears first, it is the psychic, then the spiritual.” And Saint Jude in his epistle: “These psychic fathers who have no spirit.” The directed waking dream has made it possible to observe the association of gold, ascension and sublimation, that is to say universalisation and synthesis. Hermes concludes the Emerald Tablet by saying: “What I have said of the operation of the sun is accomplished.”

The two ages of drawing

One can very distinctly separate drawings into two ages, with a hinge at twelve years. It is the age of initiation into the mysteries, that is to say of entry into the universe of archetypes. Before, the child’s discourse is totally dependent on family discourse, and archetypes are present only if they are already operative in the family. After, real father and mother fade before the cosmic Father and Mother. Childhood is at its term, Jesus is found again in the temple: “Why did you seek me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” Weaning is over. Re-birth of a subject of desire in the field of the Word. The father fades before the Father: re-cognition of desire, of the desire for recognition: “You have received a spirit of sonship which makes us cry out: Father! The Spirit himself joins with our spirit to attest that we are children of God, children and therefore heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs of Christ.” (Paul to the Romans, 8, 15.)

The journey of drawings in the course of therapies follows the route thus figured for the spiral (spire = to engender, to sow):

Diagram of the spiral

Spiral = to engender, to sow.

Masculine pole (Warm)	Feminine pole (Warm)
Dry — Active (intuition of the heart)	Humid — Passive (reflected, reflection)
The inspired — spiritual man	The psychic — psychic man
Light — Sun — Fire — AIR
LuMeN — VERB — éN-eRGy
Quintessence — Spirit of wine — Essence — Eau-de-vie — Salt (sol-eil, sun) of the earth	Butterflies — Rainbow — Volatiles — Stars (*astres* = *êtres*) — Vapour
Knowledge (Jesus) — LIFE — AIMANCE
Abstract art of the principles of the universe (archetypes)	Hominal — Animal — Vegetal
The vase
Mineral — Walls — Fortresses — Crystals — Pebbles	Fish — Snails — Quadrupeds — Mushrooms
éLéMeNts → LiMoN → aLiMeN-ts
Abstract art of defence against life
Cold — Dry — Masculine — Obsessional pole	Cold — Humid — Feminine — Hysterical pole

So as not to oversimplify by suggesting that above appears the masculine being ordering everything and that from below comes the feminine being who engenders all things, we shall see on the recapitulative canvas that the succession:

éLéMeN-t → LiMoN → aLiMeN-t → sub-LiMen (sublimate) → LuMeN

… shows clearly that at bottom, light has always already been there.

(In sacred semantics, only the consonants are taken into account. The vowels for their part constitute the participation of the divine, which allows the word to be said, and therefore to live, since God is IÉOUA or IAOUE, that is to say the five vowels — I = J and U = V.)

In sum, it is therefore not a matter of suppressing the body to free the soul, as if it were in a prison, but of sublimating matter, of illuminating it in a sense (as the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin essentially defines it), so that the spirit is not under the tutelage of the body nor the soul imprisoned in the meanderings of the spirit, but that the body be under the control of the spirit and the latter under the guard of the soul.

Stages of psychic development

The principal stages of psychic development might be summarised thus:

Latent consciousness	mineral (obsessional, where the death drives that tend to the reduction of tensions, that is to say to bring the living being back to the anorganic, are prevalent)
Instinct of preservation	vegetal
Nascent feeling	hysterical organisation (hysteresis = what persists)
Feelings, instincts
Subconscious
Consciousness in feelings and thought	psychic man (normal)
—	spiritual man (inspired)
Christic consciousness	whose fruits are charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, helpfulness, trust, gentleness, temperance (Paul to the Galatians)

Man is himself the matter of the great work of which the divine word is the alchemist and the Holy Spirit the secret fire.

Two figures from mythology

To close, I shall take two exemplary traits in mythology (mythos-logos: the word of the verb, and also: the mute word; legend: that which must be read).

The musical combat of Pan and Apollo

Apollo: the solar god who crosses the heavens on a dazzling chariot and symbolises the supreme spiritualisation. He plays the lyre, to whose charms, according to Plutarch, the Pythagoreans had recourse before giving themselves to sleep “in order to appease and enchant the instinctual and passionate elements of their soul”. Ancient art has often celebrated the musical contest that pitted Pan, with his pipe of joined tubes — a rustic and sensual god whom the cloven herbivore’s feet bind to the earth — against Apollo, the god of light, harmony, eloquence and beauty, with his lyre. Both played with great talent, but from the lyre flew accords so beautiful that the flute, beside them, seemed only to stammer. Yet King Midas, arbiter of the harmonious contest, strangely blinded, pronounced for Pan against Apollo. It cost him a pair of ass’s ears.

The poet Orpheus

(Phos d’aor: lumen de lumine of the Nicene Creed — aur-rophée: who heals by light.) Former Argonaut, conqueror of the Golden Fleece, divinised as the son of Apollo himself, he attained the supreme power of art. According to the ancients, at the ineffable harmonies that flew from his lyre and his lips, “the birds came” — follow well here all that is said, you will find it again in many drawings — “the fiercest wild beasts, become attentive and gentle, lay at his feet; the bare trees covered themselves with greenery and buds blossomed; the winds and the hail were calmed; and ships stranded in the sands themselves went to open water!”. Orpheus said: “Let yourselves be traversed by sounds.”

The audio-psycho-phonologists also seek to be in some sense disciples of Orpheus, since the latter’s followers were called the eumolpides — that is, those who have the accomplished voice.

— Dr Michel G. Mouret, psychiatrist, Centre Hospitalier Spécialisé of Pau. Communication at the 3rd National Congress of the Association Française d’Audio-Psycho-Phonologie (AFAPP), Amiens.