Description
Joel Kroeker
(Online Lecture)
When Psyche Sings:
Jungian Music Psychotherapy
Friday, February 20, 2026
7:00 – 9:00 pm
Music is everywhere in our lives, both waking and sleeping, inside and out. But much of our musical ecosystem remains unheard in a state of non-representation. Drawing on Jungian, post-Jungian and contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives this presentation will explore the place of the acoustic imaginal within our psychic ecology and our current fractured world of splitting and polarization. We will deeply listen together to the soundscape metabolization process of our auditory digestive system toward the fundamental psychoanalytic goal of hearing what cannot yet be seen. By distilling music into its basic archetypal elements, an approach is illustrated for working with musical symbols within analysis, referred to as Archetypal Music Psychotherapy. Through locating the role that acoustic images, both imaginal and material, play in our affective and archetypal engagement with our world, we will explore the contribution that musical processes offer to the wholeness and teleology of the individuation process intrapersonally, relationally and collectively.
Suggested text: Jungian Music Psychotherapy: When Psyche Sings (Routledge, 2019)
Joel Kroeker is a Swiss-trained Jungian psychoanalyst on faculty at the CG Jung Institute Zurich, a clinical supervisor and author with a private practice based in Victoria, BC. Drawing on over 25 years. of diverse experience Joel devotes part of his practice to training and supervising international practitioners in his original modality of Archetypal Music Psychotherapy across North and South America, China and Europe. He currently serves as a journal reviews editor for the Journal of Analytical Psychology and divides his time outside of clinical hours between parenting, musicking, teaching and writing. His book, Jungian Music Psychotherapy: When Psyche Sings is a finalist for the IAJS (International Association for Jungian Studies) book award and has also recently been released in Portuguese. His website is www.joelkroeker.com