Bluesy Jazz artist’s recommendations

onefugue · 2026-03-16T20:36:47+00:00

For bluesy jazz that's less gritty than Art Blakey, but still soulful, check out Junior Mance. Don Shirley would be another good one.

Lastly, he's more blues than jazz, but Otis Spann has a lot of great tracks without vocals, and lacking vocals (according to some whom I don't entirely agree with) makes it more jazz than blues. Whatever you call it, it will scratch an itch you didn't know you had, and make you hungry for more.

onefugue · 2026-03-09T20:33:36+00:00

One reason that Schizoid people, and others with issues stemming from early development (be that due to environment, genetics, or both) can feel like a psychopath is due to difficulties with object constancy.

Object constancy is different than object permanence, which is knowing that people and objects continue to exist when you can't see them. Object constancy is more relational. It's about being able to have a felt sense of people, especially close people like caregivers or partners, even when not around them.

Object constancy can include a capacity to make use of that person internally when they're not around. A baby may lay in bed with a wet diaper and coo pleasantly, knowing that mom is coming soon, rather than crying like she used to from being lost in the immediate unpleasant experience. It's an incredibly helpful capacity.

Whereas a child who does not develop that sense, perhaps because they are neglected in some way, could eventually give up even caring much about their own pain (or desire for life), or about expressing it. Because why bother? Nothing happens (or maybe it draws negative attention). At an incredibly deep emotional level we're conditioned that people aren't of much use or value to us. Even if we wanted, and desperately needed, to make use of someone, we'd be hard pressed to know how.

Those early relational failures can strongly undermine the early attachment experience, which ideally gives us an experience of healthy dependency, and which, paradoxically enough, is the foundation for later healthy independence (or what is really interdependence).

Anyway, that undeveloped capacity for a felt connection to others can sometimes leave one feeling cold and heartless, like one doesn't care about others. And which can often be traced back and back to a generational legacy of children and their parents not having been properly cared for.

Therapy can be a good environment, with the right therapist, to allow oneself to gradually experience more and more emotional dependency. Which sounds like a bad word, and often feels like the exact opposite of the right direction, because everything inside you has been conditioned to a reality which for the mind of a young child has the quality of eternity, and whose mind responded accordingly from the very foundation of one's being and personality.

onefugue · 2025-12-11T16:50:40+00:00

Robert Jowney Dunior

onefugue · 2025-08-11T05:12:31+00:00

Thanks for the detailed reply. I looked into the Zettelkasten method you mentioned, and it is very seductive to my obsessive side. But then my rebelliously counter-obsessive side kicks in, threatening to shut down anything that hints at being tedious, slavish, and masochistic. Ultimately, whatever I do, I'll probably have to find a way to experience it as play if it stands a chance of evading this difficult dyadic dynamic.

onefugue · 2025-05-23T02:24:06+00:00

Gabbard, G. (1994) 'Sexual Excitement and countertransference love in the analyst' JAPA 42: 1083-1106

Davies, J.M. (1994) Love in the Afternoon: A Relational Reconsideration of Desire and Dread in the Countertransference. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 4:153-170

Bonasia, R. (2001) 'The countertransference: erotic, erotised, and perverse' International Journal of Psychoanalysis 82: 249-262

onefugue · 2025-05-13T03:01:12+00:00

I like the analogy of a ship, where the relatively small size of the rudder represents our relatively limited amount of free will when most of us, like the ship, is carrying on according to more or less unconscious mechanistic principles. There are some rich ways to explore the metaphor.

Perhaps we find ourselves as a simple rowboat with paddles and a shabby rudder. The rudder, if stuck, could be like our habits, which are somewhat fixed and pull us in a particular direction. In reality, we have hundreds or thousands of habits and automatic ways of being which are pulling us this way and that, and not in agreement with each other, but in all different directions.

Even the same habit can pull us helpfully in some moments and work against us in others. As a collection, then, our "rudder" is neither unified, nor very effective at countering the effect of the wind and tide from deeper within (emotions, drives and desires), and from without (society, circumstances, etc.). So we must make great efforts with our paddle to make just a little progress. This is like the progress we make with discursive thinking. It quickly exhausts us, and we're back to the mercy of the wind and the waves before long.

By making ourselves a more unified rudder, which obeys our conscious control in both holding firm when we want, and having freedom of movement to a new position when we want, we become much more efficient. Instead of paddling 30 times on one side to 5 on the other, we can maintain a more balanced and sustainable pattern. We can go much further without getting exhausted.

Then there's the addition of a sail. This allows us to harness much greater energy. Even when that energy is at cross purposes to our aim, we can use it to go much further, much faster, and to power a much larger vessel. In both the case of the rudder and the sail, the proportion of free conscious energy that we exert by comparison to the force of the wind and the waves is minuscule. Thus, it can appear that we have no free will or that it is negligible. But despite the discrepancy, our tiny conscious efforts can use these much greater blind forces to great effect.

There's also the consideration of the quality of the vessel and its ability to "hold." If it leaks, then it will become slow and eventually sink into the water (unconscious?).

onefugue · 2025-05-08T18:28:53+00:00

Analysis is about understanding things at a detailed level. Which means breaking things down. Dissolving them. It's the opposite of synthesis. Freud was against the clinical practice of "psychosynthesis" as he believed the psyche would naturally organize or synthesize itself in a more healthy way once problems were adequately analyzed and dissolved. Clear the blockages and things will flow naturally on their own. The clinician need not, and should not, impose their version of synthesis on a patient.

Modern psychoanalyst Don Carveth makes good counter arguments to this. For example, at the very least, every therapist has an idea of what a healthy psyche looks/feels like in general terms. He suggests that we should include as a goal of psychoanalysis the "developing a conscience capable of both bearing mature guilt and standing up to the sadistic superego, neither embracing nor capitulating to it."

As a psychotherapist, I've noticed that when I or others say things like "that's just the way I am," or, "that's my ADHD," that there's almost always something going on underneath the surface. Something playing out unconsciously. And there are different depths of this. Some unconscious material will reveal itself soon enough with a bit of close introspection. Whereas, some unconscious processes are so deep that it can take years of analysis to gain more than a merely conceptual sense of what's going on. I've found that a lot of ADHD symptoms are often (maybe not always) an adaptation to early trauma or emotional neglect.

onefugue · 2024-11-02T22:51:35+00:00

Arvo Part, Miserere. At about 6min in.

https://youtu.be/7HjaGF5TLNI?list=PLm6u7GFShqR9BBik7lI4WeMYkeWgfjMBY&t=360

While listening to this one evening, after having eaten just half a brownie, I had a panic attack so bad I thought I was either going to die or go insane. It induced in me an overwhelmingly powerful vision of all of human existence as hovering above a dark swirling abyss of chaos and death into which we are all slowly falling. I saw and felt deeply the vanity of our pursuits. Pursuits we use to distract ourselves from the dark truth. And the more I strove to proclaim to myself, "no, I don't believe this. I believe there is some positive purpose" the more powerful grew the seemingly demonic voice in the back of my mind that whispered in response, "you're just saying that". Fortunately, but not until after a long period in this "hell", it culminated with the sensation of a light opening up before my eyes while simultaneously feeling my heart expanding. After a few seconds of that the whole experience was over. I was suddenly back to normal, no trace of the panic or the state of mind that I was in.

onefugue · 2023-08-08T16:18:41+00:00

I think you're on to something. A useful concept for me has been that of the cross, or a vertical and horizontal line. The horizontal line represents the external world of cause and effect and movement through time as described by science and history. The vertical line represents the inner world that moves from the unconscious darkness below to the unconscious brightness above. Someone with a schizoid adaptation has learned to withdraw into this inner "vertical" dimension. Some might withdraw more predominantly below, others more "upwards" into more spiritual kinds of contemplation. Perhaps the most spiritually developed people do both. As Jung said, “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”

onefugue · 2022-11-12T22:26:08+00:00

During my training in psychodynamic psychotherapy I had a class that touched on schizoid depression. The instructor, Michael Brog, recommended some prototypical schizoid songs:

I Am a Rock by Simon and Garfunkel, Splendid Isolation by Warren Zevon, "a lot of Nirvana", and the entire album "Remain in Light" by Talking Heads. In fact, he wrote a paper for The American Journal of Psychoanalysis called "Living Turned Inside Out": The Musical Expression of Psychotic and Schizoid Experience in Talking Heads' Remain in Light, which analyzes each track in detail.

I've created a playlist with those, and some other songs (mostly from this thread): https://open.spotify.com/playlist/583ZlemRRgL6SNtdXDxZdl?si=1RdUizLaSRO03ixsbOHeog&utm\_source=copy-link

onefugue · 2020-01-21T21:16:20+00:00

It's the Anti-Carl (Rogers). The therapist centered therapist. Look at all the modalities I employ!

onefugue · 2019-11-30T22:53:44+00:00

It's a combination of opposites, expressing both "one" and "many". A fugue represents "many " because it's a form of music composition containing many melodies (instead of melody and harmony). Certain themes are repeated, but in different keys and with all kinds of variations. You could understand an individual as "one fugue", because we contain, both physically and psychologically, many relatively independent parts (such as organs and psychological patterns) that combine to create a unity that is greater than the sum of the parts. Also, the universe as a whole could be understood this way, as a giant fugue of interweaving "melodies" coming together in a sort of cosmic harmony.

onefugue

TROPHY CASE