At the Crossroads of a Quaternity: Voice, Psychology, Spirituality, and the Feminine

What is in my throat? It’s a burning that can only be felt in silence. A consuming flame—a city, a temple, hot. It’s too hot.

Connecting heart and third eye. Heart flame. Throat flame.

—Personal Journal entry, November 9, 2018

Voice. Psychology. Spirituality. The Feminine. These four subjects have spun endlessly in my mind for the last two and a half decades, although the energies of their push and pull have likely been with me from the very beginning of my life. These are the energies that hum quietly (and sometimes rage deafeningly) in the background of all I do, think, feel, and know; they are the undercurrent to all that inspires, fascinates, frustrates, and delights me. Fragments of their persistent presence fill the pages of countless index cards, post-it notes, and personal journal entries; they infiltrate dream images and meditative visions, and they insinuate themselves into nearly every conversation in which I engage. They are the lens, the framework—the epistemological and ontological foundation—through which I perceive and engage with the world.

When I chose to pursue a degree in opera upon entering my undergraduate studies, it was not because I knew anything about the implications of what that choice would mean for my future life. Certainly, I did not think, at the time, that it would lead me to a life centered on the ontology and epistemology of voice within a psycho-spiritual, feminist (or, at least, feminine) frame. I chose to pursue a degree in opera because I had been told throughout my youth and teenage years that I had a beautiful singing voice, and it seemed to be the most logical path to follow. But, somewhere early on in my operatic training, my voice began to crack. A literal crack—a break—that interrupted the sound and made it impossible to sing a clear, continuous line. As an opera singer, this was not only fatal to my career, but to my very identity. Who was I, if not a singer?

During the ensuing twenty-five years, I worked as a voice-specialized speech pathologist in a clinical setting, helping others, including opera singers, heal their “broken” voices. Throughout my clinical career, I was confronted again and again by a curious phenomenon: most of the young artists I worked with were persistently anxious and depressed in relationship to their singing and their careers. Often, as they began to sing during a coaching session with me, tears suddenly overcame them. If they had incurred a vocal injury, they were mired in self-blame and shame. Even when their voices had healed and they were back to enjoying successful careers, they continued to report living in fear that they were singing “on borrowed time,” and it was just a matter of time before “the other shoe dropped.” This art form that was once their joy and pleasure had become a strange kind of burden; they were miserable if they stayed on this trajectory, but they also feared they would be miserable if they walked away.

The question of why singers feel compelled to sing, when it so often seems to make them unhappy, has become a subject of continual perplexity for me. It led me beyond the science of voice and physical healing to seeing the voice itself as a metaphor—a guide, an archetype, an image, a microcosm of being. The process of bringing the voice out of its silencing—both literally and metaphorically—led me into the endless labyrinth of the quaternity that I now see as the inescapable driving force behind my life’s work: the voice, psychology, spirituality, and the feminine.

The impetus of my investigation, at present, is a hypothesis that women (and men) who suffer when their ability to sing is compromised are afflicted because singing, and operatic singing in particular, is an archetypal expression of the divine feminine. As such, any use of the voice contains what I believe are archetypal remnants—embodied memory—of the lost voice of the archetypal goddess. When the ability to use the voice is restricted or compromised, people experience archaic existential pain. Therefore, the silencing of the voice—its shadow-side—must also find expression in my work.

It is my contention that my own break—or crack—in my singing voice mirrored a cosmological break in the divine creation of the universe. As the divine feminine sang the universe into being, her voice cracked, and it was in this break—this brief moment of silence—that monotheism and patriarchy took their foothold in what has since become our Western cultural, socio-political, and religious narrative. This article is a preliminary search to find literature, theories, and cosmologies that might support this vision, with voice serving as the through-line of connection between psychology, spirituality, and the feminine. Are there, in fact, scholars, academic writers, and thinkers, who share my vision of a feminine cosmology that manifests in the voice and silence? If so, what new knowledge or perspectives might I add to this narrative?

Several post-Freudian/post-Lacanian scholars make reference to the voice as a significant, but also largely neglected, aspect of the human condition. French-Bulgarian linguist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (1986) discusses the voice in the context of “semiotics”—the affective contribution of the embodied voice through the prosody of language that is produced by the variations in pitch and loudness of the vocal folds. Prosody, Kristeva (1986) suggests, recalls the “abjected maternal” that is discarded once children make their way into the (patriarchal) symbolic order through the acquisition of language. The voice, in Kristevan terms, subverts the power of patriarchal language in such mediums as art and poetry, reclaiming the lost feminine/maternal. Prosody (a characteristic of the voice) is the unconscious melody that carries meaning in our communication—communicative intent—and, therefore, from a feminist psychoanalytic perspective, cannot simply be ignored as an irrelevant carrier for symbolic language. Prosody contains relevant unconscious information that, if attended to, has significant implications for not only how we view the psyche, but, also, how psychoanalysts listen to their patients as they share their narratives.

Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero (2005) examines the voice in terms similar to Kristeva (1986), by drawing attention to its omission from the philosophical dialectic. In her book For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, Cavarero (2005) devotes an entire volume to putting the voice at the center of an ontological and epistemological framework in philosophy. Cavarero (2005) explores how “the devocalization of logos” has “established the ontological primacy of thought over speech, liberating speech from the corporeality of breath and the voice” (p. 62). Similar to Kristeva (1986), Cavarero’s (2005) argument is a feminist one, which points to the logocentric, patriarchal implications of extracting, dissociating, or discarding the body (the symbolic representation of the feminine) from rational thought. Also similar to Kristeva (1986), Cavarero (2005) argues for the potential “triumph” of the voice (representative of the feminine) over the “immaterial semantic,” in keeping with a feminist critique of the favoring of mind over soma.

Slovene philosopher, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist Mladen Dolar (2006) writes about voice from a similar point of departure to both Kristeva (1986) and Cavarero (2005). Dolar writes within a post-Freudian/Post-Lacanian framework, in a sense covering much of what Kristeva (1986) and Cavarero (2005) point to regarding the omission of the voice from Lacan’s symbolic order. However, while his theoretical framework provides an intriguing and erudite exploration of voice in the context of linguistics, metaphysics, physics, ethics, and politics (in addition to psychoanalysis), Dolar (2006) does not overtly support a more feminist perspective of the embodied voice, as do Kristeva (1986) and Cavarero (2005). In fact, Dolar’s (2006) Lacanian framework may serve to reinforce patriarchal views by its inclusion of the voice as the carrier of logos/monotheism’s authority (pp. 52-6). However, his work on voice is detailed and intricate, and it deserves careful review. Significantly, Dolar’s (2006) work also brings to the fore questions of voice and power, as well as implications about the voice and silence (pp. 123-4; pp. 153-162), which are at the center of feminist hermeneutics.

French researcher Michel Poizat (1992) and French feminist philosopher Catherine Clément (1988) both wrote rigorous accounts of the voice in an operatic context, through a psychoanalytic lens. Poizat (1992) explores audiences’ inexplicable fascination with and devotion to this art form, placing the voice in the context of Judeo-Christian traditions that both deify, and demonize, the singing voice. Clément’s (1988) Opera: Or, The Undoing of Women offers a feminist critique of operatic plots that consistently drive women to illness, madness, or death. Although women in opera are hailed as the “jewels” (Clément, 1988, p. 5) of the operatic stage, still, in the end, Clément laments, they are silenced.

The Jungian perspective on voice varies considerably from a psychoanalytic one, as Jung’s analytical psychology focuses primarily on archetypes and the collective unconscious, in contrast with a more Freudian developmental model of biological determinism and language acquisition. Jungian scholar and psychologist Ginette Paris (2018) brings voice into the psychological narrative primarily through the myth of Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory. Paris (2018) writes, “Mnemosyne is a voice, the voice of an oral culture, a female voice, a soul voice…metaphorically, [the Greeks] thought of Memory as the voice of a goddess” (p. 142). Paris (2018) points also to the implications of power dynamics in voice that are evident in the favoring of the Word/Book in monotheism and patriarchy, stating that

writing tends to be single-voiced; the monotheistic ideal, which is based on clarity and nonambiguity, requires that only one voice be heard…When we speak with our whole being, there has to be more than one voice at work—if we accept the premise of archetypal psychology. (p. 78)

Jungian analysts Anne Baring and Jules Cashford (1993), in their detailed account of the erasure of goddess cultures through the appointment of a transcendent Father Sky God, trace the disappearance of not only the image of the goddess, but of her voice. While the voice of the goddess was once heard by humanity through the voices of animals (Baring & Cashford, 1993, p. 16) and the humming of the bees (Baring & Cashford, 1993, p. 119), monotheism silenced her until “only the voice of the solitary god Yahweh-Elohim is heard” (Baring & Cashford, 1993, p. 448). Author Leonard Shlain (1998) continues in the vein of Baring & Cashford’s (1993) illuminating exposition in his fascinating work, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, in which he details the process by which the Voice of the goddess was silenced by the monotheistic Word with the etching of the Ten Commandments into stone.

While Paris (2018), Baring & Cashford (1993), and Shlain (1998) all trace a lineage from pre-monotheistic goddess cultures to present-day patriarchy in Western civilization, American philosopher and cultural ecologist David Abram (2017) offers support for the cosmological view of the voice bringing the universe into being in his research about the Dreamtime beliefs that are common to diverse Aboriginal cultures in Australia (pp. 163-4). He describes the indigenous mythology of the Dreamtime as a creation of “seen” or so-called consensus reality that occurred as “the Ancestors were singing the names of things and places into the land as they wandered through it” (Abram, 2017, p. 166). Abram (2017) also highlights the differences in men’s and women’s knowledge and ritual practices within Aboriginal societies, emphasizing that women’s ceremonies tend to use song to connect with the power of magic to help fulfill cultural and societal needs (p. 172).

In The Wounded Researcher, Jungian depth psychologist Robert Romanyshyn (2013) suggests that an individual’s research is “the unfinished business of the soul in the work” (p. 82) that others who came before left incomplete. He references Jung in arguing that

there is in [Jung’s] description [of his own work] a surrender of the egoic position that would claim ownership of the work. There is in his description a recognition that he and his thoughts have been in service to those questions of the ancestors left behind and unanswered. (Romanyshyn, 2013, p. 84)

Romanyshyn (2013) pushes for an inclusion of imaginal ways of knowing to guide and supplement our empiricism in our research. I see this process continually unfolding as I follow my intuitive guidance to reveal and hone a direction for my own investigations, first and foremost through my initial (imaginal) vision that now guides this process: the cosmological view that the voice of the goddess was interrupted by a cosmic “crack” that allowed the patriarchy to enter. Romanyshyn’s (2013) argument that our psychological complexes guide us to our soul work supports the possibility that my own personal experience of “losing” my voice represents the urging of the ancestors for me to devote my life to recovering the lost voice of the feminine, and, in doing so, to reclaim the strength and power in my own voice, as well.

Having confirmed through this preliminary literature review that there are, indeed, others across multiple disciplines who look to the voice as a subject of significance within the fields of psychology, spirituality, and the feminine, my task going forward is to identify my part in bringing forth new knowledge that will both satisfy my own soul work and also be in service to others. In what ways will I contribute my own unique voice to continuing the conversation of my ancestors? To continue to explore this question further, I will consider each part of the quaternity individually.

VOICE

First, it may be important to define what is meant by the term “voice.” Of course, there is the voice in its literal form, which is an essential point of departure for my epistemological framework as a speech pathologist. The anatomy and physiology of the voice, the functional work and training of the speaking and singing voice, the view of the voice as an aesthetic of clear sound that functions for its speaker within a range of “normal,” and the medicalization of the voice when it fails to function within this perceived “normal”—these aspects form a significant portion of my initial frame of reference.

Also within my frame of reference is the concept of the voice in its more symbolic form as a representation of power and oppression—voices of certain groups or genders who are “heard,” in the sense of being valued or privileged. This notion of voice brings marginalized groups (women, people of color, people with disabilities) into focus, raising questions about how to make their voices heard. Similarly, individuals who identify as Deaf and hard of hearing may not use their vocal mechanism to communicate at all, but they must have a place in the structure of society in which to be and feel included—to be “heard.” For those who use sign language as a primary mode of communication, it is worth investigating whether the embodied method employed in sign language presents a visual, imagistic form of voice that, in fact, further supports the feminine view of the voice as embodied Earth Mother (Baring & Cashford, 1993).

PSYCHOLOGY

The concept of psychology, in my work as a speech pathologist and singing voice coach, often refers or relates to issues of identity that are challenged when the voice itself breaks down. Psychology in a speech pathology context very often is thought to affect the voice (e.g., in functional voice disorders or disorders thought to be caused by excessive muscle tension). The voice, in turn, affects the psychology of the individual, when the voice no longer sounds the same as it once did (e.g., it is chronically hoarse), or it no longer functions as it once did (e.g., it is weak or fatigues easily). The voice as a reliable transmitter of thought through articulated speech is generally taken for granted until or unless its functioning is disrupted in some way, e.g., by vocal pathology causing roughness, discomfort, fatigue, or strain. Most people never consider how their thoughts are transmitted from their minds to the outside world. They simply think, and then they express those thoughts, without consideration of the breath, vocal folds, speech articulators, or the resonating chambers of the oral cavity, nasal cavities, and sinus cavities that are needed to create those sounds. The fact that this mechanism is hidden from our sight supports the historical omission of the voice from philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse as a significant part of communication.

Thus far in my depth psychological research, I have found more support for the voice as an embodied component of communication in the psychoanalytic literature (Freud and post-Freudians) than in the literature of analytical psychology (Jung and post-Jungians). I am curious to see if this will remain the case as I continue with my research. The fact that so much of psychoanalysis bases its ontological and epistemological view on language as the primary principle of psychic reality (Dolar, 2006) may account for this favoring of treating the voice as a part of language and communication that has been largely ignored and omitted from consciousness. Beyond its status as a carrier for the word—a medium through which cognition is transmitted from inside of the body to the outside listener—the voice, by the nature of its ability to vary pitch, loudness, and timbre, communicates our affective states. In feminist psychoanalytic theory, it is the voice that reveals unconscious material in the psychoanalytic session; words might deceive, but, when one is trained to listen to the ebb and flow of vocal prosody, much unconscious content can be revealed (Kristeva, 1986).

Jungian psychology is far less focused on language in/as psychology than post-Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis is, and, therefore, it seems to place the voice in mythological and religious/historical contexts, rather than as a literal carrier for the word (Paris, 2018; Baring & Cashford, 1993). A Jungian approach may allow me to bring the archetypal feminine, as well as the voice as image, into the work, which will support my predilection for a more spiritual approach to the voice.

SPIRITUALITY

The question of spirituality covers issues of soul, meaning, purpose, resonance, a sense of alignment, and what I like to call being “good with one’s god”—that is, feeling that one is on path and doing the best he or she can to be in integrity with the his/her place in the divine order. Although I, personally, do not perceive my spirituality to be connected with a religion, per se, the Muslim faith in which I was raised has left me with remnants of a cultural-religious heritage that continues to inform my ontology. For example, I have always been curious about the pagan idols that the early Muslims were admonished to destroy and to cease worshipping. Even as a young girl, I remember wondering why these idols were such a threat to the omnipotent Father God in the sky. As part of my research, indeed, my ancestral soul work (Romanyshyn, 2013), I want to explore the silencing of the feminine through an Islamic context. Although there is much support in Western culture for demonizing Islam, it is my assertion that Islam is simply the continuation of the monotheistic, patriarchal agenda that began with the Judaic tradition (Shlain, 1998). It is outside of my scope of expertise (and outside of my interest) to scrutinize or interpret religious texts. However, there is, in my mind, no way to address the issue of the silencing of the feminine, and, subsequently, women, without tracing modern Western civilization back through its monotheistic roots. Bringing my own unique voice to the spiritual aspects of the discussion may include an investigation into pagan/goddess worship in pre-Islamic Arabia, as an extension of the Judeo-Christian disappearing of the feminine in religion.

THE FEMININE

The distinction between what might be considered archetypal energies of “the feminine” and socio-political movements that might be called “feminist” is an important distinction to make, even if the distinguishing characteristics of the two are not always entirely distinguishable. Paris (2018) suggests that

traditional psychoanalysis has disparaged and opposed everything in our consciousness that relates to vulnerability, weakness, and inferiority, because of their association with the feminine. To some extent, feminism has been caught in that trap, trying to break the association of femininity and weakness…James Hillman shows how the end of a traditional analysis is the moment when the patient finally eradicates weak, passive, suffering inner femininity from his personality. Hillman demonstrates how the myth of psychoanalysis is Apollonian, at war with any feeling of feminine inferiority, which must be rooted out in order for one to be cured—that is, to be virile as Apollo would define it. Psychoanalysis somehow has convinced us that it must ‘make a man’ of our weak, irrational, hysteric inner woman because neither weakness, nor maenadism, nor receptivity, nor femininity is valued as part of the human experience. (p. 44)

This excerpt from Paris’ (2018) work brings to the fore two very important points: first of all, the feminine is an archetypal energy that exists in both men and women. The question of whether calling it “feminine” can be separated from an essentialist notion of what a woman is has been the subject of much consideration, both within and outside of Jungian circles. In other words, what causes us to label character traits such as nurturance, relatedness, gentleness, etc., as “feminine” traits? Does it make sense to characterize those traits that might be assumed to be associated with the anatomical womb or with mothering as “feminine,” and those associated with the anatomical phallus (e.g., aggression, hardness, being erect or upright, etc.) as masculine?

As I am arguing in defense of the feminine within the context of a feminist hermeneutic, I would argue that yes, there is something essentialist about femininity. Or, put another way, that some ontology of femininity can be felt or known, and that this essence is thwarted or tamped down under pervasive patriarchal structures.

The second issue that Paris’ observations (2018) point to is the question of voice and silence in both feminine and feminist contexts. Much feminist discourse in women’s empowerment centers on “giving women a voice.” Often, this literally means encouraging women to speak, either in public or in private discourse, typically with a sense of command, authority, and confidence in knowing what they desire, do not desire, and, ultimately, wish to communicate. However, it could be argued that the outward expression of voice through iteration of the word demonstrates a further favoring of the “Apollonian,” “heroic” “conquering” of a space, an argument, or a situation. This, I would argue, is a continuation of a logos-oriented, masculinized way of expression; it is not what I am determining is a voice-centered, feminine form of expression. What if the voice of the feminine is, in fact, silence? Not silent. But silence: the divine echo of archaic communication that can only be “heard” through the vibrations of heart, resonance, and intuitive knowing. A continuous reverberation across space and time that can only be heard through the heart/soul and is found, most wholly/holy, in the unspoken, but deeply heard voices of nature, of the animals, of the ancestors?

CONCLUSION

The process of exploring this quaternity has truly been an alchemical process for me, one in which the revelation of the voice as silence has newfound significance for me. The writing of these pages has felt as though it was written in the in-between place, which I now identify as, perhaps, a space of reverie (Romanyshyn, 2013). I would have thought the in-between space would feel sort of magical, as if an archetypal hand was co-authoring each keystroke with me. In a sense, it does feel that way, although that feeling is not the “inflated,” transcendent space I would have imagined it to be, were I to have been “possessed” by a god/dess. Rather, it has felt as if it were a true co-authorship—both a finding of my voice and a yielding of my voice to an unseen collaborative partner. It has felt as if it has been co-written in a space right in the borderland between consciousness and unconsciousness, leaving me unsure, precisely, of who wrote these words. I finish here in gratitude and wonder, curious to read where, next, the ancestors will guide me.

References

Abram, D. (2017). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human-world. New York, NY: Vintage.

(Original work published 1997)

Baring, A. & Cashford, J. (1993). The myth of the goddess: Evolution of an image. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Cavarero, A. (2005). For more than one voice: Toward a philosophy of vocal expression (P.A. Kottman, Trans).

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Clément, C. Opera: Or, the undoing of women (B. Wing, Trans). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Dolar, M. (2006). A voice and nothing more. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Feminist Hermeneutics. (2003). In New Catholic Encyclopedia online. Retrieved from Encyclopedia.com:

https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/feminist-hermeneutics.

Kristeva, J. (1986). The Kristeva reader. T. Moi (Ed.). Columbia University Press: New York, NY.

Shlain, L. (1998). The alphabet versus the goddess: The conflict between word and image. New York, NY: Penguin Compass.

Paris, G. (2018). Pagan grace: Dionysos, Hermes, and Goddess Memory in daily life (J. Mott, Trans). Thompson, CT: Spring

Publications. (Original work published 1990)

Poizat, M. (1992). The angel’s cry: Beyond the pleasure principle in opera (A. Denner, Trans.). Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press.

(Original work published 1986)

Romanyshyn, R.D. (2013). The wounded researcher: Research with soul in mind. New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books.