“My mind goes blank, I feel a heat wash over my body, my heart races, my breath almost stops, and my muscles go weak.” This is a description of the physical experience of an experienced musician anxiety during the performance. “What’s surprising is that in some performances I’m completely calm and unaffected, in other performances I’m afraid of being judged by others. I can’t tell why it’s in some situations and not in others.”
There are several schools of thought that psychologists use to study the experience of music performance anxiety from a biological, evolutionary, to cognitive-behavioral perspective Each approach offers a particular lens through which to observe and understand the terrifying experience of musical performance anxiety. I would like to explore some insights from a psychodynamic perspective that may provide clues to understanding your experience of anxiety during performance.
Contemporary and classical psychodynamic theory examines performance anxiety in a way that differs from other psychological theories popular today. Unlike behavioral and some evolutionary-biological theories, music performance anxiety is not viewed as a response to the actual threat of the performance situation, but unconscious activating the deep inner voice or your own words that we learned from overly critical parents or caretaker. These deeply embedded thoughts are activated when we are in situations similar to our relationships with judgmental parents in our early developmental years. Experience is created before we are consciously aware of ourselves, and it becomes a fundamental aspect of our character or way of being in the world.
This way of being is an adaptation to our environment that shapes how we feel and how we behave environment We live in it. When we experience intense physical reactions in anticipation of performance, we are reacting to the unconscious voice of the superego, the “critical parent,” passing under our immediate conscious awareness. Unaware of this silent but powerful effect on our body and mind, we react to one childhood fear rejection and threats of abandonment from our guardian. Essentially, the unconscious child in us reacts to a real threat of “if you don’t live up to my expectations, I will leave you.”
shame, blameand alarm as manifestation anger or fear in different situations. It is important to understand that we experience symptoms not in response to the actual event of the musical performance, but to projection childhood fears that are part of how we experience the world and define ourselves as individuals. The real danger in the music performance situation is not that we are judged by the people who watch and listen, but that they confirm the childhood belief that our critical parents threatened us with, that we are “understood” by the audience that we are not lovable or worthy. It’s really a matter of having a gut feeling self-esteem and a basic sense of safety in our first environment. If in those early years there is a threat of unloved or abandoned love, it becomes a red flag for anxiety later in life.
To complicate this complex scenario, we often unknowingly enter situations that replay unresolved childhood emotions. injury. In psychodynamic terms this is called repetition compulsion. This refers to our tendency to enter into the same dynamic with different people throughout our lives. Although we ourselves are unaware of the dynamic, we are attracted to people who share the characteristics of the caretakers whose judgments have shaped our trauma. When entering a relationship, we try to repeat the situation, hoping to achieve a different result. However, the experience of trauma is predicated on the current situation and blames it with a disproportionate and often incorrect assessment of the threat. We experience a sense of failure in trying to please a parent or caregiver that is impossible.
As musicians, we counter this sense of inferiority by overcompensating to have a sense of control over the rejection of others’ fear and betrayal. These are projections from our childhood experiences and feel current and accurate. We find solutions to our built-in fear of abandonment in the pursuit perfectionismthe false belief that we can control how others perceive us with perfection. We often can regression to the previous state of childhood awareness, we suddenly act like a child in a situation where we perceive a threat.
It can take some time to realize, understand, and acknowledge that the anxiety of performing music activates an ingrained childhood sensitivity to criticism and judgment. In psychodynamics psychotherapyThere is a defense to refuse which hides this trauma from conscious awareness. Working through protection is possible without a therapist. In his classic text, Analyze yourself Karen Horney offers a systematic approach to working through the layers of ego defenses that keep trauma hidden from our awareness. Through systematic and faithful analysis, one can soften the ego’s defenses and gradually eliminate the childish reactive sensibilities that have hardened into our character structure.
