Billy Joel: Cubist Cognitive Therapist

• Psychological Adaptations: A Model and It's Relevance by James Brody, 4/24/97
  
  

Billy Joel: Cubist Cognitive Therapy

His song, "We Didn't Start the Fire" opens:

"Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray

South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television

North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom

Brando, the King and I and The Catcher in the Rye

Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen

Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye.

"... Foreign debts, Homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz

Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law

Rock and Roller Cola Wars, I can't take it anymore."

Each concept denotes a larger than average event, an icon, a supernormal stimulus.(1) Each triggers emotional and physiological shifts that occur rapidly and blend into each other. It's an aural Picasso or Braque. Each word is clipped from a larger context, the song a narrated collage rather than a visual one.

Similar compositions but of more uniform impact perhaps have existed for as long as we have been a species. Church hymns, war chants, love ballads, and college fight songs are similar. They each induce a relatively uniform set of thoughts and from the thoughts flow adjustments in our hormonal levels, muscle tension, digestive activity, heart rate, and respiratory pattern. Each type of song is associated with a different pattern of Psychological Adaptations. And the feedback from our hormones, EMG shifts, stomach rumbling, and pounding in our chest and lungs amplifies the effect of the music.

Imagine an array of compositions with varied emotional loadings that systematically change across different sections of the composition to produce gentle waves or abrupt crescendos of feelings. Harmony or discord in those feelings become functions of the degree of over lap that exists in the denoted events as well as the delay between successive ideas.

It's also possible to imagine "cognitive therapists" using lyrical compositions to enhance the effect of traditional verbal exercises. The sequence of identifying feelings, the automatic thoughts that triggered them, challenging the automatic thoughts, and substituting less disruptive ones probably causes parallel shifts in Psychological Adaptations that are associated with each thought. Any other techniques that cause similar shifts may be as effective as traditional cognitive ones.

Imagine having the client beating a drum instead of writing on a feelings log! Consider the possibilities of a "rap" tradition that includes thematics from different cultures and some affect besides anger.

NOTE:

1)" Supernormal stimulus" was used by Hess, Tinbergen, and other ethologists to refer to artificial stimuli that elicited complex behavior sequences in fish, birds, or other animals. Stimuli that were more intense (more contrast, greater size) than their natural equivalents elicited more intense (greater amplitude, frequency, or duration) behavioral responses. See the discussion posted under "Tinbergen and Mickey Mouse."

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