EMTC 7th Music Therapy Congress

Eindhoven 15-20 August 2007

On Tarantism

Adriano Primadei

As clearly exposed by Ernesto De Martino in the first field study based in Salento at the end of the 50s, Tarantism was a cultural container that could absorb different pathologies.

Jan Van Camp has explained that the ritual of Tarantism is a representation where the different elements (the dramatization, the musicians, the scenographic setting, the protagonists, and the public) look like a play based on hysterical patterns. The choreography itself seems a reference to typical symptoms of hysteria for example: the dancing, the fainting, and other hysteric symptoms.

This also appears in “Magic and the south”, De Martino’s book that precedes his field study, published in 1958.  In the book’s appendix the author describes the crisis as “ characterized by a condition of profound melancholic depression or stupor or else wise a hysteric or epileptic collapse.”

De Martino continues “ in the cultural analysis prospective, tarantism does not appear as psychic disorder but as a culturally conditioned symbolic order (in other words an exorcism based on music, dancing and colors) where a culturally shaped neurotic crisis (the victim of the spider’s bite) can find an expressive solution.

The neurotic crisis could be caused by a real episode of latrodectism or by other cerebral illnesses, but what made Tarantism unique was its symbolic autonomy that could provide a possible frame for latent or unresolved psychic conflicts”.

In spite of the flexibility in this ritual representation, the outcome of the therapy would depend on the type of pathology. So, if on one side the success would depend on the capacity of the musicians to attune to the psyche of the Tarantate, on the other hand the victims or patients would try to correspond to implicit expectations of the exorcism’s cultural model.

As we understand from De Martino’s research team, which included a psychiatrist and a psychologist in the direct observation of the phenomena, many cases of Tarantism developed as clear forms of psychosis. 

It was common that in these cases, after the eventual failure of the musical therapy, the patients would end up hospitalized in the local psychiatric ward.

As we said before, in De Martino’s words tarantism is a culturally determined symbolic order. This definition appears essential to understand the therapeutic role of this ritual which is expressed by the totality of the elements composing it. Elements such as “…the  taranta , the bite, the poison have a symbolic meaning that gives an adequate perspective for subconscious instincts and the consequent reactions they produce in the individual’s conscience”.

De Martino’s point of view finds a correspondence with Jaques Lacan’s perspective in regards to the conception of a symbolic order where a person is permeated and constructed by a web of symbols and signifiers. In this view the human being is made by this net but doesn’t create it himself. According to Lacan each of us is stuck in the meshes of this net as in those of our own cultural and historic heritage.

If a person cannot access this symbolic organization we have a psychic disaster as in forms of psychosis. This can happen in a very early period of child’s development, for example when the child is involved in a symbiotic relationship with the first “object of desire” which is the mother and, more in particular,  the mother’s breast.

The father’s role in this early oedipal phase is to limit this fusional relationship the child has with its mother. If this does not happen the child cannot face the separation from its mother and cannot access the symbolic organization of language and culture.

In psychosis we deal with the shapeless spread of what is left from this original fusion with the mother and that emerges in what Freud called the feeling of the uncanny (Das Unheimliche).

In these situations we face a traumatic nucleus caused by a non assimilated separation from the initial condition of mother/child union, which should instead remain hidden under primal repression.

Sigmund Freud in his text “The uncanny” says that “the uncanny  is undoubtedly related to what is frightening — to what arouses dread and horror; (…) so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general.”

What is hidden, and eventually surfaces, belongs to the primal dimension which precedes thought and is not symbolized or rationalized. It is the real thing, the ultimate reality which Bion designates with the letter O and Lacan calls “Real” or in other terms the object of anxiety”.

The role of Tarantism as a symbolic order was to create a protection net to prevent the person from drowning into anxiety, since if the feeling of anxiety cannot be named, and has no meaning, it then cannot be thought or processed.

The spider in Tarantism gives a symbolic meaning and form to this anxiety. In this mythical ritual the virtual activity of one individual oneiric content becomes collective. Karl Abraham identifies the spider as the oneiric symbol that can arouse the feeling of the uncanny. The spider for Abraham is the “bad mother”, a “masculine mother” that can penetrate with a poisonous bite.

According to Bion, dream and myth are the first results of dream work (according to Freud’s formulation); through them, the alpha function is activated, and therefore also the possibility of thinking. In this way, the alpha function contains the experience, also traumatic, which then becomes available for other thinking processes, setting a non-rigid boundary between conscious and unconscious.

The collective myth in Tarantism does not undergo a real change at an individual level. The subject, rather, is invested by it and experiences its symbolic personification (namely the spider as a manifestation of the uncanny), but without having the possibility of working through its contents in terms of thinking.

Since the beginning, thanks to the guidance of the myth and depending on the person’s mental functioning level, in Tarantism the rough content of anxiety has been treated and transformed either into dream, or into an hallucinatory state. The victims tell about their spider’s bite using hallucinatory or fantastic material, for example: Rosaria from Nardò says she has been enchanted by a snake on her way to the sea, Giorgio from Galatone says he has been bitten after having seen someone kill a snake, Cosimo from Nardò says he has been bitten by a colorful scorpion next to the threshing machine.

As we can see, even though there are individual or religious variations ( the snake comes from S. Paul’s myth)  the symbolism of Tarantism has always something to do with a bite.

The “domiciliary” musical treatment contains and facilitates the dynamic relationship between the spider and the victim. The ritual is similar to an exorcism, where the trance induced by the music triggers a process of symbiotic identification and expulsion of the spider.

This happens in two phases:

1

The spider’s victim dances on the ground in horizontal position and identifies with the spider. (projective identification) (Fig 1)

2

The victim dances in vertical position. The spider is expulsed and killed in a crushing movement. In that moment there is evacuation and destruction of the split, bad,  persecutory object. (Fig 2)

Now, its is important to understand that the psychic process is modeled on a ritual and is not a spontaneous process. The psychic content is given or momentarily offered to the Tarantato (the victim) by the ritual’s symbolic order.

De Martino clarifies that there are numerous historic and religious parallels between Tarantism and other rituals such as witchcraft or Sciamanism which were widespread across a large area including North African Muslim countries, the Arabian peninsula, Sudan and Ethiopia.

The role of musicians and of music is to evoke individual critical elements, attuning to the specific variety of that person’s “spider”, or “bite” ore “ poison”.( page 63)

Music induces a state of trance. The musical elements that provoke this condition are:

-repetition

-rapidity or tempo

-rhythm

Repetition is particularly important for the success of the treatment. Since it allows musicians to attune to the specific  pathology and provokes a controlled and containing state of trance.

In their paper on music therapy treatment of psychosis, De Backer and Van Camp have stressed how movement  and sensorial aspects combined with repetition (sensorial play) are very frequent in psychotic patient’s musical production. In current music therapy treatment of psychosis, the role of music is to intervene in the patient’s musical production in the attempt of creating an inner psychic space.

This process is based on moments of synchronicity where the patient and therapist share the experience of freely playing together.

In Tarantism instead the musicians adjust to the specific pathology of the patient trying to find the tempo, the tonality, and the rhythmic meter that best correspond to the spider. The music used for this attempt is characterized rhythmically and harmonically by repetitions in the tambourine play and the barrel organ. The violin and the voice instead develop the melody from specific patterns. The action does not require a creative symmetry between the musicians and the Tarantata (the patient).The Tarantata reacts basically moving and dancing.

The musical form of the pizzica is determined by the melodic development, the variations, the topic moments as the tambourine slam and the crescendos. Each melodic development, like the vertiginous violin glissandos, or the group’s crescendos, try to identify or suggest a possible internal process of the Tarantata. The music thus offers a form of containment and reflection of the sexually tainted representation that the patient enacts in her movements.

In a certain way the tradition of the pizzica from Salento draws together the therapeutic function of reflection and of matching the sensorial repetition of the patient’s movements,  framing them in a musical form. This happens though, without creating a real opportunity for the patient’s psychological elaboration.

This is because there are no moments of dialogue between the musicians and the Tarantata (the patient). On the other hand there is a reflecting process  (the group in respect to the Tarantata) and an identification process (the Tarantata with the spider and with the music). This process though does not give a real opportunity for an other person (in this case the musicians) to receive and hold the problematic psychological elements of the Tarantata and return them in a mentally processed form.

In Tarantism the musicians ensembles varies in complexity from the a small ensemble including violin, barrel organ, tambourine (which is the typical therapeutic group) to the exclusive presence of a voice.

The smallest groups can simply be a woman singing and playing the tambourine. In this case the vocal part and the melody represent the spider and invoke S. Paul. The instrumental part instead underlines rhythm and provokes the dancing.

The tambourine provides the musical structure for the other instruments. The women playing the tambourine are called “the ladies of tempo and rhythm”. The voice combined with the tambourine has the role of stimulating sensorially the Tarantate. This happens for example when they hit the tambourine very near the Tarantata’s face or ears provoking an over excitement.  (Fig 3)

The women playing the tambourine are sometimes playing at funerals, so they celebrate both rituals: of healing and of death.

While the rhythm played on the tambourine is the structural axis of the music, the shaking of the bells represents chaos and creates rhythmic ambivalences.

This ambivalent rhythm is organized in  4 or 8 eights. This rhythm is played with a pointed note rhythm that sometimes can sound as swift triplets. At the same time the triplets are framed in a very accentuated binary beat rhythm. This produces a binary grounding with a ternary velocity.

There are different kinds of Pizzica: in major tonalities such as A or G, or in minor tonalities called “deaf pizzica”.  These different kind of pizzicas where used for different kinds of spiders. The so called “deaf pizzica” was used for a spider which was resilient to the cure thus required a more incisive music.

This process has only a partial outcome and needs to be repeated each year. The attempt to artificially insert symbols such as music, colors, movements represents and reflects the psychological distress but is insufficient as a process of psychic structuring. This is because the person in not actively involved in the process but only passively receives predetermined meanings. 

This is quite obvious in the last part of the ritual which takes place in S. Paul’s chapel. Here all the ritual elements and in particular the music, are eliminated and this results in a lack of an organized containment of the pathological symptoms. It is interesting to observe that in the absence of the musical ensemble the women try to make up for it singing with own voices.

We think that De Martino perfectly grasped this lack in his book “ The Land of Remorse” where he writes “…the musical exorcism seen a few days earlier at the home of Maria of Nardò was fresh in our minds: an exorcism so orderly and systematic, so clearly articulated in its consistent choreutic cycles, so regulated by the rhythm of the tambourine and the melody of the violin, so dramatically engaged in the evocation and release of obscure psychic urges through music, dance and color. But now, before our eyes, there was only an intertwining of individual, horizonless crises, disorder and chaos. (Fig 4)

The chapel lacked the music, the colored ribbons, the engrossed atmosphere of the home and the wide range of symbolism put into motion by the on-going musical exorcism: in the absence of this traditional apparatus of evocation and release, the tarantati foundered. From time to time they seemed to sketch a dance step, clapping the rhythm with their hands or even their barefoot soles, or they briefly attempted to break into songs which were sometimes gay and at the other times melancholy, rhythms of tarantellas and funeral dirges. But it was if they were clinging for a few moments to the debris of a shipwreck surfacing on the waves of a tempestuous ocean, and then they lost their grip, quickly sunk again by the imminent crisis. The scenes which we saw from above in our gallery ad audiendum Sacrum gave us the impression of colored chips of a shattered  Kaleidoscope, one that was no longer capable of composing geometric designs as before: states of abandon on the floor, uncontrolled psychomotor agitation, attitude of anxious depression, bursts of aggressive frenzy along with hysterical arches, slow crawling in a prone position, sketches of dance steps, attempts at prayer, song and retching. Everything which we had already been able to see during the home exorcism was repeated, but with no dynamic bond or teleological framework, as with a demolished building where one finds the exact same things which furnished the rooms when the building was still standing…”  De Martino’s description clearly shows the weak moments of the ritual’s structure. As soon as the musical element is missing, anything that eventually emerged from chaos, to chaos it returns.

The fall and subsequent disappearance of Tarantism is partially due to its fragmented qualities that made it so unique; but also to the impossible mediation between the centuries old rural believes, and  Italy’s postwar radial social and cultural changes.

Compared with other codified rituals such as the Roman Catholic mass, Tarantism was missing the presence of factors that could unify the discrepancies produced by the mix of different cultural influences. Tarantism lacked a wide-ranging thought that could bring it beyond superstition and also, it didn’t’ have an significant counterpart that could defend the need for believe facing the spread of sociology, psychiatry and psychology. 

Tarantism has been an important phenomena for music therapy since it has been able to, even if intuitively, grasp the basic principles of contemporary music therapy.

Tarantism has also been an attempt to fill the terrifying void caused be the incomprehensible  reality of our own existence. The only word that refers to this reality concerns the most incomprehensible event of our life. In front of this event, language, culture and imagination are speechless and hope is vane, and from the waste land of reality the silence of God is ineluctable.

At the end of Ingmar Bergman’s film “Through a glass darkly”, Karin the psychotic female protagonist has an hallucinatory experience in front of a wardrobe where she hears the voice of God. At a certain moment when the wardrobe opens Karin is expecting to see God but has a terrible crisis. Only later, under the effect of a powerful sedative can she tell her experience:

““I was frightened. The door opened. But the god that came out was a spider. He came towards me and I saw his face. It was a terrible, stony face. He crawled up and tried to force himself into me, but I defended myself. The whole time I saw his eyes. They were cold and calm. When he couldn't penetrate me, he continued up my chest up onto my face and on up the wall. I have seen God.”

But as Bergman himself alludes, the path that leads to God, if ever it is to be found, does not pass through possession or folly. A testimony of this is given to us by the Tarantati who for centuries have danced to the obsessive rhythm of their own fears.

-  AA.VV., Quarant’anni dopo De Martino, Atti del Convegno, Besa Editore

-  Abraham Karl, Il ragno come simbolo onirico, in “Opere”, Volume II, Bollati Boringhieri

-  Agamennone Maurizio, Musiche tradizionali del Salento, Edizioni Squilibri

-  Bion Wilfred, Gli elementi della psicoanalisi, Armando Editore

-  Bion Wilfred, Trasformazioni, Armando Editore

-  De Backer Jos & Van Camp Jan,  The case of Marianne, in Psychodynamic Music Therapy: Case Studies, Barcelona Publishers

-  De Martino Ernesto, Sud e magia, Feltrinelli

-  De Martino Ernesto: The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism, Free   Association Books

-  Freud Sigmund: Il Perturbante (Das Unheimliche), Opere Complete, Vol. 9, Bollati Boringhieri

-  Grotstein James, Splitting and projective identification. Jason Aronson

-  Klein Melanie, Note su alcuni meccanismi schizoidi, in “Scritti 1921-1958”, Bollati Boringhieri

-  Klein Melanie, On identification, in “Our Adult World and Other Essays”, William Heinemann-Medical Books

-  Lacan Jacques, Il seminario X “l’Angoscia”, Einaudi

-  Lacan Jacques, Il seminario VII “L’etica della psicoanalisi”, Einaudi

-  Mina Gabriele, Torsello Sergio, La tela infinita, Besa Editore

-  Mora Gorge, Il male pugliese, Besa Editore

-  Recalcati Massimo, Il miracolo della forma, Bruno Mondatori

-  Van Camp Jan, Music and Music Therapy from a Lacanian Perspective, Lecture

-  Van Camp Jan, Muziek en Ritueel, Lecture