To Boldly Go

First, a joke:

Q Why is there no jazz in Star Trek?

A Because it’s set in the future

Thanks to my friend Matt Regan for reminding me of that one the other day. You have to be a jazz musician to tell it, otherwise it’s just mean.

If you’ve read this blog before and are inclined to feel there are too many references to science fiction, then best to skip this post. I’m a big science fiction fan. At its best, it’s full of beautiful metaphors, which it uses to amplify the themes and dilemmas of real life. I also like watching spaceships fire lasers at each other, and cool monsters, so it can connect me to my 8-year-old self too. Some people were critical of the new Star Trek reboot, because it contains a bit too much crash-bang and not enough consideration of the socio-political or philosophical issues which you find in the TV series. I liked it. I particularly like the symbolism at the beginning of the first one, where Captain Kirk’s father has to sacrifice himself by crashing a starship directly into a sun, in order to save the lives of everyone else on board, including his wife, who is in labour, giving birth to the future Captain Kirk. The silliness of a lot of sci-fi in TV and film is usually a long way from the masterpieces of Philip K Dick or Kurt Vonnegut, but it can often be saved by the use of powerful symbols which drive the narrative. So, here we have the young Captain Kirk, trying to atone for his failure to live up to the myth of his absent heroic father.

Then, in Dr Who, we have the archetype of the wise old man in the form of the Doctor. Even when he manifests as a younger man, as has been a recent tendency, we are frequently reminded that he’s over 900 years old. Kids hide behind the sofa during the scary bits, but they keep watching. The Doctor is almost as scary as the monsters at times, but we know that he will always ultimately prevail, and that he’s on our side. I’ve continued watching Dr Who recently, even as the storylines have buckled beneath their own grandiosity and hyper-complexity. Some episodes have been ludicrous, but every now and then you get a gem of a science fiction idea. The episode, ‘Blink’, where the marooned Doctor communicates with people 20 years in the future through a videotape, and the weeping angels are first introduced, is a great science fiction short story. The recent episodes in which a huge spacecraft is trapped on the event horizon of a black hole, so that time passes much faster at one end of the ship than another, cleverly uses Einstein’s theory of relativity in a playful and inventive way.

Then, after a disappointing Wimbledon men’s final the other day, we Dr Who fans were introduced to the new forthcoming female manifestation of the Doctor. It was an image of a male archetype transformed into a woman. Whatever the socio-cultural context, and bracketing the fact that this is essentially a fairly silly children’s TV programme, this is a powerful idea. For me, someone who has watched Dr Who since the 1970s, it was full of resonance. The father figure reveals the feminine, the anima perhaps. Male and female roles, sexuality, identity, are fluid things. They can change. So, on one level, the Doctor can be a woman, and little girls can have someone new to identify with, on another level, the Doctor always had the potential to be a woman.

As a therapist this fluidity is important. The transference relationship in therapy is gender-fluid. Sometimes my role embodies paternal function, sometimes there are maternal aspects to it, or even sibling aspects. Sometimes I have to be serious and focused, at other times I have to engage in imaginative creative play with a 5-year-old, pretend to be the ‘evil baddie’, the ‘rescuer’, or the ‘rescued’. ‘Male’ and ‘female’ can blur within these imaginary roles. Before I was a music therapist I was (and still am) a freelance musician in the jazz and commercial world, as well as a teacher. I went from a corner of the music scene which was largely male-dominated (increasingly less so now) to the music therapy scene, which is the opposite. This required some flexibility of identity and thinking. As a male music therapist I’m taking on a role that is sometimes stereotyped as female, similarly to a male nurse, perhaps. This is a positive challenge. It involves letting certain ideas go, but not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. ‘Paternal’ and ‘maternal’ roles, whatever they might be, and whether taken on by men or women, are both important, and therapists have to be able to encompass both at different times.

I’m sticking with science fiction as a genre with plenty to offer in the way of symbolism and philosophical thought experiments. And it’s good to see that the ‘wise old man’, or the ‘young hero’, can be female, and that the ‘damsel in distress’, or the ‘glamorous assistant’, can be male, or that they can all be both or neither, depending on the context and on perception.

And, by the way, the irony of the joke is that while there might not be any jazz in Star Trek, Star Trek is pretty popular amongst jazz musicians. Check out the Phil Woods version of the theme from the original series – swingin’!