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“My mind becomes blank, I feel a surge of warmth overtaking my body, my heart races, my breathing almost stops, and my muscles become weak.” This is a description offered by a seasoned musician of the physical experience of anxiety during a performance. “The baffling thing is, some performances I am completely calm and unaffected, other performances I feel the dread of being judged by others. I can’t identify what causes it to happen in some situations and not in others.”
There are multiple schools of thought that psychologists use to explore the experience of music performance anxiety, from the biological, evolutionary perspective to the cognitive-behavioral perspective. Each approach offers a distinct lens through which to observe and understand the dreadful experience of musical performance anxiety. I would like to explore some insights from the psychodynamic perspective that might offer clues to an understanding of your experience of anxiety while performing.
Contemporary and classic psychodynamic theory views musical performance anxiety in a way that is different from most other psychological theories that are popular today. Unlike behavioral and some evolutionary-biological theories, musical performance anxiety is not viewed as a reaction to an actual threat from the performance situation, but rather an unconscious activation of a deeply embedded internal voice or self-talk that we learned from an overcritical parent or caregiver. These deeply embedded thoughts are activated when we are in a situation that resembles our interactions with the judgmental parent during the earliest years of our development. The experience was created before we had a conscious understanding 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 forms into our sense of self and how we view the environment we live in. When we feel intense physical reactions while waiting to perform, we are reacting to the unconscious voice of the superego, the “critical parent” that runs under our immediate conscious awareness. Unaware of this silent but potent effect on our body and our mind, we are reacting to a childhood fear of rejection and the threat of abandonment from our caregiver. In essence, the unconscious little child in us is reacting to a once real threat of “I will leave you if you do not live up to my expectations.”
Shame, guilt, and alarm manifest as anger or fear in different situations. It is important to understand that we are not experiencing the symptoms in reaction to the actual event of musical performance, but rather to the projection of childhood fears that have become part of how we experience the world and identify as a person. The actual danger in a musical performance situation is not that we are being judged by the people watching and listening, but rather, that they will confirm the childhood belief that the critical parent threatened us with, that we will be “found out” by those watching, that we are not lovable and worthy. This is really a matter of having an internal sense of self-worth and a basic feeling of safety in our earliest environment. If there was a threat of withheld love or abandonment in those early years, this becomes a sensitive cue in adult life for anxiety.
To compound this complicated scenario, we often unconsciously enter into situations that replicate the unresolved childhood emotional trauma. In psychodynamic terminology, this is called repetition compulsion. It refers to our tendency to enter into the same dynamics with different people throughout our lives. Though we ourselves are unaware of the dynamic, we are drawn to people who resemble the qualities of the caregiver whose judgment shaped our trauma. In entering the relationship, we seek to repeat the situation, hoping to achieve a different outcome. However, the experience of the trauma is projected onto the current situation and charges it with a disproportionate and typically inaccurate appraisal of the threat. We find ourselves re-experiencing the feelings of failure in trying to please an impossible-to-please parent or caregiver.
As musicians, we meet this sense of inferiority by overcompensating to have a sense of control over the feared rejection and betrayal of others. These are projections from our early childhood experiences and feel current and accurate. We find a solution to our embedded fear of abandonment in the pursuit of perfectionism, an erroneous belief that we can control how others receive us by being perfect. We can often regress into an earlier state of childhood awareness, suddenly finding ourselves acting like a child in a situation in which we perceive a threat.
Realization, awareness, and acknowledgment that musical performance anxiety is activating an entrenched childhood sensitivity to criticism and judgment can take some time. In psychodynamic psychotherapy, there is a defensive denial that keeps this trauma hidden from conscious awareness. Working through defensiveness is possible without a therapist. In her classic text, Self-Analysis, Karen Horney offers a systematic approach to working through layers of ego defense that keep the trauma hidden from our awareness. Through systematic and committed analysis, one can soften the ego defenses and gradually dissolve the reactive childhood sensitivity that has hardened into our character structure.
