The study of lullabies and of ways to soothe humans or other beings offers a variety of scientific, artistic, and creative lenses through which we can examine the se practices. They therefore require not only multidisciplinary but also inventive, multidimensional, and even “trickster” (epistemologically edgy, elusive, ever-changing, disobedient) approaches. Most importantly, they invite us to reflect on the multi-layered concept of “staying with the trouble”. This invitation can also be extended to the relationship between different theories of knowledge and experience, such as – in this case – relationalpsychotherapy, (music) anthropology/ethnomusicology, and practical(somatic-vocal) work. This presentation focuses on the “psychotherapeutic ethnographies”collected among women from Colombia, Scotland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Slovenia who participated in the author’s somatic-vocal lullaby workshops in the pre-pandemic years. The narratives of soothing experiences with babies and children not only challenge prevailing discourses about the mother as a vehicle for the child’s needs, but they also question the role of the mother (or the concept of mother, i. e. any caregiver who attends to the child’s physical and psychosocial needs) as a regulator of the child’s affective and stressful emotional states. Pursuing the questions of who sings, to whom, and about what, reveals (self- and co-) regulation not exclusively as “positive maternal-infant interactions that can shape the infant’s developmental outcomes”(Schore in Weber and Harrison, 2012), but as a processual nature of becoming (regulated), that is infused with struggle, frustration, grief, loss, and even anger. When regulation is viewed as a process of “staying with the trouble”, the epistemologies of rupture, wounding, and trauma, and their potential for healing, become apparent.
»Staying With the Trouble«: On regulation by singing lullabies
Katarina Juvančič
