Transactional Analysis and the Spiritual Dimension in the Religious Music of Johann Sebastian Bach

Abstract

The author, who is passionate about both Bach’s music and transactional analysis (TA), explores the spiritual dimension of each. He considers how to look at spiritual experiences from a TA perspective and links his reflections to his experience of Bach’s music. Based on music director John Eliot Gardener’s description of Bach’s music as “being in another world” and bringing “a sense of otherness,” the author explores this sense of otherness using TA. To illustrate his point, he concludes his article with a quote from Bach himself.

Keywords:

• Autonomy
• aspiration arrow
• ego states
• inner core
• intuition
• physis
• real self
• spirituality
• stimulus hunger
• transactional analysis

Disclosure statement

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Henk Tigchelaar

Henk Tigchelaar is a Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst (education) and cofounder of and teacher at the TA Academy in the Netherlands. He was educated as a teacher and taught in primary and secondary schools as well as universities and has run an MSc program for school directors. He specializes in the areas of change and learning processes in school organizations. Henk is also a certified musician in Music in Schools, Organ and Church Music and was a teacher at the Conservatory of Music in Amsterdam. He is the author of a chapter in Educational Transactional Analysis: An International Guide to Theory and Practice edited by Giles Barrow and Trudi Newton (Routledge, 2015). He can be reached at Rendier 9, 1273 HM Huizen, Netherlands; email: [email protected]. The author thanks Anne de Graaf for his constructive feedback during the writing of this article.