Interdisciplinary Page

Psychology
- Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, was the founder of the subset of psychology known as "analytical psychology," which, similar to Sigmund Freud's method of psychoanalysis, looks into the unconscious mind and underlying motivations that drive human behavior.
- One of the topics that Jung proposed was the "persona," referring to the social masks that people "wear" in everyday life.
- The persona is used to mask the "shadow," or the "true" state of an individual's life (ex. someone's behavior and appearance at school compared to at home).
- In both works, the "idols" (Gatsby and Kurtz) both utilize social masks to mask the shortcomings and flaws of their shadows.
- The creation of a persona is required for one to be individuated, or to become an individual set apart from a single collective entity. The process of individuation comes from experiences gained and lessons learned throughout one's life, which is more notable in The Great Gatsby because Gatsby's former life is much more fleshed out in the story than Kurtz's in Heart of Darkness.

- The figure-ground optical illusion, most commonly presented with the question "do you see a vase or two faces?" is an example of when both appearance and reality are subjective. There is no way to come up with a definitive answer as to if the picture is either one, so it acts as a visual representation of an instance where reality cannot be exactly defined.

Music

- Unlike so many things in this world which values symmetry, music is an art form that usually sounds best when asymmetric. While symmetry may be appreciated greatly in fields such as modelling or architecture, the harmonic and rhythmic structures of music are more often asymmetric than they are symmetric. The visual representation of music, its appearance, is not totally indicative of its sound, the reality.

- Chords are groups of at least three notes that are played simultaneously. Major and minor chords, the two main basic "categories" of chords, make up an extremely large portion of contemporary Western music due to their generally consonant sound. The structures of these chords, when formed on a keyboard, are not symmetrical, with major chords having three keys between the first two notes and two keys between the second and third note and minor chords having two keys between the first two notes and three keys between the second and third note. Diminished and augmented chords are formed symmetrically, with two and three notes between each note respectively, but are much more dissonant and unpleasant-sounding than the asymmetrical major and minor chords.

 

- Although some melodic lines have symmetric shapes (going up, going down) and rhythmic patterns, composing with the intention of forming something symmetric usually results in a boring and not-so-pleasant-sounding song.