Black Metal and Psychoanalysis
“From the time I first encountered psychoanalysis until now, I’ve been in analysis for a total of about fifteen years. Not continuously, but always there, with the psychoanalyst Yoany Rendón.” With these words, Faber begins this interview about his experience in analysis.
It all began in my final years at school, a complex time, says Faber, “not only because of what I was going through at the time – which he describes as his adolescence – but also because of other family issues that I naturally had to work through”.
In short, “a very difficult time when I needed to start understanding many things that were happening to me, certain excessive behaviours. Something that, in a way, hasn’t disappeared, but which I am now aware of”.
During his years in therapy, says Faber, “he has never sought to be a better person. He has wanted to understand who he is, as well as the reason behind those acts of excess and the turmoil of his difficult years”.
He also says he “feels good understanding that darkness is also part of who we are”. He sums up his therapeutic experience as “learning to walk, a new way of walking. Letting go of crutches, to learn to walk again, with all the difficulties that entails, but at least, on his own.”
Of that darkness Faber speaks of, he adds, “it is the main reason why he is not in favour of practices that tell one what to do, for from that darkness, he has realised, that sometimes the monster just needs to be heard.”
In his case, says Faber, “it is as if it were an abyss, which, whilst many may approach perhaps too closely, lends his life a certain hue, a certain splendour of sinister beauty. Something which, whilst in the eyes of others constitutes the height of strangeness, in his case helps to bring his inner self under control; a place of peace to which he sometimes escapes”.
Black Metal has been for him “more than music, it has been an art. The art of rebellion against established standards of normality and beauty”. In itself, “a rebellion capable of singing what people do not want to hear, what they do not want to know because it makes them uncomfortable, what they flee from”. Nor, Faber continues, “does he see in it an absolute truth; it is not a certainty, for then it would be a church, but in reverse”.
According to him, psychoanalysis “has helped him to approach that void of his own darkness without being absorbed by it, using it for his own creation”. Over the past year he has been working on the latest album by his black metal band, where alchemy is the album’s central theme; divided into three phases:
Nigredo: Faber tells us, “it is the part of oneself that must be destroyed in order to become something like gold”
Codex: This would be the beginning of the phases, “it is fire, but not the kind that burns everything. It does not aim to scorch everything, but to control it, for the nigredo requires the codex”.
Nexus: “the structuring. It is like putting together a package with the knowledge of the cliques, the singularities understood; placing them in a chest and losing them”.
