Music from the Heart

by Len Bergantino

I had been doing psychotherapy with a man whose mother had been taken away in a straight jacket and institutionalized when he was three years old. He never saw her again.

The man was so frightened at the primitive three year old level that he invested his entire life in "looking good." He was a successful public relations executive for a big firm, but affectively detached and disconnected and always aiming to please as a result of never being truly present in the here and now.

One day I asked him to sing because he always sounded like he had a cloth stuffed in his mouth. He sang "Come Back to Sorrento," an Italian ballad. He was Irish but sang it with more feeling than I had ever heard in him before.

There had been many sessions which had differing degrees of frustration in which he would come in disconnected, detached and aiming to please, and the feeling I had on this particular day was I just didn't want to say one more word to him about anything.

So, to his surprise, I took out my mandolin and in the most loving mellow beautiful way I could I played "Come Back to Sorrento." He broke down in tears and cried for the last forty minutes of the session, saying only, at the very end of the session, "Bergantino, you sure earned your money today!" I replied, "And to think, I wasted all these years talking to people."

If you enjoyed these reflections, we invite you to discover other thoughtful and personal writings in the pages of The Best of Pilgrimage and Pilgrimage Vol. 26 and Vol. 27. These can be ordered directly from this website; please click on "How to Order."