“In every chaos there is a cosmos; in every disorder there is a secret order.”
(C.G. Jung)
The unceasing interest in techno scene naturally raises the question of what it is about this “technoculture,” as it likes to call itself, that is so attractive and fascinates young people practically all over the world.² The name techno—i.e., Electronic Dance Music (EDM)³—already indicates that it is the result of the modern computerization of music. This music emerged in the second half of the 1980s in the United States, particularly in Detroit, Michigan, and Chicago. The original sound of techno developed from synthesized music shaped by strong African American influences, including Chicago house, funk, electro, and electric jazz. These elements blended with rhythms reminiscent of African tribal drumming, as well as futuristic and science-fiction motifs reflecting the social imagination and lived realities of late-twentieth-century America.
Within less than a decade, techno music spread to Brazil and to the Old Continent—especially to Great Britain and Germany—where it branched into various styles such as house, rave, garage, trance, acid, drum-and-bass, minimal techno, wonky techno, ghettotech, nortec, glitch, digital hardcore, so-called no-beat techno, and others, depending on the typology of its listeners. Although interest in this music has stabilized in Western countries today, an unexpected boom has occurred in the so-called post-communist bloc. A characteristic feature of techno music is the rhythm of percussion instruments (drums), on which this music is fundamentally built. Although many offshoots of this musical style exist today, they differ primarily in the hardness and tempo of the drum beats; the musical logic itself—gradual build-up, climax, and a phase of repetitive, stereotyped patterning—remains largely unchanged. Older generations would likely claim that this music lacks melody, and this assessment is not without merit, as the melodic form that structures most other musical traditions is of secondary importance in techno. The capacities enabled by the development of the cerebral cortex—creativity and inventiveness that elaborate a musical theme into melodic and harmonic complexity—are, in this context, largely unnecessary. In its structure and rhythmic insistence, techno more closely resembles tribal music performed during initiation rituals, where sound and rhythm serve as instruments for inducing ecstatic trance rather than for melodic expression.⁴ Although many offshoots of this musical style exist today, they differ primarily in the hardness and tempo of the drum beats; the musical logic itself—gradual build-up, climax, and a phase of repetitive, stereotyped patterning—remains largely unchanged. Older generations would likely claim that this music lacks melody, and this assessment is not without merit, as the melodic form that structures most other musical traditions is of secondary importance in techno. The capacities enabled by the development of the cerebral cortex—creativity and inventiveness that elaborate a musical theme into melodic and harmonic complexity—are, in this context, largely unnecessary. In its structure and rhythmic insistence, techno more closely resembles tribal music performed during initiation rituals, where sound and rhythm serve as instruments for inducing ecstatic trance rather than for melodic expression. As Jung writes, “a great many ritualistic performances are carried out for the sole purpose of producing at will the effect of the numinosum by means of certain devices” (Jung, Psychology and Religion, CW 11); the techno ritual can be understood as belonging to this same category.⁵˒⁶
It can be said that this music engages the most archaic layers of the psyche, or even arises from them. From a contemporary neuroscientific perspective, techno’s repetitive, low-frequency rhythmic structure strongly entrains subcortical and sensorimotor systems that predate higher cortical functions responsible for symbolic thought, melody, and narrative meaning. Research on neural entrainment demonstrates that steady, predictable beats synchronize oscillatory activity in motor, premotor, basal ganglia, and cerebellar networks, creating an automatic coupling between auditory input and bodily movement (Grahn & Brett, 2007; Large & Snyder, 2009). Once this coupling is established, movement becomes increasingly involuntary, which explains why prolonged exposure to such rhythms makes resistance to synchronized motion difficult (trance). This process closely resembles mechanisms observed in hypnosis. Monotonous, repetitive auditory stimulation has been shown to reduce prefrontal executive monitoring and shift dominant brain activity toward slower alpha and theta oscillations—states associated with focused absorption, diminished self-reflective awareness, and heightened suggestibility (Oakley & Halligan, 2013; Jensen et al., 2015). Similar oscillatory patterns occur during the hypnagogic phase of sleep and in REM sleep, where emotional memory processing and associative integration are enhanced while logical, linear cognition is attenuated. In techno settings, this shift is further intensified by prolonged rhythmic repetition and sensory saturation, producing a trance-like state that is neither fully waking nor sleeping, but functionally analogous to both.
The extensive use of stroboscopic and rhythmic lighting at rave events amplifies these effects. Visual flicker at certain frequencies has been shown to synchronize cortical activity and deepen altered states of consciousness by reinforcing thalamocortical entrainment (Vernet et al., 2019). This combination of repetitive sound and rhythmic light closely parallels techniques used in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, where bilateral auditory or visual stimulation facilitates access to emotionally charged memories while reducing cognitive control and defensive inhibition (Shapiro, 2018). In EMDR, such stimulation is thought to engage mechanisms similar to those active during REM sleep, enabling adaptive reprocessing and emotional integration. Analogously, the rave environment creates conditions in which affective material can surface and be discharged through movement rather than verbal cognition.
In this sense, a rave party functions less as a conventional dance event and more as a modern ritual with trance-hypnotic induction. Technical correctness or adherence to an external norm becomes irrelevant; the norm is subjective and embodied. Each raver must discover individualized movements synchronized with the beat in order to regulate arousal, express emotion, and sustain prolonged dancing. Neuroscientifically, individualized movement allows continuous recalibration of proprioceptive, vestibular, and interoceptive feedback, preventing sensory overload and supporting self-regulation within an otherwise overwhelming stimulus field (Thaut et al., 2015). Psychologically, this individuality of expression constitutes a crucial faculty: it loosens rigid ego-defense control and collective conformity while preserving participation in the group, enabling deep immersion without complete loss of agency. From both a neuroscientific and depth-psychological perspective, this balance between rhythmic synchronization and individual modulation is what allows the experience to be transformative rather than disorganizing.
An uninitiated observer might assume that the raver’s dance movements are merely a sequence of chaotic or meaningless bodily oscillations. This, however, is a misunderstanding. The movements carry clear psychological meaning. They are not only an individual optimization of energy and motor discharge, but also a symbolic mode of expression through which the dancer gives form to an unconscious psychic situation.
By situation we do not mean an external circumstance, but an inner configuration: a dynamically constellated image composed of affect, bodily sensation, impulse, and implicit meaning. This inner image is not consciously designed or choreographed; rather, it emerges autonomously and guides expression from within. Movement becomes the medium through which this situation takes shape, as an embodied image enacted in space and time. In this sense, the body functions as a symbolic organ, translating unconscious contents into visible form without the mediation of reflective thought.
From a depth-psychological perspective, such movement corresponds to the activation of imaginal processes that precede verbal representation. The dancer does not think of the image and then expresses it; the image lives the body and moves it. Rhythm provides the containing structure within which this inner situation can unfold safely, allowing affect and impulse to be shaped rather than discharged chaotically. What appears externally as repetitive or idiosyncratic motion is, internally, a precise regulation of psychic energy in accordance with the dancer’s unconscious inner constellation.
For trance to take place, a unification of bodily movement and psychic form is essential. When movement resonates with the underlying inner situation—an autonomously constellated inner image composed of affect, impulse, and implicit meaning—the usual split between mind and body begins to dissolve. Movement is no longer consciously directed or aesthetically shaped, as in choreographed dance, but arises instinctively, translating the inner image directly into bodily expression. Conscious control recedes, and expression is taken over by an autonomous process in which image, affect, and motion form a single experiential field. In this state, the dancer is no longer representing an experience from a reflective distance but inhabiting it “organically” in the moment, causa praesens. Trance thus arises not from a loss of form, but from a deeper congruence between inner image and embodied expression, where psyche and soma temporarily speak the same, pre-reflective language.
Techno music is not a song in the traditional sense we are accustomed to, but a compact, uninterrupted continuum that can unfold for hours without a clear beginning or end. Within this extended temporal field, the DJ does not merely play music but enters into a living, reciprocal relationship with the crowd. Attuned to subtle shifts in movement, intensity, and collective affect, the DJ senses when the energy tightens, disperses, or seeks release. The crowd, in turn, responds bodily to each modulation of rhythm, texture, and tempo.
What emerges is a circular process resembling biofeedback. The dancers’ movements express an unconscious collective situation; the DJ perceives this expression and translates it back into sound, adjusting the musical flow accordingly. This altered sound then reshapes the crowd’s movement, which again feeds back to the DJ. In this loop, music and movement continuously inform and regulate one another. Neither fully leads nor follows; both co-arise within a shared field.
Psychologically, this dynamic creates a self-organizing system in which individual inner situations are momentarily synchronized within a collective rhythm, without being homogenized. The DJ functions less as a performer and more as a mediator of the ritual container, holding and amplifying what is already present in the crowd. The music becomes a mirror and a guide, allowing unconscious material to surface, circulate, and be embodied through movement. In this sense, the techno set is not a linear composition but a living process, shaped in real time by the dialogue between sound, body, and collective psyche.
Those dancers who manage to reach trance truly dance the entire time without rest, or only with short breaks to replenish fluids. The DJ mixes the techno and has relatively free rein in choosing melody, rhythm, and style.
Entering the hall or dance space resembles entering a sacred space where a ritual takes place. The DJ is in the center or at the front, from where the entire ritual is directed. An unconscious connection between DJ and dancers is quickly established. The DJ is a witness to the drama of creation but also a member of the crowd with which he necessarily identifies in the manner of participation mystique.
Let us not be mistaken: it is a dialogue, not a one-sided stream from equipment to dancer. The equipment comes alive only under human touch. The dancing crowd, becoming one body, dictates tempo and gradation to the DJ, and the DJ dictates the same to the crowd. After a while, it becomes impossible to distinguish what came first—the chicken or the egg. Movement shapes the music, the music shapes movement, and both are carried by something that no longer belongs to either alone. At this point, we can speak of the emergence of the numinosum, of an archetypal field coming into being. What is characteristic of archetypal reality is that ordinary linear causality loses its primacy. Events no longer follow one another in a clear sequence of cause and effect, but unfold in a shared simultaneity, as though coordinated from a center that is not personal, not consciously willed, and yet profoundly ordering.
In such a field, the usual distinctions between subject and object, leader and follower, inner and outer begin to soften. The dancer no longer experiences the music as something external, nor the DJ as an individual agent imposing form. Instead, both seem to participate in a larger pattern that reveals itself through them. This is why participants often describe the experience as being “carried,” “guided,” or “taken over,” not in a pathological sense, but in the feeling of being aligned with something meaningful and alive.
For the observer who has not lived this state, such descriptions may sound vague or exaggerated. Language itself struggles here, because it is shaped to describe linear processes, not unified fields of experience. What can be said is that within this archetypal reality, experience acquires a particular density and intensity, accompanied by a sense of inevitability and rightness. One feels that things are happening as they must, not because someone decided so, but because the situation itself demands it. This quality—both fascinating and difficult to grasp—is precisely what gives the experience its numinous character.
The party may take place in a huge hall where five or even ten thousand people dance, surrounded by high-tech speakers, clouds of smoke, rapidly flashing light effects, and cut off from the external world. The dancers’ clothing is usually soaked through with sweat. I have seen sweat dripping from the ceiling and a half-centimeter layer of sweat flowing on the floor. It is like bathing in one’s own self. Yet at the same time it is an experience of participation and unity, where aggression and hostility practically do not exist. That is why Jung’s used term of participation mystique captures this unconscious unity well.⁸ The dancing crowd is essentially a mass with a soul of its own, however there is a presence of the observing ego that is in awe and deeply touched.
This movement can be understood as the visible expression of a living organism. Dancers are gradually drawn toward the center, where sound, vibration, and collective intensity are strongest, much like air drawn into the core of a low-pressure system or water pulled toward a powerful current. The center functions as a zone of maximal energetic density. Yet few can remain there for long. The intensity is too great, both physically and psychically, and so dancers are gradually pushed back toward the periphery as they dance, where the pressure is lower and the system allows for natural recovery. There , at the edges, the dancer breathes, regains orientation, and restores energy, only to be drawn once again toward the center when readiness returns. This oscillation between immersion and withdrawal is not consciously organized; it seems to unfold automatically, perhaps analogous to the ebb and flow of tides, the circulation of atmospheric currents, or the natural pacing of a meaningful conversation. In a deep dialogue or a psychotherapy session, one can observe a similar rhythm: moments of emotional intensity and depth are followed by pauses, shifts to safer ground, or lighter material, before the conversation once again moves inward. Too much intensity sustained too long would overwhelm the system; too little would lead to stagnation. And it is governed by the psyche’s instinctive wisdom.
In the techno ritual, the crowd as a whole behaves like a living organism, instinctively regulating its own arousal. The center is where transformation threatens and beckons; the periphery is where integration and recovery occur. This continuous circulation allows the ritual to persist for hours without collapse. The journey itself—moving in and out of intensity, repeatedly approaching and retreating—becomes something very akin to the ritual form. It mirrors natural systems and psychological processes alike, where growth does not occur through constant pressure, but through rhythmic alternation between engagement and rest, exposure and containment.
Dancers experience intoxicating affiliative feelings of acceptance, cohesion, understanding, and unity. And, as in the rituals of so-called primitive cultures, drugs also play a role here—most often ecstasy, cannabis, psychedelics and stimulants that increase the dancers’ endurance.⁷
Readers might ask: what is the philosophy of the techno movement? The answer is: there is no philosophy of this movement. The only philosophy is individual experience. Exodus—the rave movement that arose in Great Britain—however, does have certain aims: to spread love, communitas, and friendship among people. In the case of techno music, these aims are not pursued through rational philosophy, but through a form of mystical participation—that is, a state akin to dreaming, in which ego-consciousness enters an imaginal and experiential encounter with the archetypal unconscious.⁸ Ego-consciousness withdraws from its usual position of control and assumes the role of an open, receptive witness, while the intensified unconscious unfolds an inner adventure before the raver’s senses. The raver’s intention—perhaps better understood as an instinctive urge rather than a thought-thru goal—is to reach a purifying, healing, and ultimately transforming experience. As one raver expressed it to me, it is about “resetting the head and the heart.” The dancer seeks inner quiet, a temporary release from the everyday world of obligation, calculation, and rational demands, allowing something deeper and older within the psyche to speak to him directly and clearly.
From a depth-psychological perspective, this is not merely an escape, but an attempt at symbolic rebirth through entry into sacred space, undertaken so that life may be lived more consciously in the profane world, to use Eliade’s classic distinction between the aspects of reality (Eliade, 1959).⁹ One cannot live long in sacred space; it is like an overly intense fire that would soon burn us. Whoever enters must bring the light back into the profane world, for whose sake the sacred exists. Like every ritual, this one must not serve only itself, but must be a principio individuationis, a means to fuller life.
The historical beginnings of ritual ceremonies reach back to the Paleolithic era; in this sense, ritual can be thus regarded as coextensive with humanity itself. Archaeological evidence from Upper Paleolithic burial sites—such as intentional body positioning, the use of ochre, grave goods, and repeated symbolic motifs—indicates that early humans engaged in structured, meaning-laden actions oriented toward transformation, continuity, and relationship with forces of “beyond” (Eliade, 1959; Rappaport, 1999; Lewis-Williams, 2002). Ritual, in this light, is closely interlinked with what we would today call religious behavior, long predating formal belief systems, ideologies or doctrines.
Music, however, is far more difficult to trace archaeologically, as sound itself leaves no direct material record. Despite this limitation, there is compelling indirect evidence that music and rhythmic sound were integral to early ritual life. Archaeologists have identified Paleolithic musical instruments, such as bone flutes dating back over 40,000 years (e.g., finds from Hohle Fels in Germany), as well as percussion-capable objects like hollowed bones, stones, and resonant surfaces likely used for rhythmic purposes (Conard et al., 2009; Morley, 2013). These artifacts suggest that early humans intentionally produced sound not merely for entertainment, but within symbolic and ritual contexts.
From an anthropological and psychological perspective, rhythm and sound likely served as primary tools for inducing altered states of consciousness long before language-based mythologies emerged. Repetitive drumming, chanting, and tonal modulation would have provided reliable means of synchronizing group behavior, regulating affect, and facilitating trance states—functions that later became formalized within religious ritual across cultures (Turner, 1974; Winkelman, 2000). In depth-psychological terms, music can thus be understood as one of the earliest symbolic technologies for engaging archetypal contents of the psyche, offering a nonverbal bridge between bodily experience, emotion, and the imaginal world.¹⁰ The goal of the participant in such a religious act, which usually took place under the guidance of a shaman or medicine man, was to establish contact with gods, spirits, mythical figures, and the like, on whose will his life depended. The shaman’s task was also to find lost souls and bring them back so that the participant’s identity could be restored. Early human cultures developed a wide range of techniques that enabled access to such states, including circular spinning, rhythmic drumming, dance, and the use of hallucinogenic plants, sometimes in carefully crafted forms.¹¹ What such a person would call contact with gods is called, in analytical psychology, the entry of unconscious contents into consciousness. From this perspective, gods are psychic projections of these unconscious contents, archetypes. Archetypes by their nature transcend individual experience and, like instincts, carry information about basic possibilities of psychic functioning in various situations through human phylogeny, essentially since humanity’s origin or possibly even beyond it – apriori, before the experience itself. This is why C. G. Jung called them contents of the collective psyche and thought of them as aspects of anima mundi.
The fact that we no longer call archetypes gods does not mean that we have explained or understood them. They remain as mysterious to us as the gods were to earlier cultures. Archetypes cannot be reduced to purely psychic representations or biological mechanisms, nor can their origin, function, and effects be exhaustively explained through causal nor final analysis. In depth-psychological theory, archetypes emerge from beyond the psyche, “from” a deeper, “essence of universe,” ground of reality. Jung referred to this underlying substrate as the unus mundus (Latin for “one world”), “a unitary world, in which psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world” (Jung, 1973, CW 14, para. 767). Marie-Louise von Franz further emphasized that this unity implies meaningful, non-causal correspondences between inner representations (symbols) and outer events, suggesting that archetypal patterns belong to an order that precedes the split between mind and matter (von Franz, 1974). From this perspective, archetypes are not merely reflections of subjective psychic representations, but expressions of ordering principles of the unus mundus, manifesting simultaneously in psychological experience and in the structure of reality itself, and therefore fundamentally beyond any Cartesian, purely material, or otherwise exhaustive explanation that does not leave room for mystery—particularly because psychological phenomena of observation are inevitably present in any act of cognition, making it impossible to assume a fully detached or purely “objective” position.
Archetypes speak through human ritual activities. When Eliade explains that, through the imitation of exemplary deeds of gods or mythical heroes—or through the retelling of their adventures—people in archaic societies separated themselves from profane time and re-entered sacred or exalted time, this should not be understood to mean that divinity is absent from modern ritual forms. Rather, it suggests that the mode of experiencing the sacred has changed, not that the sacred itself has disappeared. The numinous force, though subjected to critical reflection and defined in terms of analytical psychology, has lost nothing of its magical function in its effect in creating consciousness.⁶ We can say that what distinguishes modern humans from ancient humans is a specific spirituality, i.e., the faith with which they approach their deities. Whereas ancient humans implicitly “believed” or rather “felt” that their life depended entirely on their relationship to their gods and that divinity held a categorical position because human life belonged to it, modern humans with pronounced lack their spirituality in this sense, reduce their existence to some designated value that need not relate to anything higher. It sounds conceptually strong, but it can be clarified and smoothed for readability. Here is a refined version that keeps your meaning intact:
What many modern humans lack is a lived spiritual relationship to the transcendent—a life shaped by the awareness of meaningful existence that exceeds the physical and temporal boundaries of the body, together with a conscious dedication to the responsibilities that such awareness entails. It is not only belief in an afterlife, reincarnation, or salvation, but the transcendent meaning that primitive humans attributed to their existence.
Traditional rituals help to maintain a certain continuity of transcendent dialogue between unconscious and conscious. The participant’s conscious action was – in ancient times – guided by divinity. The human—no longer exclusively a collective being—through ritual established contact with destiny, thereby receiving uniqueness and meaning. Ritual was an act of imitating heroic drama; just as the hero, through confrontation with gods, gained a new quality for himself and his people, so too could the ritual participant integrate a new content – skill – of the collective unconscious. Ritual objectified unconscious drama, enabling their integration into consciousness and thus, in effect, human sapientization. The shaman thus directly participated psychically and physically in a situation that occurred ab origine and usually related to creation. As it appears, many analogies exist between ritual acts and what happens at technoparties.
With techno we can also speak of regression to archaic initiation techniques in which drumming, intoxication, and trance played significant roles. Whereas traditional ritual often objectified unconscious processes and depicted deeds of gods or heroes, technoparty merely reproduces a disordered situation without any apparent frame. It creates a primitive experience of chaos. Yet this chaos is not only chaos; it is the chaos of primordial order. Within this chaos is contained the potential existence of everything possible, i.e., everything potentially realizable. It is an attempt to imitate the state of consciousness before realization by the observer.
Ecstatic spontaneous dancing among so-called primitives is richly documented. After shamanic dance a healing process occurred. The psyche found an instinctive way to heal itself. A new perspective appeared; a temporary state of calm was achieved. Elimination of consciousness causes activation of the inferior function by sudden emergence. It is as if the whole unconscious floods ego consciousness. Trance, which, on some level, resembles psychotic noxa, has something in common with temporary disintegration of the rational system of the partie supérieure. Whereas the evolution of consciousness is a gradual movement from massa confussa toward a more differentiated state, in trance, life energy, libido flows regressively toward the unconscious, where it awakens sleeping gods – actions in potentia.
Activated contents of the unconscious are tamed only by dance, not by rational integration. The raver thus maintains an affective and experience-ridden relationship to the contents of the unconscious. The whole experience is certainly very interesting. It activates deep, primordial and the most archaic emotions and fantasies. Experiences of other kinds of music stimulate cultivated feeling-toned reactions and images linked to previous experience; in techno the raver is often overtaken by raw, undifferentiated emotionality in addition to freely flowing emotions of personal nature. The raver experiences the unconscious in its amoral and irrational form beyond good and evil. It is not uncommon that the raver’s emotions evoked by techno are, so to speak, emotions from another world. They do not simply refer to current experiences but to experiences of past, present, and future simultaneously in a mysterious comingling mode. The numinous experience of technoparty is characterized by leaving ordinary experiences and living mysterious, bizarre, fantastic, or psychedelic emotions and images that are radically foreign to the dancer, and yet he finds in them a sense of familiarity and safety. The archetypal field induced by music, the crowd, the enclosed space, and so on causes the dancer to fall under its power; he ritualistically abandons his ego-attachments and will.¹² John Giannini writes that when we feel something charged with emotional energy in a way that lacks logic, we are in the embrace of an archetype and experience more-than; it carries meaning that can never be fully articulated, and we sense a spiritual aura with which, in the same time, we cannot fully connect.¹³ From an archetypal perspective, technoparty is an experience of the Great Mother archetype, or the feminine aspect of the unconscious. It is a perceptual experience of preconscious, undifferentiated wholeness. Lao Tze writes:¹⁴
“There was something formless and complete
before the universe was born.
It was utterly quiet. Empty.
Solitary. Unchanging.
Infinite. Eternally present.
It is the mother of the universe.
Because I do not know its name,
I call it Tao.
It flows through all things,
inside and outside, and returns
to the origin of all things.”
Whereas the father archetype evokes clarity and purity, differentiation and spirituality, the mother archetype is an experience of psychic unity, togetherness, undifferentiation. It evokes an experience of regressus ad uterum (return to the womb), a psychic movement contra patris—though not completely, because egoic, heroic consciousness is usually preserved and is not wholly consumed by the archetype. We can speak of Fordham’s process of deintegration, in which the primary self is enriched by experience of the object; here the object is not the biological mother but the archetypal mother. Deintegration must not be confused with disintegration, although occasionally it happens among technodancers that the cohesiveness of the ego breaks down.¹⁵
The experience of techno music evokes a sense of timelessness, a moment of causa praesens. Past and present fold into one another and become indistinguishable. The dancer descends into the primordial fabric of experience, into a state in which space, time, and causality were not yet separated—into the moment when consciousness itself was first stirring, into the time of Tao. Strictly speaking, we should no longer speak of time or past at all, for everything unfolds hic et nunc. Consciousness touches a timeless dimension in which the collective psyche naturally dwells, and in doing so momentarily steps outside linear time, beyond ordinary moral oppositions of good and evil. It is no exaggeration to describe this experience as a fleeting glimpse into life before time.
This experience has the character of mysterium fascinans et tremendum, there is something utterly magnetic and at the same time fear-inducing about it. Unconscious wholeness attracts the dancer like a hypnotizing voice, as a subtle recollection of a dream that was true once… On one hand we can describe the state as a “fall,” because the raver feels an irresistible urge to relinquish rationality, identity, and conscious continuity of ego-experience and merge with the infinite universe of the collective unconscious—the Great Mother; on the other hand there is a presence of fear that everything – the ego clings to – will be lost forever. Name, age, gender, parents, friends, place and time—everything must be let go off and forgotten in trembling and sweat. It is terrifying like an image of death, but once the dancer sets out on the path, it is no longer possible to slow down until he reaches the end. The raver must trust the process and maintain hope that it will have a good ending. Though the ritual seems disordered, it contains an immanent structure. Three components of this experience are remarkable:
Jung observes that a return to primordial nature and a mystical regression to timeless psychic conditions are common to all religions in which the dynamic force remains a living experience rather than a mere rational abstraction. Such regression is not a pathological retreat, but a temporary descent into the deeper layers of the psyche, where renewal takes place. From this encounter, a restoration of unity with the divine emerges, giving rise to new psychological potential and, in a profound sense, allowing the world to be experienced as newly created. As Jung writes, “The retrograde step to the preconscious psyche is not only a relapse into the past, but at the same time a step forward, a potential advance, since it re-establishes the original totality out of which new forms can arise” (Jung, 1956/1967, CW 6, para. 431).¹⁷ The return to the profane world is a return to a different world: by changing our relationship to it, the world itself changes. In this lies the purifying and healing power of ritual.
Why is this archaic method gaining ever more supporters among young people? It did not take long for dance to return to something close to its original form. Drugs, rhythmic movement, and music readily induce trance states. What is largely missing, however, is a sustained philosophical or symbolic framework—a referential relationship to another reality into which, traditionally, the shaman was carefully initiated. Such a container does not arise spontaneously; it is the result of devoted, patient—one might say alchemical—work.
That opinions and representations possess enormous power hardly needs demonstration. In psychotherapy, they are precisely the means through which psychological suffering is transformed. Thought itself—forms of differentiation and discrimination—allows us to name, structure, and relate to the phenomenal world. The movement from undifferentiation, massa confussa, toward order takes place through the gradual refinement of reason by conscious integration and adopting one’s own individual moral stances that are, of course, a matter of gradual correction as one grows. By naming and symbolically coding instinctual contents, the shaman was able to establish a relationship to them and thereby gain a measure of containment and orientation. Tribal teaching thus functioned as a spiritual reference framework—a supporting staff for the dangerous journey into the depths—but also as a source of norms, religious ideas, and codes of conduct that gave structure, meaning, and ethical orientation to individual and communal life.
The expansion of consciousness occurred through the attribution of meaning—names, qualities, narratives. By grasping what was chaotic and seemingly random into symbolic form, the shaman performed an act of relation and containment. In doing so, a stable observing position emerged, along with boundaries that defined the intensity, quality, and significance of inner experience. This capacity to establish form and limit is the only way heroic consciousness can protect itself from disintegration.
In the context of a technoparty, the shamanic function is assumed not by an individual alone, but by the DJ and, more broadly, by the entire ritual container. The music itself becomes a projective object that helps define boundaries and serves as the primary referential image. It allows participants to descend only as far as their own instinctual capacity permits. As with rites of passage such as funerals or weddings, participants absorb a shift in psychological state. The raver often experiences this as a form of rebirth.
The descent into ᾍδης, in this sense, is a descent into the preconscious—a state that has long awaited articulation and relatable meaning. Preconscious unity, understood as the organized instinctual psyche, exerts a magnetic pull on consciousness. It is as though the psyche itself were invested in its own development, applying continuous, subtle pressure on ego boundaries so that they occasionally yield and admit new content. Wholeness, or harmony, is the implicit aim of every living system, arising from the tendency of all energetic systems toward equilibrium. Were psychological boundaries entirely rigid, adaptation—and thus growth—would be impossible.
No philosophy or doctrine imposes moral and social norms on the ritual participant. On the contrary, precisely because formal boundaries—other than implicit ones—do not exist in the ritual, techno allows adaptation to an external world that is constantly developing. The phenomenon of techno has the greatest resonance where unnatural barriers of mind exist, such as rigid clinging to so-called religious tradition what we called Dark Religion – and other traps of the mind. It is young people whom techno addresses most. It provides a desired compensation for a reality they often perceive as profane—boring or even hostile. The world of adults is, from their perspective, a loss of spirituality at the expense of material values. Their silence rebels against the fact that after some time they themselves will accept social norms and principles they reject. Almost. For young people techno is a way to deal with a negative father complex of the tradition that surrounds them. Contact with the archetypal mother relativizes the value of these rigid structures and makes it possible to establish a new, more adaptive psychological state. From this perspective techno liberates; it is a catalyst of change. It is probably no coincidence that it enjoys such high interest precisely in countries that are abandoning old paradigms and searching for a new spiritual identity that meets the demands of the society they participate in.
Technoculture cannot be blamed for tearing down old dogmas and changing society. Rather, it can be seen as an instinctive attempt to address natural social peripeteia, to contain and address the “spirit of the time.” Technoparty cannot be blamed for attracting incomparably more young people than churches; on the contrary, technoculture arises as a consequence of religious institutions’ inability to offer young people spiritual satisfaction appropriate to the century in which they live. And precisely in times of spiritual confusion, in times of pain arising from the split between faith and knowledge, no dogmatic—masculine—solution will bring an exit. Nature, the feminine itself, is a mediatrix, which through its instinctive mechanism establishes harmony and heals the narcissistic split.
Again it is the unconscious that urgently fascinates young people, especially in Western society characterized by excessive extroversion. This extroversion manifests as a general belief in spiritual satisfaction through the object, especially matter. It is no coincidence that the roots of the technoscene reach into the 1960s in the USA, into the psychedelic epoch that arose as a revolt against the pronounced individualism characteristic of American society at the time. Then too nature entered the one-sided process of apotheosis of matter to help collapse the rigid walls of the fixated ego. It seems the unconscious always finds a way to speak to humans.
We know that the unconscious stands in opposition to consciousness; yet the two mutually compensate one another and together form a dynamic whole that gives rise to a credible imago Dei. Jungian analysts are well aware that a thought or content repressed into the unconscious inevitably returns to the individual in a masked form, much like a boomerang—masked precisely because it is unconscious. In such cases, the person is less the owner of the content than its victim, compelled by forces that have not yet been consciously recognized or integrated.
It is not only orientation to the object but an overall spiritual one-sidedness that opposes instinct. The unconscious does not like this; it is unreflected and produces compensatory pressure—apparently archaic, animalistic, regressive. It fascinates and attracts. Yet regression is not only a descent to a previous level of psychic functioning, but an attempt to return to a previous level where harmony – an adaptation – once successfully reigned. In Jung’s words, regression resembles searching for an old key that could open new doors. Here lies its prospective character, the aim it pursues in the future. The Great Mother herself offers a magical compensatory influence. The dancer is absorbed by it and realizes her will.
And precisely in excessive surrender to the unconscious lies the danger of this ritual. The shadow side is the measure that is crossed. External rational control has vanished already with the loss of the philosophical idea on which the music was once built. The hippie movement still knew that it was about love, the idea of peace, and emancipation. Techno no longer needs an idea; as every raver claims, he feels it on the basis of experience. This is the supposed regression—toward undifferentiation and unity—of tribal organization. Regression must not be an end in itself, otherwise the Great Mother will exact a tax in the form of too strong and unfreeing an embrace. As emphasized above, contact with the unconscious was always only a means toward conscious life. Even if it may seem that nature’s goal is a return to paradise, the world we live in can approach paradise only through conscious effort—opus contra naturam—effort that maintains balance through rational knowledge.
Consciousness arose as the surface of unconscious primal matter through rational knowledge; when there is too much of it, it grows into rigidity; when its importance is neglected, it falls into passivity and succumbs to the unconscious. The human task is to live in balance. Buddha teaches the golden middle way: when a guitar string is tightened too much, it snaps; when it is too loose, it produces no tone.
The danger of technoculture can be seen in this one-sidedness. In the effort to flee the father, one can fall into the archetypal mother. Descent into Hades is not recommended for those who have forgotten their worldly calling, i.e., those without a firm psychological relationship to reality. Minařík similarly warns against purposeless experiments with mystical practices: no one should perform them without “firm morality and strong knowledge of teaching.” Only then can the techno ritual bring the desired freedom.
Whether we consider techno mere craziness or a sophisticated institute, one thing is certain: this old-new ritual has a place in today’s society; and it seems it will continue to have a place as long as nature insists on its reasons.
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Vlado Šolc is a Diplomate Jungian Analyst practicing in Wisconsin and Illinois. He serves as an analyst, consultant, educator, and co-director of the Jungian Psychotherapy and Jungian Studies Program at the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago. He is a member of the Slovak Society for Analytical Psychology (SSAP). Vlado lives in constant awe of the miracle of existence. His clinical focus includes psycho-spiritual crises such as loss of meaning and direction in life, the mind-body connection and psychosomatic concerns, as well as issues related to immigration and cultural adaptation. His research interests encompass narcissism, collective psychology, religious fundamentalism, illusion, and transformation. He has presented at conferences across North America, Asia, and Europe and is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and seven books in the field of depth psychology. Learn more at therapyvlado.com.
Vlado Šolc
