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Welcome everyone.
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Today, we're gonna start off with a Psychology of Songs podcast,
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and we're gonna be looking at it psychologically. And today's
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first song is Alex Warren's breakout hit Ordinary Song, that
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has reached millions with its portrait of a love so
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intense it turns the every day into something sacred. In Ordinary,
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warren sings of a love so profound that ordinary moments
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become holy. Lines like You're my holy water and I'm
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actual alter use religious imagery to describe something intensely personal.
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He does not just love his partner, he worships her.
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She becomes a source of salvation, something larger than a person.
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This is not very unusual love songs, but Warren's version.
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Feels particularly raw.
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It captures something universal, the moment when another person stops
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being just another face and becomes the center of your
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entire emotional world.
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That ship from ordinary to sacred is.
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Exactly what psychology has a lot to say about. Song
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is a nearly textbook illustration of what we call idealization
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as a psychological process, and psychology is a theory called
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object relations, and one of the concepts is idealization. It
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happens when we project our deepest longings onto another person.
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They become perfect.
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The loved one stops being seen as a flawed, complex
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human being. It becomes what some would say an idealized object,
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a figure who feels capable of providing everything we have
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ever needed. Perfect safety, unconditional love, total atonement. They're a
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perfect person. The roots of this process or often an
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early attachment, when early caregivers were inconsistent or emotionally unavailable,
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The developing mind compensates by constructing an idealized image of
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a perfect other, someone who will eventually arrive and give
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us what we did not reliably get.
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In romantic love.
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We sometimes temporarily transfer that internal image onto our partner.
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They become the carrier of something that was never really
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about them. This is somewhat equivalent to the concept of
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cloud nine. Warren captures this fusion beautifully. The ordinary becomes extraordinary,
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not because his partner is literally extraordinary, but because she
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has become a vessel for his deepest longing.
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And that is what idealization does. It's not really about
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the other.
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Person, it's what about the other person has come to
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represent in the internal world of the original. In this case,
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Alex Warren Winnicott would recognize this one.
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Of the founders.
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Others would recognize that the idealized self object, the specifically
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religious language in the song, is worth slowing down on
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because it is doing very precise psychological work. Holy water
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and alter angels. These are not casual metaphors. This kind
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of elevation represents what we call displacement. The singer is
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taking emotional material, the raw need for connection, for safety,
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from meaning, and lifting it into a spiritual plane. Because
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human love alone may feel too exposed to precarious, it's
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too mortal to hold all that weight. By making his
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partner sacred, he does two things simultaneously. He protects the
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relationship from the full vulnerability of real intimacy by wrapping
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it in something untouchable, and he creates a sense of
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transcendent meaning, a feeling that this love is bigger than
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ordinary life, that it matters cosmically. This is why religious
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imagery recurs so persistently in love poetry, and love songs
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across every.
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Culture and era.
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The emotional register of love and the emotional register of
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religious devotion genuinely overlap. Both involve surrender, awe and the
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experience of something larger than the self. The psychology is
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doing work in both cases. But here's what idealization always
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eventually runs into reality. The idealized object cannot sustain this,
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and definitely the partner is a human being. They are
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not perfect being. They're an inconsistent, moody, tire limited. They
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have needs of their own that have nothing to do
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with being on ney One's holy water. When the real
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person begins to show through the projected image, sometimes the
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disillusionment can be severe, sometimes disproportioned to whatever actually happened.
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This is one of the most recognizable patterns and clinical work.
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Clients who describe early relationships in nearly worshipful terms, the
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intensity of it, the feeling of finally having found the one,
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often follow that with an equally intense amount account of collapse,
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not because the partner changed, but because the projection became impossible.
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To maintain.
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Healthy love requires what object relation theories call integration, the
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capacity to hold both the idealized and the disappointing aspects
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of a person in the same internal image, to love
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someone who's genuinely good and also genuinely flawed without needing
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them to be either a god or a villain. That
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tolerance of ambiguity is a achievement, and it is one
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that idealization actively works against. Alex Warren's Ordinary Song is
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more than a love song. It is a map of
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the the internal world and the grip of idealization, a
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portrait of what feels like when another person becomes a
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carrier of your deepest longing for something sacred, whole, imperfect
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understanding that psychology does not diminish the beauty of the song.
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It's a wonderful song.
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It makes the beauty make sense, and of course it
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resonates with you and millions.
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Of people because millions of people have.
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Been there in that place where someone ordinary suddenly holds everything. Well,
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hope you enjoy the Psychology of songs podcasts. We're gonna
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go checking out the top songs for the last several
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decades and see what the psychology is behind them and
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then relate it to your life.
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That's it for now,