Psychoanalysis and musicality

Abstract

In this chapter, I seek to address the question of why music and musicality originally played such a negligible part in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, and how and why that is starting to change. Some key IJP papers are examined, exploring Freud’s paradoxical claims to musical deafness, and his influence on subsequent theoreticians. It is suggested that the advent of opening out and even reversing previous theories of countertransference set the stage for musicality within the clinical encounter to be recognized, considered, and investigated, especially in the context of Winnicott’s theory of transitional space, Bion’s theories of reverie and alpha function, and Stern’s theory of attunement. Birksted-Breen’s notion of “reverberation time” is considered as an instance of a contemporary deepening and broadening out of psychoanalytic theory to include in a central position the intuitive and non-verbal dimension of musicality. The chapter ends with a clinical example and my attempt to give definitions to the different usages of the term “musical” in a psychoanalytic context.