The Sound of memory: Psychoanalytic Perspectives
on Music and Mental Life

by Alexander Stein, Ph.D.

Abstract

This work advances an interdisciplinary approach toward understanding the relationships and intersections between music and mentation. Of primary focus is the dialectical transmission, registration, and interpretation of meaning from sound; and the communication of affect and ideation in the psychoanalytic dialogue.

Following introductory commentary which gives form and context to several key issues to be developed later on, the point of main departure is a concise overview of the history and development of psychoanalytic views of music. This is followed by a delineation of overlaps and distinctions in forms of listening, the cardinal sensory-modal engagement with both music and the psychoanalytic interchange. A brief consideration of musical and psychoanalytic conceptualizations of time forms a bridge to subsequent chapters exploring the profound formative influences of the earliest sound environment in psychological development, the intrapsychic functions of music in the mourning process, and as a special response to psychic trauma.

These sections are connected by relevant discussions involving clinical material. I consider patients' communications-especially abstract or ineffable nonlinguistic and nonverbal gestures-as a form of music being verbalized in a language of sounds-termed the verbalization of music. Taken in the aggregate, these endorse a consilient view of music and mentation, clarifying through a psycho-musical lens how analysts hear and interpret meaning from each individual's unique sonic rendering of interiority-the sound of memory.