The Sound of the Unconscious

Psychoanalysis as Music

Ludovica Grassi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367645526
• eBook ISBN: 9781000391619
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this book, Ludovica Grassi explores the importance of music in psychoanalysis, arguing that music is a basic working tool for psyche, as words are composed of sound, rhythm and intonation more than lexical meaning.

Starting from ethnomusicological, evolutionary, neurodevelopmental, psychological and psychoanalytical perspectives, the book explores music's symbolic status, structure and way of operating compared to unconscious psychic functioning. Extraordinary similarities are revealed, especially in mechanisms such as repetition, imitation, variation (transformation), intimacy and the work of mourning, of the negative and of nostalgia. Moreover, silence and absence are essential components of music as well as of psychic and symbolic functioning. Time and temporality are specifically investigated in the book as key elements both in music and in symbolization and subjectivation processes. The role of the word's phonic kernel and of the voice as fundamental links to emotions, the body, the sexual and the infantile has promising implications for psychoanalytic work. All these elements find an articulation in the natural as well as complex activity of listening, which conveys a tri-dimensional and polyphonic dimension of the world, so important both in music and in psychoanalysis.

Illuminating the link between music and analysis in new and contemporary ways, The Sound of the Unconscious explores the resulting advances in theory and clinical practice and will be of great interest to practicing and training psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Chapter 1

Sound and rhythm in psychic life and psychoanalytic work^*

* A version of this chapter was previously published as ‘The dimension of sound and rhythm in psychic structuring and analytic work’ in The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual, (2014) 1914: 63–82.

We do not know of any human society that lacks music, we do not know of a single society that does not express itself through dance.

Simha Arom (2000)

Music and its history make up a whole with human civilization and the process of hominization since the origins of mankind. In ancient Greek culture, music always came along and was intertwined with the development of poetry, which it probably preceded. Homer was represented as a blind bard who accompanied himself on the cithara: blindness referred to his being intent on his internal world from where his verses drew on the deepest and innermost motions. Greek mousiké encompassed melody, dance and poetry, whose common denominator is rhythm. Greeks held music in high regard, as is testified by the countless myths that attribute it with immense powers, mainly over the spirit and the will: Orpheus fascinated and bewitched wild animals, plants and even rocks with his singing; Amphion built the walls of Thebes with the sound of music; Arion was saved from death by dolphins, enchanted by his singing (Mila, 1963).

The supremacy of sight

And yet both humanistic and scientific knowledge has been constructed around the visual element as the prevalent or exclusive instrument of knowledge (from scientific observation to philosophical or metaphysical representation), depriving the acoustic element of commensurate appreciation. In the history of knowledge, Plato first and then Aristotle (De anima or On the Soul) had arranged the instruments of perception according to a hierarchical and evaluative system that was to influence philosophical reflection for centuries to come: classical culture thus developed as a culture of the icon, which confers on the image the value of ontological proof through which knowledge (de-monstration) is possible. Not only epistemologically but also at the level of brain functioning, sight and hearing influence each other, with a tendency of the first to prevail over the second: according to some psychological research, when sight and hearing conflict, our brain chooses sight.

Despite these epistemological and ontological biases having led to a relative atrophying of the aural/oral dimension, in favour of a strong link of the ‘scopic’ regime to the subject’s cognitive and rational sphere (Midolo, 2008), sound, an intrusive and pervasive phenomenon, is an indispensable communicative medium and relational resource within an individual’s experience and social life. Along these lines, G. Simmel, M. Weber and T. W. Adorno introduced a perspective according to which music is the interpretive key and articulatory means of social and identification processes in every specific cultural reality.

According to Jacques Attali (1977, p. 3): ‘For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.’ Writing, too, may be considered as an affirmation of the visual over the oral, leading to the view that the oral tradition is an archaic remnant.¹ Sight operates along straight lines, therefore according to a linear (two-dimensional) and sequential mode, which favours the logics of exclusion: in fact, the rational mind, abstract thought and detached logic that lead to looking at reality through objective eyes are associated with it. Hearing, on the contrary, is multidirectional and three-dimensional, and also more rooted in corporeality (through its association with vibrations), in physicalness, and, likewise, in the inner world: if the gaze is directed to observing the external dimension that is foreign to the subject, hearing is the organ of reflection, of introjection, of the possibility for listening to one’s own daimon, as well as having great evocative and generative power per se.

With its multiple declinations (voices, noises, rhythms and harmonies), sound saturates the subject’s daily experience: hearing is both a sensorial experience open to indiscriminate and painfully passive reception and an indispensable medium for producing meaning. Jacques Lacan, too, emphasized the phonetic value of the signifier, in that it is an acoustic image that transmits the concept.

Only recently, a new science has emerged to bridge this gap, acoustemology (Feld, 1990, 2003), which, defining itself through a word derived from ‘acoustics’ and ‘epistemology’, aims to analyse reality by using sound and listening, as well as their reflective feedback, as the preferred mode for knowing about and living in the world. Starting from the idea of an anthropology of sound meant to decolonize ethnomusicology’s disciplinary paradigms, Feld came up with a definition of acoustemology as the science that uses the different sound ways of being in the world and of knowing it: these range beyond music and the spoken word to include unconventional tools of knowledge that come from an ensemble of broader sound environments, of which music is one of many expressions. For example, studying the soundscapes of the populations of the rainforests of New Guinea, which live in close contact with birds and their song, or those of the city populations of the Western world, Feld constructed a sort of acoustic ecology and anthropology that allows a significant in-depth analysis of our knowledge about worlds that are so very different. Acoustemology basically relies on a relational understanding of the human and non-human world, that is, an existential relationality. Participation and reflection make acoustemology a kind of processual and experiential, subject–subject knowledge.

The origins of music

The new field of evolutionary musicology has shed light on the inextricable interweaving between the evolution of music and the evolution of man’s social structures, group functions and cultural expressions. Various evolutionary theories have attempted to explain how selective pressures determined the origins of man’s capacity to produce and enjoy music: as an instrument for courting and selecting one’s sexual companion; as a function capable of furthering coordination, cohesion and cooperation in the social group; as a means for improving parent–child communication with a resulting increase in the survival of newborns. In this way music flanks language in the study of man’s evolution from his animal forefathers.

One of the most promising aspects of this research focuses on the interface between music and language and on the evolutionary roots of this relationship: intonational phonology, which analyses the melodic element of language,² and metrical phonology, which centres on the rhythmic forms of discourse,³ are two examples of this link, alongside the studies on the relationship between verbal language and gesture, which we may compare to the relationship between music and dance. According to the semiologist Jean Molino (2000), music and language share numerous elements, among which melody, rhythm, affective semantics and also syntax. A clear example of something that was originally both music and language is poetry, which was always sung, while music at the beginning was exclusively vocal. Rhythm and imitation would give rise to that step in the evolutionary passage⁴ towards the capacity of representation, which is mimetic culture: activities of collective imitation accompanied by vocalizations and organized by rhythm would develop into the first forms of narrative, from which rites and myths subsequently emerged.

According to the Swedish neuroscientist Steven Brown (2000), music and language testify to the evolution of an identical precursor, which he calls musilanguage. This was an emotional–referential communicative system that used vocal sounds in their dual quality of emotional and referential meaning. The specific characteristics subsequently developed by music would make it the chosen instrument for furthering identity, coordination, cohesion and the sharing of emotions on a group level. In fact, differently from language, which necessarily proceeds by alternation, music fosters concurrence, and consequently interpersonal harmonization, through its vertical dimension, built up by harmony (the simultaneous production of different sounds) and by rhythm. This is why mechanisms of individual selection alone would not be enough to explain its origins, in which processes of group selection, or of cultural groups, perhaps played their part.

Rhythm, the temporal core of music, is shared by man and animals insofar as it is about the capacity to move rhythmically, whereas the skill that enables movements to be synchronized to an external rhythm is specifically human (with rare and limited exceptions) and distinct from the capacity to produce and perceive the tonal elements of music. This ability, which comes under the generalized phenomenon in nature of entrainment, depends on the experience of a regular rhythm that allows us to predict the next beat so that we can synchronize our behaviour to the external pulse. Its selective advantage, by coordinating sound production, has been hypothesized in the possibility that the intensity and therefore the sound diffusion produced by calls having varying objectives (sexual, feeding, danger and so on) would be greatly increased. From this point of view, the acquisition of musical and dancing skills could constitute in man an indispensable precursor to the birth of a referential language (Merker, 2000).

However, other interpretations in an evolutionary key of the development of man’s musical skills are possible, starting from the condition of neoteny (or altriciality, as scholars of evolution call it) where the young human is born quite helpless and totally dependent on the adult. At this level, music would play a crucial role in activating specific affiliative mechanisms, not only through maternal vocalizations but also through the whole range of temporally structured rhythmic communicative interactions (movements, glances, facial expressions, vocalizations, contact…), which coordinate the emotions of the dyad and encourage the relationship. Given the capacity of the newborn to trans-modally process sensory information,⁵ the channel of communication (acoustic, visual, tactile, kinaesthetic) used by the mother and child would be less important than its temporal structure, the rhythm. Not because mother and infant must necessarily synchronize their rhythms, but so that they can follow the variations introduced by the other and may both satisfy the anticipation and open themselves up to something new (Dissanayake, 2000).

Research in the neurophysiological field has shown the fundamental role that music plays not only in cognitive development but also, and above all, in the relational capacities of human beings. Walter Freeman (2000), a Californian neurobiologist, has come to the conclusion that trust, the basic foundation for every one of man’s social activities, originates from the experience of music and from the deep interpersonal bonds that it alone can create. Neurophysiological research has shown that knowledge is the result of autonomous neuronal activities that replace the schemes of activity produced by external stimuli. Thus, there is no direct transfer of knowledge from the outside, but a highly individual internal process of constructing knowledge, starting from the meaning that the external stimuli hold for each single individual. This results in what Freeman calls epistemological solipsism. Starting out from this unequivocal fact, how can the mind enter into communication with another to organize coherent and efficient collective behaviour, and how can a relationship of trust be established between minds that makes the appearance and use of language possible?

Freeman postulates that music is first of all a biological construction technique of the social bond, which would operate by means of neurohumoral mechanisms similar to those activated in the parental bond and which, by determining the dissolution of previous learning and the loosening of the relative neuronal synaptic links, open up opportunities for new acquisitions and behaviours based on understanding and sharing. By involving the whole body through the somato-sensory and motor systems of both the person producing it and the person participating in it through listening, dancing or other rhythmical movements, music lays the basis for coordination, cooperation and communication within groups. Opening up to what is new and at the same time to what is expected, music allows a sense of trust and reliability to develop that makes communication, sharing and life possible⁶ (similarly to the Winnicottian concepts of ‘going on being’ and ‘transitionality’).

Music and psychoanalysis

At the beginning, psychoanalysis paid little attention to music – the art of time par excellence – perhaps because it was difficult to articulate with an unconscious whose basic quality is timelessness;⁷ and yet the talking cure originated as a treatment method based on the word, which is a specific type of sound production. Freud (1914) justified his own incapacity to appreciate music as having little physiological predisposition for it and, above all, because of the difficulty in using a rational or analytic approach to it. Barale and Minazzi (2008) and Barale (2008) compare Freud’s drawing back from the unknown and the undifferentiated in the a-semantical language of music to Breuer’s recoiling from the irruption of the transference. In a letter to Fliess (31 August 1898, in Masson, 1985), written while he was working on The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud expressed his admiration for the work by Theodor Lipps Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (The Basic Facts of Psychic Life; 1885–1905), in which he found many connections with the discoveries he was making at that moment. However, he said he had stopped reading at the chapter ‘The Relationships Between Sounds’, justifying himself with ‘the atrophy of my acoustic sensibilities’ (Masson, 1985, p. 325). According to Barale and Minazzi, Freud stopped because the questions posed by Lipps ‘would have shifted the focus of research on the “basic facts of psychic life” from the representational unconscious (and from the vicissitudes of infantile sexuality) to a substantially pre-representational dimension, which was excessively “dissonant” with Freud’s expectations and requirements at this time’ (Barale and Minazzi, 2008, p. 945). The founding act of psychoanalysis required the field to be defined: focused on the representational unconscious and on infantile sexuality, it had to exclude the language of music since it was a-semantic and so not suitable for psychoanalytic interpretation. In his turn, Lipps had explored in depth the bases of individual empathy, identifying them in internal imitation, a concept recently revived by neuroscientists with the term intentional consonance, a phenomenon closely interwoven with rhythm and with what has been called embodied simulation (Gallese, 2007; 2009a, b).

More recently, increasing interest in the non-verbal and early aspects of interpersonal relationships has meant that music has made its appearance as the object of psychoanalytic reflection. However, the arduous task of getting into the specific language of musical expression remains, which often leads to merely focusing attention on musicians’ biographies or on the analysis of characters or plots in opera librettos, or else to restrictively using musical metaphors or analogies to describe aspects of the psychoanalytic situation (from Edoardo Weiss’s resonance identification, to Bion’s being in unison, up to Salomonsson’s playing chamber music in the analyst’s con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Sound and rhythm in psychic life and psychoanalytic work
• 2 Listening to the link: Music and primal relationships
• 3 On imitation
• 4 The music is not in the notes… Intimacy and the negative in music
• 5 Beyond space, time
• 6 Musical dialogues: The baby in a world of sound and rhythm
• 7 The musical unconscious in the family
• 8 Silence and absence: Sound and music during the coronavirus pandemic
• Afterword
• References
• Index