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Peter Goldberg is trying to find some sort of language for a level of experience which has for most of psychoanalytic history been under- or not-represented — of course, the non-representational, (or perhaps just presentational) level of human experience.  And since psychoanalysis has yet to discover or repurpose sufficient words to help us get at this aspect of psychical life, especially as it lives in the clinical situation, we may need to borrow from another language, a neighboring discipline, in order to more fully understand and inhabit our own project.  And this is where I think music comes in, the language music has to talk about itself, to richly describe exactly this mode of experience.

So we have found ourselves searching for language from musical discourse that can start to help us figure out what’s going on in this presentational domain of psychical life — while at the same time keeping an ear out for what psychoanalysis might be able to tell us about musical life.  Our approach, in other words, has been more or less to try to think very carefully about music — even psychoanalytically about music — and to see how that affects the way we practice and think about our clinical work. And so I want to share some of what we’ve come up with so far in terms of thinking musically about psychoanalysis, and psychoanalytically about music.

I’ll preface by saying that there is always a reluctance in talking about music at all, lest the words interfere with the potential of actually listening to music, as opposed to talking about it — its presentational potential.  We are always bearing in mind that the only words worth saying about music are ones that bring us deeper and more fully into the real thing.

Now we know there may be people in this room who speak music much better than we do, or who speak it not at all.  So we’re going to be judicious about the words we select, so that everyone’s on the same page. I’ll start by nominating two words. The first word is rhythm, which we can begin using in order to think about and feel the piece of music we heard at the beginning, which is a song called “Wave” by the artist Beck Hansen, better known as Beck. 

Of the many affecting elements of this stirring piece of music, I doubt anyone was particularly moved by the rhythmic component of that song. (It’s barely there, not easily perceived.) There is certainly no rhythm section, no percussive instruments articulating its steady pulse, not even a piano — only sonic pads of bowed strings playing in unison, cushioning layers of haunting vocal tracks.  But there is in fact a distinct rhythm there, a grouping of musical sounds that organizes experiential time through repetition, in this case the repetition of three chords. Here’s what those chords sound like on a piano, and then maybe you can hear them more clearly in Beck’s version:

If you’re still not hearing a rhythm here, you’re probably not alone. In fact, more than we can perceive the rhythm as such, we can infer it simply from the fact that the members of this string ensemble are playing in synchrony, which means they are dialed into a common source of orientation, an arranger, a conductor. They are playing, in other words, according to a musical schedule, a choreography of physical movement, without which none of the players would know how or when to play.

One reason we’ve chosen this piece, with its liminal rhythmicity, is because it shares that property with another creative form, the rhythm of which may be difficult to discern as a rhythm, at least at first, a rhythm we refer to in psychoanalysis as the frame.  While it bears little resemblance to anything we might immediately recognize as musical, the psychoanalytic frame may operate first and foremost as a rhythmic constant, a sequence of meetings of equal length at fixed intervals, which repeats. For many patients this aspect of the process is easily internalized, and quickly recedes to a background supportive function, like a commute or a bedtime; the rhythm is established, and the rest is history.  But for an increasing number of our patients (and these are the patients that Peter writes about), this rhythmic quality is not at all familiar, and the invitation to a reliable, consensual cadence of meetings may be the first order of business in establishing something like a common sense, a being-with one another.

Shared rhythms help to establish not only a musical feeling but a specific mode of perception, what the late French psychoanalyst and philosopher Nicholas Abraham once described in the following way:

Seated in the compartment of a train, I distractedly contemplate the receding landscape.  Without paying any particular attention to it, I feel myself surrounded by a whole world of presences: my fellow passengers, the windowpane, the rumbling of the wheels, the continually changing panorama.  But now here I am, for the past moment or so, nodding my head, tapping my foot, and my whole body is vibrating to the beat of a rhythm that seems unending. What has happened? A radical change of attitude must have taken place within me.  Just a minute ago, the monotonous rumbling of the wheels striking the joints of the rails was simply there, like my neighbors in the compartment or the landscape I was contemplating. But from the moment my body embraced the cadencing of the wheels, the surrounding objects appeared to lose their solidity and they took on the flavor of an almost dreamlike unreality. (21)

When the repetition of the train wheels becomes a vibrating rhythm in the body, everything changes.  There is a change of attitude, a feeling of musical surrender to the hypnotic flow of perception in time, a kind of sensory enchantment.  Perception itself is altered — “rhythmized,” to use Abraham’s term. To practice psychoanalytically is to induce (to use Peter’s term) exactly this kind of rhythmized perception, tuned to a very slow, almost glacial tempo, on the order of about an hour-long beat per day, a handful of beats per week — but a rhythm nonetheless.  And the quality of perception that emerges through this rhythmized attitude approaches what Abraham calls a “dreamlike unreality” — in other words, psychical reality, now jointly available to the two passengers on the psychoanalytic train, which rests upon the non-dream-like, actual repetition of the frame. There may be no more constant element of psychoanalytic practice across decades, theories, or geographical locations than this discipline of doing it rhythmically, and experiments with altering this element have largely fallen by the wayside, or forfeited their designation of being psychoanalytic.

It is worth noting that the looping chords of this song are not related harmonically, which is the other term I’d like to borrow from music to talk about psychoanalysis, in just a few moments.  The only thing binding them is their repetition, and the variety of perceptual experience it generates.  But before we turn our attention to harmony, [I want to highlight, as a kind of interlude, one other aspect of this song, which is the way it ends, a repeated melodic figure that sings a single word four times.  At first the harrowing lyric is sung with a breathy fragility — barely there, just like the rhythm. For the second pair, however, the painful word is sung with greater force and vocal support, like a Greek chorus enhancing the process of suffering through emphatic accompaniment.  As in that highly rhythmic, ancestral practice, the choral amplification of feeling is also one of the primary musical activities in psychoanalytic work, perhaps the next order of business once the rhythmicity of shared time has been established, turning isolated agony into communal suffering, into mourning. (We may want to return to the topic of what kind of powerful energy emerges from this form of profound accompaniment.) 

The word musicians use to talk about volume and force in this way is actually dynamics; and while there may in fact by a psycho-dynamic element to this intensification of sound, I believe we are primarily in the terrain of soma-dynamics, the “sound-shape” of the notes themselves, as Peter beautifully puts it — or perhaps better yet, of psyche-somatic dynamics, to invoke the term Winnicott used to describe perhaps nothing so much as the musical coordination of the two, psyche and soma, weaving the two into one.

So I want to play the end of “Wave” for us now, followed by] another Beck song which may feel, by contrast, like it comes from a different world altogether (even though it is from the same album):

Just going to pause there for a moment. (Again there’s the hesitation whether to say anything at all.) I’ll say that among many reasons we chose this second song is the purity with which it expresses a sense of a home key, a “tonic,” which is the defining feature of what is referred to in music as tonal harmony. Tonal harmony has a tonic, a sense of a key to which some pitches belong, or sound right, as opposed to others, which sound weird, or dissonant.  (Most pitches fall somewhere on what’s called a “chromatic” spectrum between sameness and difference.)

This song is written in — any guesses? — it’s in C major, the homiest of home keys:

And every moment of the song (up to a certain, very interesting point) is comprised entirely of those pitches.  The verse:

And here’s the chorus:

Now the word harmony comes from the Greek harmonia, which can be translated as “attunement,” another word not uncommon in our own literature.  But while those discussions often emphasize the matching of language and feeling between two participants, a musical understanding of harmony expands our attention to the environment, the whole world, in which attunement (or, in German, Stimmung) can be felt — not between two people so much as among two or more players as members of a wider world.  (Two people, like two instruments, can be tuned to one another yet totally outside the concert pitch of the wider ensemble in which they must operate.) 

If this sounds like a radical revision of psychoanalytic emphasis, it is worth noting that the German word that Freud used to describe the kind of attention required of the analyst, usually translated as “even-hovering” or “free-floating,” was gleichschwebende, lit. “even-weavened,” which is the very word that is used in German to describe a well-tuned musical instrument.  (Also bear in mind Freud’s recommendation for achieving the kind of attention required of the patient, for free associating, like Abraham’s for rhythmizing perception, is to pretend that you’re on a train.) The analyst in this sense acts as a conduit, a conductor, between the idiosyncratic music of each individual, which may be barely perceptible at first, and the musical community of human being, “keeping time with everyone.”

I want to end this part of our presentation with a note about the potential of this rhythmized, harmonized experience — which we believe may be described as a kind of eros, or erotic energy — by noting the emergence of something new, something dissonant — indeed, from a certain psychoanalytic perspective, something sexual, something profoundly ‘other’ — in the bridge section of the song. A chord, the root of which does not belong to the home world, and in fact sounds quite foreign when you play it in isolation against the diatonic scale of the home key:

But through the dream-work of the musical process, the new note is woven into the harmonic world of the song, renewing a sense of fascination, of emotional poignancy, and of inspired possibility, worlded entirely by the music itself: