Freud’s Lost Chord: Integrating Music, Myth, and Time in Depth Psychology

Contents

Preface

Chapter One Making Space for Music and Myth

- Relativising Neurosis
- Rycroft’s Challenge
- Two trains of thought
- Horizon and Space of the Subject
- Why “Space?”
- Myth and Model
- Crossroads and Knife-Edge
- Mercuriality and a Space for Myth

Chapter Two From Freud’s Ambivalence to the Coherence of Instinct

- Freud’s Ambivalence About Art and Artist
- Absolutes and Movement Toward Integration
- Freud’s Transitional Concepts
- Revisions of Dreamwork
- Libido: Promethean Fire, Psychosexual Energy, Mythological Currency
- Revisioning the Structural Theory

Chapter Three Beyond Repression, Into Eros

- The Myth of a Science

- Primary and Secondary Processes and Creativity
- Sublimation, in Theory
- Other Means than Repression
- The Problem of Primal and Primary
- Deferred Revision and the Manifestations of Time
- From Time Deferred, to the Plastic Time of Music
- Structure: Latent, Implicit, or Fluid
- Eros and the Thread of Wish
- Negation and Negative Capability
- Into the Ocean
- Freud and Romain Rolland
- Negotiating Oceanic Feeling: Knowledge versus “Fit”
- Phantasy, the Numinous, and the Infantile: A Convergence
- The Postmodern, the Mercurial, and Resonance across the Gap
- Language Limits and Bion’s Caesura

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Chapter Four Resonant Space for Dreaming x

- Introduction and Review

- Preparing Dreamlife for Music
- Kleinian Space, Image, and Phantasy
- Boundary, Potential Space, and Caesura
- Temporality
- Primal Form, the Uterine Soundscape, and Container/Contained
- The Archaic and the Not-Yet-Formulated
- Complex Space: Bion and Jung
- Resolution of Imbalance and Conflict
- Revising Scientific Myth and Metaphor in Preparation for Music

Chapter Five Musical Metapsychology

- Introduction
- Approaching a Musical Horizon
- Clearing Space
- Psychoanalytic Aesthetics as Transition into Music
- Music, Resonance, and Poly-Valent Semantics
- Eros across Boundaries
- Presentational Immediacy and the Isomorphism of Music and Affect
- The Space-Time of Music
- Unsaturated Meaning, Emerging in Time
- Improvisation, Composition, and Reconciliation
- Evoking the Lost Object: Music, Magic, Transience, and Permanence
- What to Say about the Ineffable
- Jazz and the Evolution from Saturation to Openness
- Further Thoughts: Polyphony, Dreamwork, and Presentational Immediacy
- Polyphony as Creative Splitting
- Mythic, Archetypal, Universal
- Music and the Symbolic
- A Few Words on Idiom

Chapter Six The Musical and the Clinical

- The Bridge from Music to Therapy

- Resonant Minding and Fields of Influence in Clinical Experience
- Resonant Minding and Time
- Rhythm and Resonant Minding in Clinical Interaction
- A Case Example

Afterword, and Reprise

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Preface
_________________________________________________________
I.
Psychoanalysis, as a whole, has paid little attention to music, and almost none to jazz. This fact
has wide-ranging implications for theory and practice. Voice, vibes, tone, rhythm, harmony,
nuance, resonance, the developing and receptive mind in utero, and their expression in the extra-
verbal details of human relation – these amount to a significant roster of human elements
scarcely acknowledged on account of this particular auditory neglect.

To begin with a digression of sorts, this week, two nice studies1 came across my desk,
demonstrating that infants in the first week of life cry in their parents’ accent. What a delightful
expansion of our view of infantile receptivity and communication! It is easy to surmise that the
accent of the newborn wail must come from the digestion and implementation of speech
dynamics heard while in the womb, unless the moment of birth inaugurates a fabulous capacity
for mimicry. But, with irony to be explored in a later chapter, Freud long ago told us that “there
is much more continuity between intrauterine life and earliest infancy than the impressive
caesura of birth would allow us to believe” (Freud, SE 20, 1926). Of all the seismic evens in the
history of psychology, this titillating research may penetrate to the heart of one particular fault

1
Newborns' Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language (Birgit Mampe, Angela D. Friederici, Anne
Christophe, Kathleen Wermke), Current Biology - 15 December 2009 (Vol. 19, Issue 23, pp. 1994-1997); and Cross,
I. Communicative Development: Neonate Crying Reflects Patterns of Native-Language Speech. Current Biology -
15 December 2009 (Vol. 19, Issue 23, pp.1078-1079)

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line, and aid considerably in revising our mythologies, beginning with what happens before the
beginning. Fault lines and magma pools are responsible for all sorts of endings and beginnings.

Freud was probably being neither modest nor ironic when he referred to psychoanalysis as a
mythology – “our mythology” (Freud, 1933, SE22, p.95). Nor when he called his key terms
provisional, and admitted that there are things of which we cannot be certain. Freud was not
simply admitting universal epistemological and scientific limits. He was voicing a truth about the
psychoanalytic endeavor, which is both a technique for eliciting and enlivening our patients’
stor(ies) of self, and is itself an example of the mythological enterprise by which we narrate
insights about human life. It is a complicated truth of psychoanalysis that it has variously been
meant and utilized to help individuals tell and understand their story, to tell the story of humanity
from its internal, geopolitical, familial, religious, medical, and aesthetic vectors. What sort of
myth insinuates itself into every possible sphere - every possible sphere, that is, but for a very
few, one of the most obvious of which ought to be music?.

Myth per se is neither true nor false. It is a vehicle for delivering all sorts of thoughts from their
experiential home in the subject – whether musician, dreamer, patient, or scientist - into the
world of dialogue, culture, self-reflection. Our ability to verify and falsify, critique and
comment, likewise help to polish our consensual effort at insight, and approximate something
like truth. They just as easily abrade away the essential features of insight so that we are left with
the familiar, the benign, the expected, the conformity that reassures us of the intactness of our
principles, or the dust that testifies that the enemy and upstart have been vanquished. But as
indispensable as our intellectual rigor may be, it too must be bracketed and questioned as to
whether it has remained true to our core of experience, its contour, flavor, and subjective depth.
Or, to its most enduring quality, that of flow, process, and transformation. Surely the neurotic
model of the dreamwork cannot account for the largest part of that transformational foundation,
and its applicability to mental life as a whole.

The debate may meander on as to whether Freud was truly reductive, or as to the scientific status
of psychoanalysis in any of its forms. This present book, which examines psychoanalytic
struggles with creative, musical, and experiential modes of life, is an effort to sidestep this debate

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in a manner consistent with Freud’s own persistent return to that which frustrated and tantalized
him. It is pays attention, moreover, to the ways in which depth psychology has evolved from
founding insights that were simultaneously most fecund and conflictual. But the reader, as much
as the writer, may be tempted to read from one pole or another, to view and argue points from a
place of orthodoxy or deconstruction.

The psychoanalytic corollary is the debate between those who treat Freud as a prophet/scientist,
with the Freudian scriptures as gospels and revealed truths, and those who sadly dismiss him as a
fraud, purveying atavistic pseudo-science fiction. A solution is suggested by those - such as
Hans Loewald, whose work will be discussed further along - who see them as the historical
foundation of an evolving, pluralistic endeavor at telling the story of human psyche. Applying, to
theory-building, the metaphors of the container, the caesura, of the resonant soundspace, etc, we
can extend this insight to say that mythic constructs can serve as the elastic chambers in which
ideas have the opportunity to evolve; music, and the notion of fluid and mercurial symbolic
forms, as the model of how meaning is conveyed from this fons et origo2 throughout the
dimensions of the psychic and cultural landscape. We might imagine a psychology of theory-
building (a topic for another book); this would necessitate such concepts of translation of the
subjective – and discourse about it - across transitional boundaries, in order that new ideas can
grow to express a widening gyre of reality without so far transcending their human origins that
they become irrelevant, can no longer be felt, or gestate further symbolic life, viable and fertile
in its own right. The transitional object of Winnicott, the transcendent function of Jung, and the
conception of Bion are a sampling of the available constructs concerning the bridging of abysses
and ruptures in experience by means of symbolization. Music perhaps has escaped the discourse
because it does not sit still, does not behave appropriately; but it is for this precise reason that it
illuminates so much of what depth psychology has tried and failed to say about the place of
symbol and subjectivity in the nature of the mind. To achieve this is to have profound impact on
how people treat each other and their shared context, with obvious impact on the therapy
process. And, of all the arts, about which Freud was openly and notoriously conflicted, it was the
one about which he claimed to be “always vexed…because here I lack the most elementary

2
Source and origin (Freud, 1930a, SE 21; p.68).

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knowledge, thanks to the atrophy of my acoustic sensibilities” (Letter to Fliess, August 31, 1898;
cited in Barale & Minazzi, 2008)

But we are also clinicians, rooted in Freud, and our business revolves around the treatment of
suffering. The sidestepping dance around the need to make hero or fraud of Freud, or of Jung,
from this or that side of the abyss, necessitates the sort of effort I am trying to make: to build
bridges of theory allowing access to music, metaphor, or pathology and treatment, without
needing to abandon one tongue for another, more specialized and conventional one. This
approach is meant to be integrative, rather than to rest upon mere ambivalence and eclecticism
in our thinking and our work. As therapists, we know that suffering is real, development and
authenticity difficulty, and that dialogue and insight help immeasurably. Clinical theory is a
collection of mythologies about how this happens; but the varying texts are dreamed differently
here and there, in each iteration, over and over, some elements persisting, some evolving, some
fading from consciousness. Practice varies from analyst to text and from analyst to analyst, the
link never completely severed to either a core of tenets, nor a core of irresolvable conflict ever
completely transcended.

But our present dilemma is about attunement and integration, not correctness or truth: What
does it say about the whole endeavor that there is little or no place for music in the theory, in the
whole canon, except as a further derivative of an already marginal approach to art and creativity?
The musical dimension of human life crosses all boundaries and permeates history, but
psychoanalysis barely speaks of it and makes at best a narrow sort of sense when it does: A
missing or atrophied mythology. The dimensions of art and mysticism are fertile, burgeoning,
ubiquitous; but depending on which Freudian text one reads, they are either virtual forms of
pathology, something to be sought and envied, or, as Freud himself writes in a qualified way, for
which psychoanalysis itself is an inappropriate tool except in qualified, as-if ways. But the
healing of this absence is evident, if unintentional, in the writing of several authors, in ways this
book will explore.

To place Freud in temporal and academic context, among forebears and peers, is to strip away
the articles of faith and anti-faith. He was our myth-maker, neither prophet nor charlatan, and his

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gift was not immutable truth, but a huge endowment of fertile mythology for development, for
psychological jazz and new dreams about self and world. But his mythology, though world-
changing and huge, was incomplete, and to the very end reflected his bafflement about whole
swathes of human life – befitting not a god nor even a prophet, but a man confounded by
aspiration to science and envy of artists and seers, a man who repeatedly stepped blindly into
mythic pools in his peregrinations through ever deeper psychic chambers. These are the very
chambers Jung strode through enthusiastically with rucksack, notebook, and carbide helmet
lamp. Freud’s relationship with him, and subsequently other divers and spelunkers, was hardly
accidental.
__________________________________________________________________

II.
This project really began twenty-two years ago as a bachelor’s thesis, in which I first tried to
flesh out an idea about the role of attentive listening in understanding the qualities of experience,
and the construction of meaning, ethics, and identity. By 1983, I had begun to piece together this
particular approach to psychology, born from my adolescent fascination with improvised music,
and my inaugural exposure to Freud, Jung, Buddhism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber. I
became committed to fleshing out some ideas about different kinds and degrees of attention,
different ways of experiencing, knowing, and valuing. I attempted to analyze how our levels of
attention determine whether and to what degree life and the warp we apply to it are available to
the observing subject, simultaneously living and examining life.

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When I wrote that thesis, my daughter had not yet been born. I thought I had already witnessed
something of the responsiveness of children to music, and that experientially and theoretically I
was on good footing. The day she was born, I made up a little song we sing to her every day at
some point, especially during tough transitions and at bedtime; it usually works, and since her
third month, she has usually vocalized along with it, or shimmied and pulsed. I scat-sang with
her, and she would gleefully trade gibberish till one of us couldn’t stand it anymore. At 16
months, she laughed, singing along in parts, interjecting “ee-I-ee-I-ooooh”. She danced to the
ice-cream truck music. She hums to herself as she falls asleep. When she saw a bus, she
demanded we sing – and now sings herself “The wheels on the bus go round and round”. If she
is despondent, that song will end the tears. Other songs have joined the repertory.

This week, at 23 months, she speaks clear, mostly grammatical sentences; yet, she still enjoys
standing erect and addressing us in elaborate sing-song gibberish, almost but not quite sounding
like language not-quite heard - “baby Dutch”, we sometimes call it - or scat singing, complete
with gestures, facial expressions, and laughter. She did this naturally, but we sang, chanted, and
babbled with her, following the advice of our parenting how-to books. And because it was
delightful. It is the musical speech-song of an intentional, passionate little person, that acts as a
substrate or carrier wave for the clear and passionate recounting of the elements of the day she
found most captivating. As the days pass, there are more clear statements, less jargon. The song,
the sound, the ritual, and the relationship, are all inseparable, and yet change every few weeks, a
new skin of music to fit the growth in her psychic life. Her grammatical speech maintains the
cadences and dynamics of her earlier speech-song. In her speech, phrase rhythms and pitches
emerged intact, holding the vocal tapestry together as her ability to integrate semantics and
grammar. Eudora Welty helps here – for every feeling, there is a gesture; and vocalization is
sonic gesture. Feelings given their gestures - gestures of hand, body, and voice – prefiguring and
coalescing into formal speech, as part of a multi-modal repertoire that envelops the pulsing wave
of care.

Then there is the dyad, and forms of intimate contact. Once, when Alyssa had been home a few
days, I was lying, exhausted and numb, on the sofa. My wife, Dina, brought our sleepy baby

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downstairs and placed her on my bare chest. I immediately had a palpable sense of euphoria.
This was not simply comfort, a sweet sensation, happiness at the fact of our new family. Perhaps
the aforementioned were enhanced by a potent burst of oxytocin, some animal, visceral bonding
mechanism, or some such. But the contact of this barely-five-pound creature, her pulse and
breath, her quiet vibrance, induced one of the most powerful sensations and changes of
consciousness I have ever experienced. Everything else fell away. I was quite high and quite
awake. It was visceral, ecstatic, and felt correct. Quite ordinary, really – parent and child. At that
moment and thereafter, I knew more deeply how important to any serious effort at psychology
the experience of contact must be, what our template is for the holding that effectuates
interpretation. And the point was driven home yet again that there must be a considerable cost to
our understanding of the depths of psychological life to adhere too rigidly, in thought and deed,
to the more ascetic principles of psychoanalysis. It must be, as Jung has cautioned against, a one-
sided attitude that demands a compensation. Contact makes music, and contact with things
beyond words can be felt as mystical. My simple reverie with our baby was simply a reminder
of the non-verbal range of experience spanning the simplest breath and the ecstasies and
cataclysms of the natural world, and the most basic relationship. There are contacts, resonant
zones of interaction, for which most analytic approaches are simply unprepared, and which
involve no breach of boundaries not already combining and redrawing by their very nature.

Perhaps this does nothing more than show my confirmation bias – finding in my parental
euphoria the confirmation of beliefs I labored greatly to shape into theory. But I’ll trust my
observations, and those of our extended family, a little more than that. Welty meant that
something within us moves, and the movement extends outward, through the skin, vocal cords,
and limbs. And for the moment, we are reminded of what Winnicott meant when he wrote that
there is no such thing as a baby – or, no such thing as a living monopole, an organism not
pulsing in dynamic connection to the field it inhabits. Perhaps, we can make the case that all the
sophistications of language are essentially highly specialized songs, carved of the same sonic

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gesture, expressing the pulsions 3 of the body. We are far beyond, or beneath, Freud’s version of
the pleasure principle.
___________________________________________________

III.

Music is central to human life – radically and deeply, the expression of nature’s sonic dimension
through the human instrument. At its best, depth psychology reaches to encompass the full
living sensitivity of the psyche, the resonant membrane of that instrument, its reed, string, taut
skin. This life and sensitivity, if we can bear to acknowledge it, include the whole world of
which the individual is an experiencing, dreaming, interacting subject. This world includes that
dimension called mystical – but what’s in a name? I write as an amazed atheist, with Buddhistic
leanings, comfortable for the time being that the Big Experiences I’ve had owe little to any story
of a deity transcendent to the natural world that has Big Experiences of itself through us,
expresses itself in awe and dancing, euphoriant babies. But this is a book about making room in
depth psychology, theory and practice, for music as a dimension of mental life, a way of thinking
and being; also of the mystical, that bête noir of rationalists, as a name for the ways our
consciousness can relax and flow past and around our own skin, mingling with the bigger world.
This is not an exercise in cataloging and classification of its types and mechanisms. While we
help neurotic patients, among others, there is time to acknowledge those sorts of experiences
Freud could neither digest nor ignore. In the process, we may find that language is durable
enough to survive and even be nourished in the process of being radically displaced, its pre-
eminence suspended for the purpose of finding the coherence, presence, and validity of the other
modes of experience.

Music and mysticism are siblings in several ways; dismissed as contentless fluff, constructed of
arbitrary, pleasurable connections, mere deluded states and their soundtracks, mass participation
and ego-dissolving ritual; or the revered artworks of deceased composers. What credibility can
we achieve, what solidity of purpose and scholarship can we establish by means of a perspective
that says, as did Heraclitus, Whitehead, and the Sutras, “all is process, flux, and flow”?. Flow of
ego which diffuses and condenses, flow of tones and rhythms, flowing boundaries confusing self

3
Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) and Kristeva (1980), discussed in the chapter on revisioning the structural theory,
with respect to a more nuanced understanding of the drive-concept.

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and other, infant and mother? Or that quantum bit of consternation, over a century old but still
eluding conventional thinking, which says all our solid matter, flesh and proton included, is truly
no more than standing waves, persistent and slowly dissipating interference patterns in the
dynamic vacuum of space? These are attempts to represent the facts, about which we either go
new-age gaga, shake our heads, turn up our noses, or turn away, indifferent. But those attitudes
are themselves the stuff of psychology, arising out of a natural world that gives forth embodied
minds with attitudes about their nature and the nature they inhabit. Have we ever really
swallowed and digested our insights, or our need to move on to new ones? Flux is hardly alien to
psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis is about transformation, and for this reason is already
halfway towards this goal. But our field has a hard time accepting that it, just maybe, has never
really properly taken notice of the full repertoire of its topic, psychological life – has, in fact,
tended to shy away from transformations it cannot make into symptoms or twists of language.

For our purposes, the subject of lifelong consternation, dismissive reduction, indifference,
contradiction, and ambivalence by Freud – this psychology seen by way of music, and
secondarily mysticism, is our starting point. The psychic life in which music and mystical
experience – of experiential, non-verbal life rather than discursive or narrative life - is not
equivalent to the physical world of objects, landscapes, stars, quantum entanglements, pizza, etc,
but these worlds inhabit one another. We run risks: of being terribly negligent in our scientific
parsing, sorting, classifying and negating the relationships between the physical world and the
psychic; or recklessly overeager in our “mystical”, “new age” efforts to see and celebrate
meaningful connections everywhere we imagine them, so that the sublime subtleties of the
marriage of psyche and mind are washed over with wishes. But this does not help us fill a
particular vacuum, the deafening silence that is the paucity of music in depth psychology. Or the
vacuum which, but for a wakefulness in certain corners of our field, smacks of a benumbed
distrust of feelings of awe, ecstasy, delight, dissolution, groove, communion – a radical flaw. It is
so hard to be a scientist, clinician, or serious academic while approaching these on any more than
a formal, scholarly level. But they are simply part of our endowment, albeit a part that, as for
Freud, is always at risk to shrivel to a shrunken residue, tickling consciousness at special
moments (Freud, 1930; 66-67), only rarely, and unbidden. It is hard consider these questions, yet
also to be an analyst, when the foundational scriptures have so little to say about this dimension
of life that does not find it wed to degradation, to entropy, to suffering and self-deception, to an

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analytic analogue of sin. Yet, as a non-polemical piece, driven, if I may say so myself, by both
compassion for those like myself who’ve stayed within this edifice in order to do the work, and
with abiding curiosity for what else might be heard and interpreted within these walls, this book
may be thought of as an exploration of psychoanalysis as both an example of, and a defense
against, the vicissitudes of flux. And the glories of it. As embodied being attempting to navigate
oceans and rivers of subjectivity, do we build boats, submersibles, scuba gear, or lighthouses,
docks…or dams? What, precisely, is the wish encoded in a psychoanalytic “science”? To be a
hard science in an assertively soft, fluid medium, but one which nonetheless births the most
enduring human artifacts? Such as songs that pass away after a few minutes, but remain in our
minds, and in the mind of history, for lifetimes and epochs. What a conundrum!

The solution, though, has always been at hand. It will take little more than a willingness to do
something already being done, but in perhaps a more heretical way. This approach will consist
in finding the convergences between schools of thought, and studying them for what may already
have been written and digested, or consigned to the margins and remote library stacks, about the
sensitivities we might call musical, experiential, or mystical. It also means studying, as analysts,
analysands, scholars, and creative people, our deaf-spots, to find what has been lurking all the
while behind our ear. It demands that we look freshly at Freud’s own writing, at Jung’s, and
Bion’s, Loewald’s, Winnicott’s, Reik’s, Lacan’s, et al, for clues, convergences, errors,
omissions, and stretch ourselves in ways sometimes called interdisciplinary. To read and study as
though for the first time to find something we didn’t know was missing, or was all that
important. To bring, as Bronowski invited his students to do, a “ragamuffin, barefoot
irreverence” to our studies; not to worship what is known, but to question it and see what else
can, and perhaps, ought to be said. Something entirely consistent with the psychoanalytic
mission, but for a stern orthodoxy of attitude that occasionally insists otherwise; an orthodoxy
expressed by Bion in his comments at Tavistock, when he criticized the “occupational neurosis”
of analysts who over-focus on mental mistakes and hindrances at the expense of expanding the
possibilities of life available to us in our current circumstances.

In this single book, some approaches must be given priority over others. Perhaps in another
volume, there will be time to give due attention to approaches such as Attachment Theory and
Gestalt psychology, which have much to say about the centrality of the dyad and contact in the

12
mentalization (Fonagy, 2005) of emotion. I have not yet been able to integrate them into this
work. Our discussion of Jung really ought to open into a discussion of Archetypal Psychology,
which gives essential and subversive priority to the image, and which, like its cousin, eco-
psychology, finds soul, or the ground of psychological life, in the resonant affinities of person
and place, flesh and earth. But this is the next level. This book could not exist without the
perspectives offered by Archetypal Psychology, but a thorough comparative analysis of the post-
Freudian and post-Jungian approaches to creativity, music and phenomenology will have to
come at another time. For the time being, I direct the reader to the works of James Hillman and
Paul Kugler, to whom I am indebted – particularly Kugler’s (1992) singular analysis of the sonic
and linguistic dimensions of archetypal image. Elements of other paradigms will appear here and
there in this book, but this should not make them appear marginal. Even so, with few exceptions,
they too have little to say about music or sound as a medium and mode of thinking, a dimension
of mental life, rather than as ritual, as cultural activity, salve for the nerves, or as sensual
entertainment.

This is the first installment of a project to find a resonant space in the psychological depths,
where we can in turn find a living spontaneity, and a creative principle, lurking in the underbrush
and flowering outward from the thickets of Freud’s own work. I go as far as possible to establish
the theoretical matrix on which meaningful developments have emerged and may still be brought
forth from this soil, and from that of Jung, already fertile and productive by the time he met
Freud. Michael Eigen’s The Psychoanalytic Mystic provided my initial inspiration and ongoing
education in the ecstatic and the terrible amidst the ordinary and the clinical, and how
psychoanalysis may address them. In spite of the peculiar absence of music in all psychoanalytic
directions, there is a matrix of theory, extending like a rhizome throughout the depth
psychologies, reaching down into well-springs of space, complexity, openness, and attunement,
linking those few places where we can safely explore the place of the numinous and the aesthetic
in the growth, therapy, and ordinary activity of the mind.

But, as I will show, the horizons of psychoanalytic psychology are still dominated by tenets
belonging to neurosis and reductivism, which cast a stultifying shadow over issues having
nothing to do with these clinical exigencies. In one of the most renowned, sensitive and astute
early works on openness and the analytic ear, Listening with the Third Ear (Reik, 1948),

13
Theodore Reik manages to bring our attention to the meaning, never accidental, of the music
than runs beneath and occasionally into consciousness. However, ironically, while this work
garnered considerable resistance from fellow psychoanalysts for its revisions of Freudian
concepts, it nonetheless opens with an obeisance to Freud, treating the specific song or theme as
an indicator of an unconscious preoccupation, and attributing to Freud’s discoveries about the
workings of the mind the same fundamental status as the laws of chemistry and physics. This is
an absurd standard, and illustrates how much resistance the depth-psychologist faces, when,
fearing his heresies, he tries to describe the surging psychological life to be found within the
cracks in the edifice, and in the strata beneath the foundations. In 2010, articles on music and
psychoanalysis are still uncommon. Still more rare are those that make an obvious link: free
association and evenly hovering attention with improvisation and spontaneous expressions of
innate musicality. Most works on music and psychoanalysis are still about compositions
performed by people other than the composer, and about music as cultural product, rather than
the music in and of our thinking, feeling, being.

But, first things first: music is conspicuously absent from Freud's work, its presence is limited in
post-Freudian study. Charles Rycroft makes a single challenging comment, which anchors the
project. To paraphrase as a question: How might psychoanalysis have developed if its founders
had thought in auditory rather than linguistic and visual terms? Rycroft offers a radical critique
of Freudian dualisms, such as the pleasure and reality principles, and primary and secondary
process, and explores the problems of borrowing from other sciences to construct psychological
metaphors. His critique condenses many of the ideas available in other revisions by thinkers such
as Bion and Loewald. These developments converge with key insights of Jung, which have been,
until recently, rejected and treated with derision by psychoanalysts, but which consistently show
up in the margins of Freud's own writings from all phrases of his career. I address how Freud's
unresponsiveness to music illuminates his commonly acknowledged struggles with art, religion,
myth, affect, the mother-infant dyad, Eros, Thanatos, and the archaic psyche. Treated in this
way, these themes indicate Freud's basic ambivalence, and his awareness of the explanatory
limits of what he called "our mythology." In particular, Freud's inarticulateness with respect to
music invites a thorough re-assessment of the strengths and limits of a psychoanalysis organized
around language and its relation to (visual) image and to libido.

14
I will demonstrate how Freud’s dream-theory, offered as a model for all mental life, and built on
neurosis, repression, and wish-fulfillment, is a drastically limited cosmogony. The alternative
lines of inquiry carried forward by Bion, Winnicott, Loewald, and Rycroft both preserve core
depth-psychology tenets and fruitfully develop areas of Freud's own impasse. They flesh out the
pantheon and the endless story of, and about, the psyche, in ways that help us feel what was once
meant by psyche: the breath that animates the body. I explore how the phenomena which neither
Freud nor his theory could adequately contain within the mythic structure of neurosis were
developed into extensions of psychoanalysis; were already intact and undergoing development in
the work of Jung; were explored in both passionate and polemical ways by Freud, who sought
out mystics such as Jung and Rolland, and theologians such as Pfister; and how they can be both
edified and revised through further revisionings of the psychoanalytic myth. In doing so, I
explore – in answer to Rycroft – the principles of theme, mode, resonance, and the interplay of
structure and spontaneity, finding them exemplified in modern jazz, represented by landmark
works by John Coltrane and Miles Davis.

Lastly, I will attempt to do justice to a few contemporary efforts at bringing out music of analysis
as it is practiced. In particular, the theoretical and clinical observations of Steven Knoblauch
show just how fertile this field is, how an analyst who hears and feels music in the interplay of
the moment can deepen his therapeutic skill. This task, overall, may demand a little more
openness to the jazz of our profession than some are comfortable with. But I hope it will be clear
by the end that this is something we all do, and strive to do better, whether we realize it or not.
We do not have to be Max Roach to learn how to tap our feet and accentuate the bass line, to
accompany and not only analyze our patients, and our own neglected aspects.

15
Chapter 1.

Making Space for Music and Myth

Creativity and art, mysticism and religion, history and culture, affect and experience – these
presented Freud with a dense core of issues. Their impact on him ranged from bêtes noir, to
magma flow beneath the shifting, unstable terrain, to mere irritants. Ironically, in resisting
reduction to the terms of Freud’s neurosis theory, they have been crucial to both the initial and
subsequent developments of depth psychology. Freud returned to each again and again, in
different and sometimes wildly contradictory, ambivalent ways. His contemporaries and heirs –
from Jung and Rank to Klein, Bion, and Kohut, et al, seized on pieces of these unwieldy themes.
In so doing, they founded the schools of thought, not to mention the legendary splits, feuds,
personality cults, and competing dogmas, forming the many-headed hydra – or symphony -
known collectively as psychodynamic, as depth psychology, or, generically, psychoanalytic
psychology.

Charles Rycroft, who moved inquisitively in the “fenceless field” (Fordham, date) comprising
Freud, Jung, and Klein, offered a quietly subversive suggestion aimed right at the core of “our
mythology”, as Freud called the psychoanalytic endeavor:
“One cannot help regretting that none of the pioneers of the unconscious thought naturally in
auditory terms. If they had, we would perhaps have a psychology in which thoughts are
conceived of as themes, which can occur in different modes and keys, which can vary in their
audibility, which can be harmonious or discordant, and which can undergo development and
variation (Rycroft, 1985, p.115).

This seemingly benign insight has radical implications. If the mind and subjectivity, understood
psychoanalytically, can be conceived in terms derived from music, can be said to exist in the
dimensions described by these terms, then our clinical and theoretical frames of reference
undergo a dramatic, decentering shift. It would no longer be a novelty or a marginal exercise in

16
cultural, applied psychoanalysis to speak in terms of a depth psychology of music. To proceed
this way does not merely suggest that music is another frame of reference to enrich our ideas and
sensitivities, though it certainly is this. It is to suggest, with some audacity, that the reality of the
mind in all its permutations is more than, perhaps at its base something very much “other” than,
the elaborate dance of compromise formations and linguistic terraforming at the heart of
Freudian culture. At the same time, to proceed this way does not negate any of our fundamental
premises; language, spoken and written, is still our main symbolic medium. But a musical depth
psychology would flow through and around the life of repression and wish-fulfillment, animating
and giving life to our words. As a theoretical endeavor, it promises to envelope and lend its
resonance to some of the most developments in and around psychoanalysis.

This theme of describing the “other”, that which escapes basic premises, is deeply rooted in
Freud’s own efforts. It is evident both in his cyclic return to thematic roads winding through
recalcitrant terrain; his canny efforts to reconcile his principles with the occult, the mystical, the
archetypal and evolutionary; and his own admission of personal limitations and bafflement. Not
the least of the latter is his admission, in The Moses of Michelangelo, of complete
unresponsiveness to music, illustrating his need to isolate all that would not be conquered by
intellectual analysis.

Post-Freudian depth psychology has continued developing in loops and arcs around the areas I
will describe. However, it has seldom ever touched the actual issue of the musical and the
resonant as they are expressed in the ordinary, continuous dreamwork and dream-life (Meltzer
1985) comprising psychological life. In particular, a two-volume collection of erudite and
entirely relevant contemporary essays devoted to explorations “in” music and psychoanalysis, is
nevertheless devoted almost entirely to issues surrounding classical music, to works composed
by composers mostly dead. Music as a form of and dimension of thinking, or as a ritual devoted
to the presentation of that spontaneous thinking, for the experience of an audience, such as that
offered in jazz and many ethnic musics built around rigorous and flexible structures for
improvisation, is largely absent – but for a mention of one dismissive comment by Kohut about
jazz (Kohut, in Feder, et al, 1990).

17
Relativising Neurosis
The model of neurosis cannot account for the myriad and rich ways of being human in the world
and among others. There is a thread running between the relation of mother to child, lover to
lover, to the relation of man to mountain and river, and society to landscape, which also can be
traced through to the intrapsychic expression of each in dream. Even if the larger end of that
scale serves no practical purpose for a given psychologist’s daily tasks, that thread must be
acknowledged as openly as the thread of wish, of Eros, which wove around and through Freud’s
own speculations. Jung’s supposed obtuseness and essentialism was exemplified by his writing
on the archetype and its numinous experiential quality; but whether the archetypes exist and
function as he posited them, it seems completely reasonable to consider the ways in which the
formal qualities of the natural world, of the matter and energy which infuse instinct, not only
inform the ways in which mind and minds come to be, but also the ways in which we experience
the world and interpret our experience.

Neurosis theory faced with all manner of creativity, and intimate or ecstatic experience, is like a
theory of the immune system generalized to explain metabolism, gestation, cytogenesis – or life
itself. Psyche is not simply another form of tissue, but to the extent that the metaphor holds up, it
simply makes no sense that a single function, a single vector, can be the signature of the whole.
That Freudian theory went as far as it did in the effort to create an encompassing theory of
psychological life is testament to his genius. The genius of colleagues, critics, and heirs in turn
has guided the mercurial, even amoeboid reshaping of psychoanalysis, paradoxically keeping it
psychoanalytic by keeping it responsive to unspoken and unspeakable experience, to
developments of culture, and to new paradigms. Freud’s thread of wish, taken up by others, can
best be traced through the peregrinations of that thread of wish through dirt, cosmos, sex, song,
poetry, analysis, etc, in the themes I explore in this book.

When we feel connected beyond our ego, when we catch a vibe, it is because we feel our place in
the natural world, and react as responsive natural objects possessed of the power of
apprehension, of subjectivity. At such times, our thoughts and apprehensions echo our origins in
matter and energy, in dirt and plant-life and the mid-brain, which sometimes bubble up into the

18
higher stories only foreshadowed in our chthonic, primordial origins. Our ways of structuring
and “feeling” our inner terrain, our intrapsychic society and geography, may be mostly built of
the inherited predispositions of 21st century human animals, but we are not really all that
alienated from the “nature” that is in our past but abundantly present in the matter and genetics
we still carry with us. The experiential quality of our connection to this “below” and “above” of
apprehension, the surround which envelopes our familiar mental states, is what Freud
occasionally called the uncanny, and what Jung called the numinous. For Jung, it is the
experiential component of those human structures of apprehension and apperception on which
culture and psyche rest, rather than the reverse. Without some sense of the physicality, the
wholeness as well as the agony of that natural matrix, white whale to the Victorian scientist, we
have the reductio ad absurdum of the reductive, neurotic axis of Freudian theory, seduced by the
conflictual wish into seeing little else in human motivation. And without that Freudian axis, we
lose the tragic component of the psyche in thrall to its own drives, self-deceptions, and conceits,
always on the brink of castration by that nature, inner and outer, which will not yield, nor satisfy.

We have made, over the course of over a century, some sort of progress in understanding the
inner relational landscape. We have begun to come to terms with the bigger space, psychic and
cosmological, in which the ego, relativised, becomes extremely relative, tiny in the vastness of
the endless chamber of experience in which we gradually attain consciousness, and gigantic as a
window opening onto the universe. But, as respectable theoreticians, we are still somewhat
locked in – Freud’s Eros was only one of a few speculative gestures into the pool of mythic
forms of natural principles, expressed as psychological tendencies – what Jung called archetypes
and their archetypal images. Freud’s work on sublimation, climbing an Escher staircase toward a
genuine theory of psychological growth, banged repeatedly against the ceiling of repression, only
to be abandoned, never finding its place above the goal of ordinary misery. In adopting this
“realistic” goal of psychoanalysis proffered by Freud, we may well be accepting, instead of
reality, the admitted limitations of a genius founder who could not feel any pleasure that would
not yield to the intellect. Ordinary misery is abundant, but so are all manner of ecstasies and
transcendences, not to mention a life and soul that amount to something genuine, in which
dissonances achieve some kind of harmony. A better goal is receptivity and capacity to contain
and be contained by both, in a wider spectrum, without being swept away by either skepticism or

19
mystical grandiosity. This low ceiling on the various ecstasies (that which puts us outside
ourselves, or outside our rational wits) are simply unnecessary and unrealistic, considering a
world of experience irreducible to sheer wish-fulfillment. The fact that post-Freudian revisions
continue to be so fruitful, while remaining resolutely psychodynamic, attests to the possibility
that ordinary misery was less a goal than a way-station, a sober place in which to take stock and
accountability, and remember to think clearly.

Sound and music offer both specific physical, creative media, and a model that forces us to look
and listen, in ways both familiar and esoteric, at our interpenetrating relationship in the physical
world – our place within it, its place within us. As an alternate model of relation, or expansion of
familiar models, it promises to energize our ways to think about object relations, about what
happens at the boundaries and thresholds between images, aspects and divisions of the self.
Rycroft (1985) speaks against careless borrowing of other scientific paradigms to speak of what
happens psychologically. In a related vein, R.M. Young writes of how Darwin’s writings on
natural selection
are absolutely full of voluntaristic, anthropomorphic, dirty words as far as the official rules
of science are concerned. (Young, 1985)

Young goes on to write that

One of the cardinal rules of modern science is to avoid explaining things in terms which
draw on human intentions and to eschew evaluative language. The abandonment of
explanation in terms which draw on analogies to human intentions and which explain in
terms of values and purposes (teleology) is supposed to set modern science off against earlier
forms of explanation of the phenomena of the natural world. (ibid.)

While I agree with the caution, it is a qualified agreement; psychology addresses a branch of the
natural world – the psyche – which resists treatment as a mere system of objects, or a
concatenation of forces. Whether it is reducible to physics without sacrificing too much of its
nature, thereby satisfying Occam, is highly questionable. But we can use our metaphors
constructively – when I write of the acoustics, the chemistry, the fluid dynamics, the complex
dynamics, of the psyche, I am selecting illustrative terms from the master, “hard” sciences, terms
that have become part of our repertoire due to their ubiquity and the authority of these sciences.
But these are not merely metaphors, either. The psyche, seen as an order of natural organization,
is no more independent of physics than is chemistry or dance, for that matter, though it is not

20
encompassed by that discipline, and its dynamics are enigmatic in a way that invites analogies
drawn between psychology and the “new” physics. But we the figurative can be accurate as well;
the putative boundary between a problematic wish and consciousness is indeed a boundary, with
a degree of permeability and resistance; the impact at this “boundary” sends “shockwaves” and
feedback loops through the medium of the psyche, with subjective and measurable effects
described, in our current clinical psychology paradigm, as “symptoms”. In capitalizing on our
available vocabulary, I am doing what we all do, what Freud did in positioning psychoanalysis as
a medical profession, yet one borrowing liberally and transparently from his available physics
and chemistry, as well as archaeology and the mythologies of east and west. What I, following
Bion, refer to as “myth” is precisely the necessity of packaging human truths in constructs of
cognition and experience – of subjectivity – both because the mythemes of even the hardest
science are there as leitmotifs, whether acknowledged or not, and because ours is a science of
human bundles of mass and energy who, at their root and core, dream and ap-perceive.

In asserting this privilege, I come straight through Jung. The details of his psychology of the
complex and the archetype, as well as in his bold effort to identify efforts at psychology within
mythic and occult systems of older cultures, are good hermeneutic devices at the very least, alive
if disguised within our contemporary ways of thinking and being. Moreover, regardless of
Jung’s own limitations with respect to music and the auditory sphere, he went a long way toward
establishing a contemporary foundation for the responsiveness and interpenetration of ego, self,
and environment, comprising ecopsychology. This approach does no less than offer a paradigm
allowing – perhaps requiring – that we see psychological life as embodied and embedded in a
world of varying interdependent and interpenetrating domains. Keeping this in mind will help the
reader, perhaps already cringing at the forced bonhomie of strange conceptual neighbors, accept
how the sonic, the resonant, and the musical are a very basic order of connection. This
connection is nothing more esoteric than the vibrations of the stuff around and within us,
undercutting and flowing through and around the twisty obscurities of linguistics, and the
obscuring shadows they cast over psychological life.

21
Rycroft’s Challenge
If ambivalent about creativity and mysticism, Freud was all but mute about music – it
represented something that slips through the nets of language and clinical theory leaving no
artifact to analyze. As dense as the knots are in his thinking about creativity and mysticism,
music represented a theoretical dead zone, an aporia or blocked passage, as well as a
demonstration of how his theories of dreamwork and repression hinge excessively on the limited
capacity of language to represent psychic processes. Music illuminates the very principles of
simultaneous flow and structural organization missing or under-represented in most areas of
depth psychology. On close reading, the canon of post-Freudian thought, including areas of
convergence with Jung, can be seen to present a gradual articulation of the experiential,
presentational, and creative dimensions of psychic life that were repressed and isolated in
Freud’s efforts.

Despite scant reference to music, the work of a representative group of later Freudian thinkers
begins to articulate the presence of musical values very near the heart of psychoanalysis. On
these grounds, certain musical and experiential amendments can be made to existing
psychoanalytic models. Again, I offer Charles Rycroft’s challenging statement as linchpin: “One
cannot help regretting that none of the pioneers of the unconscious thought naturally in auditory
terms. If they had, we would perhaps have a psychology in which thoughts are conceived of as
themes, which can occur in different modes and keys, which can vary in their audibility, which
can be harmonious or discordant, and which can undergo development and variation (Rycroft,
1985, p.115).

Rycroft’s critique of Freud’s work brings to the foreground, among other things, the spontaneous
presentation of imagination across sensory modalities. Along with his critique of the dualities of
primary and secondary processes and the pleasure and reality principles, he suggests that much
of what functions as psychoanalytic dogma is actually the artifact of unwitting errors in
translation: from unconscious to conscious, and sleeping to waking; from iconic to linguistic
modes; and from experiential to discursive analysis about selected products of experience. Like
Jung, and like Bion and other post-Freudians before him, Rycroft maintains that the dream and
the dreamwork are central metaphors for integrated psychic life; yet he attends, as do the others,

22
to the “innocent” (Rycroft, 1979) or spontaneous level at which biological process registers
subjectively as integrated image. Only thereafter do we come to the vicissitudes of psychic life,
the contortions and losses in the medium of subjectivity that sculpt differentiated and dynamic
representations, as well as the symptomatology that Freud grounds in dreamwork. In the face of
creativity, and of the organizational dynamics at its foundation, we see that a theory of
dreamwork based on repression and neurosis cannot represent the foundational level of the
psyche.

Two Trains of Thought

Freud’s work carries a secondary line of thought, a shadow theme or counterpoint to its main line
of repression. This counterpoint is concerned with transcendent and spontaneous aspects of
creativity. It leads through several areas of compatibility and reconciliation with Jung. It also
invites one to analyze a wealth of meaning in Freud’s writing whose outlines have been the
subject of explorations by Rycroft, Loewald, and the Kleinians. A review of seemingly disparate
approaches to psychoanalysis demonstrates that there has always been considerable concern with
a cluster of topics difficult to contain within the orthodoxy. The interpersonal field, dyadic
phenomena, transference/countertransference, holding, the complexity of the self, persistence
and transformation of the personality, intergenerational personality patterns, the nature of image
and symbol are among these. A chief aspect of these is the psychic expression of coherence and
continuity, the fact that life and psyche both cohere and flow, exceed our means of codification –
especially that concerned with pathology and treatment. Something essential escapes the effort to
treat it scientifically, medically, or linguistically. But the paradox of flow and endurance, of
identity and change, are only paradoxical depending on what we ask of our languages. Language
per se is only one level of meaningful form, ideally suited to reflection upon language but
relatively limited when it comes to refracting the light of the intelligence and fecundity at work
in other modes of experience.

I suggest a re-evaluation of the dynamic psyche along these lines in order to circumvent the
circular error of defining it in terms which serve the classification and treatment of its
pathologies. Freud’s emphasis on the vicissitudes of instinct and their relationship to the

23
distortions of all manifest forms is itself symptomatic of his alienation from the experiential
states and forms exceeding his hermeneutic reach. His less mainstream speculations may be seen
as a return of and to the repressed, toward these same states and forms, in sometimes halting but
none the less persistent efforts at reconciliation with a missing principle that haunted him. A
careful reading of these lines of thought, and what came after, spells out a return to the
continuous and dynamically integrated zone between the body, culture, and the dream-life.

Terminology will undergo some strain. I will be referring to drives, instincts, and the flow of
living energy somewhat interchangeably, depending upon context. These metaphorical
constructs all point to inseparable functions of mental life: the instincts are presented in the
psyche as images which reflect the complex conditions of bodily experience at that moment. I
utilize the term “phantasy,” to denote the inherent configuration of instinct in image, with roots
for such usage in Freud, Jung, and Klein. Phantasy denotes the continuity of imaginal process
underlying images per se; specific, discrete images, reflecting particular moments, are to be seen
as snapshots or selective products of attention, and therefore as secondary to the flow of instinct
and the structural function of phantasy. Dream-life and “dreamwork,” if not qualified as Freud’s
formal dreamwork, indicates the whole of the conscious and unconscious continuity, in which
imaginal activity fluctuates, quiets, slows, crests, detours, etc., in concert with the tides of the
body, but which never either ceases or atomizes into static parts except as casualties of a failure
of integration. Images are cross-modal, meaning that sound and word have equal claim to
“image” alongside the visual image.

Throughout, I attempt a position of equanimity. I focus on the effort across the psychoanalytic
canon to articulate principles of flow, integration, and the foundation of psychic forms in the
nature of the body. I reject claims of hegemony by any school of thought, so that we can
maintain focus upon the collective creative effort itself and the territory of overlap and
complementarity. I will operate on the assumption that we occupy a level playing field defined
by many decades of effort at telling the mind’s story – and over millennia, if one counts the
mythological history comprising much of our analytic vocabulary.

24
This treatment of the limits of language is not a dismissal of psychoanalysis or of meaning.
Rather, it supports a call to revise the very metaphors and models on which psychoanalysis is
constructed. For example, the 19th century scientific paradigms available to Freud are too limited
to do justice to key dimensions of subjectivity. In the following century, Einstein and Bohr
revolutionized the world-mythology available to science, Joyce and Picasso exploded literature
and visual art, and jazz artists such as Parker, Davis and Coltrane opened up music in ways that
would have been inconceivable in the 19th century. The quantum revolution, relativity,
emergence & complexity in science, and Stravinsky, early jazz, and other revolutionary
developments were, in fact available during Freud’s fertile later period; yet, he took little notice
of them, and made little use of them, or of their value for psychology. 4

Other sensory modalities and media of expression besides language show us the fertility of
imagining psyche found in art, dream, and spirituality. Rather than building another theory that
sees repressed wish and its substitutions everywhere it looks, taking them to be fundamental, we
instead aim at construing the innocent5, constructive horizon at which instinct differentiates into
thought, by means of organizational and neurological dynamics unknown to Freud. Bion shows
us that we dream not simply to remain asleep by temporarily granting wishes and discharging
tensions, but so that we may become conscious in the first place (Bion, 1967), to construct both
the apparatus and territory of conscious and unconscious. In dream-life6 we construct both the
symbols and the symbolic capacity of differentiated psychological life. Their elements - myth,
sense, and passion – are the building blocks of psychoanalysis (Bion, 1963), the elements of the
psychoanalytic approach. In this way, repression, substitution, and wish-fulfillment are clearly
displaced from center stage, relativised without being banished. They are part of the
psychoanalytic repertoire, but no longer its mainstays. And among these elements we will find
the sex and aggression of Freud and Klein, as well as the transitional and transcendent processes
of Winnicott, Bion, and Jung, by which these elements are contained and transformed into stable
and elastic mental structures. Also there we will come upon the dialectical organizational

4
By comparison, Jung explicitly connected the movement of feeling in music to unconscious process and the
transformative aspects of motigs of the collective unconscious (Jung, 1973, p.542 in Skar, 2002, p.632); he also
grappled at length with the link between insights of newer physics and the properties of the psyche and myth.
5
Per Rycroft, not fundamentally neurotic or substitutive; expression of the present conditions of our being in image
6
Donald Meltzer, in his 1983 book by this name, traces the evolution of the significance of dreaming and dream-life
as psychoanalysis’ central metaphor, from Freud through Bion’s expansions of it.

25
dynamics of Loewald, in which the primal is disseminated and developed into the differentiated
patterns of the maturing psyche. We can see the bridge formed by this confluence of
psychoanalytic thought between its problematic, turbulent theoretical origins and the diversity
and complementarity of its contemporary harvest. This history itself can be seen as a
demonstration of the creative task its theories struggle to articulate. The example of the
principles of music, and Rycroft’s challenge to go beyond the verbal and visual to the auditory,
will gradually appear as a thread woven throughout this diverse fabric.

Horizon and Space of the Subject

Dream and art are dual pillars in the psychoanalytic edifice. Dreamwork is Freud’s chief model
of the psyche, and it also remains at the center of contemporary psychoanalytic theory; art was a
pivot point for Freud’s own ambivalence, yielding extremes of characterization and
compensatory efforts at reconciliation. Freud made the neurotic dreamwork the model for all
mental life. Yet he tried to reframe neurosis so that sublimation would represent a goal beyond it,
a creative principle that might restore the lost divine essence of Eros to a repressed sexuality
(1910b, p.97). This proves to be an essential ground for revisionist thinking in this paper.
Through sublimation, the wish could pass through the zone of neurotic interferences into
something clear, beneficial, and redemptive. At the same time, sublimation as both mythic
construct and wish-fulfillment reached beyond the theory of neurosis in a personal way, offering
Freud access to zones of art and spirit from which he felt excluded. That access was vital to him:
Freud returned repeatedly and forcefully to the topics of art and culture, ostensibly to explore
how art and artists could be seen from within the neurotic model, with artist and artifact
analogous to patient and symptom. Yet he gave clear indications that much of art’s scope
exceeded his grasp and would require other models to do it justice.

Dream and art together also serve to establish complementary avenues to the emergence,
composition, and utilization of imaginal structures capable of becoming coherent experiential
holisms. They are also vehicles of for the emergence and transformation of the capacity for
further integrated experiences. Process and product become inseparable in creativity; that which
holds together, and holds us together, is a vehicle for further dreaming. This is a central,

26
revolutionary discovery of Bion’s; in dream-life, the very dimensions of subjectivity – sensation,
passion, and myth, Bion’s “elements of psychoanalysis” (Bion, 1963) - are prepared for use as
structures for thinking (Bion, 1962) They are vehicles by which phantasy as the principle of
instinctual organization, gives birth to the relational structures of thought, inaugurating a mind
that can navigate the world inside and out.

A phenomenological focus helps clarify both how thought and image emerge in this model, and
how a field’s discourse recognizes that a phenomenon exists and ought to be brought within its
territory. This is essential given the obfuscation and resistance, the closed horizons after intimate
beginnings, between systems and their champions, e.g. Freud and Jung. The first is “horizon”
borrowed from Husserl (1999, 2001). Horizon refers to the limits and scope of both perception
and discourse from within a given perspective. Thus, when we speak of the “horizon of
subjectivity”, subjectivity is our focal area, our world, the phenomena and ideas pertaining to
mental life. Rather than treating the mind as an apparatus, for example, requiring that mental
phenomena demonstrate the laws of a limited branch of physics or the properties of a technology,
we will remember that the metaphors of physics, art, and mythology serve the mythic purpose
(muthos, tale) of telling a story about subjectivity. As much as subjectivity is a natural
phenomenon, and a special kind of expression of the natural order7, when we speak of it in terms
of physics or another discipline, we are like hermit crabs or stowaways, borrowing the carapace
belonging to another for shelter, transportation and reliable set of boundaries. Like music and
mysticism, the psyche does not sit still for words, and loses itself and its mercuriality as it
becomes domesticated or concretized in its borrowed shell.

Our psychoanalytic horizon is not that of a fundamental and authoritative physics; rather, it is
that of the subjectivity we seek to describe in terms as close to its own contours as possible. The
musical model of psyche, then, does not attempt to say that the mind is a musical phenomenon,
better understood musically than physically. This would commit us to a struggle among
dominant ideologies. Rather, music expresses otherwise unarticulated aspects of experience, and
demonstrates the fluid organizational properties of the affective life, of the psyche and its
relation to the world. It articulates a domain of presentational life to which psychoanalytic

7
Not to mention a cultural construction

27
history has been all but deaf, but for a relatively few concerted efforts. If we wish to know the
dynamics of subjectivity, we must look to what it does, what it builds, and how it presents and
unfolds itself. This is our horizon.

Subjectivity here has two complementary aspects, inseparable but for the needs of discourse:
experience and figurability. The former refers to the capacity to regard, reflect and become self-
aware of oneself as one who experiences. The latter refers to the formation of “image,” or
psychic contents appreciable by and available for reflection, perception, thinking. Each is in a
tensile relationship to objectivity, which refers to the stance from which we regard phenomena as
though they existed independently of us. Most usefully, though the objectivity I care about is a
trick of perspective, the ability to step back enough to take note of our place in the dance, get our
bearings, see what has either fallen beyond the infrared or ultraviolet horizons and thus outside
the horizon of our perception and understanding. If one uses a multi-modal kind of attention, this
peculiar sort of objectivity, then those phenomena that have fallen out of our perceptual or
hermeneutic range will still be felt, as heat, as irritation, tingling or nausea, and may leave a
psychic sunburn. To experience life, our patients, and our waking and sleeping dreams,
musically, is to hear what would otherwise be missed, dismissed, or mischaracterized. But the
ultraviolet/infrared analogy alerts us to the fact that our actual and metaphorical perception is
only geared, no matter how acutely, toward a humblingly narrow but expandable range of the
available spectrum. Not only of the electromagnetic spectrum, but of sound, the
chemical/olfactory, the temporal, the various modes of empathy, and of the shifting
organizational patterns of the natural world.

With music and mysticism in mind, questions arise at the perimeters of the discipline,
demanding attention to directionality and flow: whence “mind,” its process, and it, and where
they lead. These boundary and process questions are implicit in the work of both Freud and the
post-Freudians. To address them is not just a disguised exercise in philosophy, but aims to refine
the definitions of the very subject and object of psychoanalysis. This is done squarely within the
purview of the experiencing subject: the one we analyze in our offices, and ourselves as
analysands; the one who makes and the one who beholds art; the one who dreams, the one who
witnesses the dream, and the one who understands the dream (Grotstein, 2000).

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Why “Space?”
Space is a common trope – we keep things “in” mind, we make them up “in” our heads, we
speak of the intra-psychic. Space is literal room in which to move, to effect changes and
interactions. It is also a construct that allows us to affect, describe, compare, and shuffle the
configurations of that which occurs to us, and that which we imaginatively and analytically
create. It is the literal and metaphorical space in which we can have both self and other, and
thereby relate. The movement of objects and players across a mental stage and in narrative time,
in a child’s game, in sport, and in a mythic adventure or a stage play, depends on it and/or
defines it. The movements of time, harmony, and theme in a piece of music, much as the
physical arrangement of musicians in the ensemble, and the graphical organization of the written
score, also demonstrate the intricacy of the dimensional structure in which meaningful
experience occurs. Freud offered topography and structure; Jung and Bion, vessels and
container/contained; Bion, a grid of mental transformations; Winnicott, transition and potential,
and holding.

Spatial phenomena and metaphor are features of the theoretical revisions of all the post-Freudian
thinkers. Space is thus also the field in which theory differentiates. Freud’s analysis of the
psyche into its parts and mechanisms, its topography and structure, and of acts into their wish
and compromise formations, is the reductive half of a natural process, the “lysis” that occurs
within the synthesis of whole structures. Psychic health depends upon the integration of disparate
categories, such as reason and passion, primary and secondary process (Rycroft, 1962, 1979), or
symmetric (unconscious, seeing similarity as identity) and asymmetric (conscious, critical,
differentiating) (Matte-Blanco, 1975). These categories of mental activity do not stand apart
from one another for long except in analytical discourse or in pathology. By the same token, a
viable psychoanalytic theory, able to recognize and address this healthy subjectivity, must itself
constitute a flexible three-, four- or higher-dimensional space, privileging no single dimension
over the others or over the whole. Bion’s formulation is pertinent:

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 Psycho-analytic elements and the objects derived from them have the following
dimensions:

1. Extension in the domain of sense

2. Extension in the domain of myth
3. Extension in the domain of passion

An interpretation cannot be regarded as satisfactory unless it illuminates a psychoanalytic

object and that object must at the time of interpretation possess these dimensions (Bion,
1963, EP, p.11).

This applies not only to the analyst interpreting a patient’s speech, but also to the theorist
interpreting the psyche or criticizing an idea. Sense, myth, and passion are domains of
experience, and without their structural relations, akin to length, width, and height, there is
nothing psychological, no meaning, nothing to interpret. What elevates this phenomenological
concern into a psycho-analytic one is the fact that, regardless of selective attention to elements,
forces, functions and objects, the true object is a construct of all three dimensions, and disappears
when explained away into fewer. This true object is the present human subject who can only
attest to his existence by means of the qualia and utterance of personal meaning of his
experience, and also exists within a context that exceeds the bounds of his awareness. The same
applies to art, dream, and the mythologies of individuals and cultures; each is a compositional
whole, evolving in spite of and in the face of – evolving through – its travails, the catastrophic
changes Bion writes about (1966).

Freud’s efforts in this regard can be read in the development of his topographical and structural
models. The topographical model was his initial depiction of psychic space. The nature and
subjective value of psychic contents derived from their place in the structure of conscious,
preconscious, and unconscious. The topographical model, built upon Freud and Breuer’s work
on hysteria, regarded the physical symptom as an altered form of an unconscious thought.
Instinct remained unconscious, while its conscious representation – not simply hysterical
symptoms, but meaningful thoughts - emerged into the space of conscious awareness only
through a process of compromise and disguise of repressed wishes (Jones, 1916). Freud’s
dreamwork exemplified this view of conscious image and symbol as the results of a process of
alteration of the instincts.

30
The Freudian sense of space gradually differentiated to accommodate the complex, multi-tiered
dynamics of repression. It then diversified further into the agencies of id, ego, and superego,
whose dynamic connections wove throughout systems conscious, preconscious, and
unconscious. Yet the possibility of conscious representation still depended upon the compromise
between agencies, with the instinctual “latent thoughts” denied any direct expression to the
conscious subject. Freud’s approach, for the most part, still could not account for the initial,
spontaneous imagistic component of mind, that which would undergo repression secondarily
under certain conditions. A differentiated account of phantasy – of organized psychic process
prior to the work of repression - was not yet available. The Freudian paradigm, though, was
beginning to suggest some of the seminal developments of the next wave of psychoanalytic
thinkers, distinct from the mechanisms of repression.

One approach to this problem was suggested in a preliminary way in Freud’s structural theory. It
suggested an intuition on Freud’s part that the mechanism of the psyche was not based narrowly
on the discharge of tension and gratification of wishes by objects, but on the organization and
interactions of functions belonging to these objects. With the structural theory per se came a shift
of focus away from the gratification of wishes and discharge of tensions, toward the
organizational relationships among functional agencies. The main function of this organizational
capacity became the maintenance of psychic equanimity and integrity, the main but not only
function of which was to manage wish and libido through the various mechanisms of repression.
Repression, while still cornerstone, became the exemplary maneuver in a psychic repertoire
consisting of other techniques and purposes. The bodily tensions at the heart of the economic
model, repression, and the pleasure and reality principles could now be seen, rightly, as
secondary to a similarly innate, biological endowment – a readiness at birth for the full palette of
subjectivity, able to emerge under a wide and divergent range of adequate conditions.

The horizon of subjectivity, as a main bone of contention between Freud’s most gifted followers,
is a key to differences between their respective paradigms. As it defines the origins and limits of
what the psyche per se is and can make use of, it also determines what can be conceived of
within a paradigm; the limits of our language are the limits of our world (Wittgenstein, 1974,

31
5.6). Without knowledge of the invisible ranges of light, there would be no natural explanation
for sunburn, or an x-ray image. The world, here, is the psychoanalytic paradigm, which, like any
paradigm (Kuhn, 1971), undergoes re-formulation when confronted with anomaly. A system of
expression, like music, that only asserts identity and truth through a balance of constant change
and recapitulation, without adhering to the dreamwork-model, is like the paradox of an invisible
light that burns, or another that sees through surfaces to the inner flesh. But the limits of the idea-
world, applied to 21st century Freudian ideology, shed light on the psychological, even the
psychoanalytic, difficulty in noticing, much less understanding, a quality of life and mind that is
always ready-to-hand. The dilemma is summed up nicely by philosopher and Freudian scholar
Walter Davis, in a lecture dedicated to identifying what has been lost of original Freudian
insights in contemporary psychoanalysis:

The ideological function of a paradigm is that it renders something one doesn’t

want to know about unintelligible. As psychoanalysts that should peak our
curiosity, since our supposed goal is always to open ourselves to the repressed and
then remake ourselves by what we thereby learn…the unintelligible stuff is
precisely what we must save because it is where we will rediscover psyche as
opposed to mind and brain. (Davis, 2006)

What is it we do not want to hear, and why? Freud wanted to hear, I suggest, or to feel, as he
reached out to those who represented precisely those areas he had the most difficulty with. Yet
he also wanted to preserve the faith in rational conquest of the id, fortifying the intellectual
desire whose unintended consequence was to keep whole swathes of psychic life unintelligible,
and leave a metapsychology hollow and echoing from the absence. This was and remains a crisis
of ambivalence, unformulated experience8, and repression which should more than peak the
curiosity of psychoanalysts.

Yet the language of Freud was already built on an awareness of the anomaly of subjectivity, seen
through the lens of 19th-century neuroscience. Both art and dream are the original focal points for
psychoanalysis, alongside clinical method, and they are still by nature anomalous. For that
reason, I see the work of these post-Freudian thinkers as continuous and consistent with the task
of creating a language, a symbolic and mythic structure, for a paradigm that can articulate

8
I adopt the phrase from the title of Donnel Stern’s excellent book on imagination in psychoanalysis.

32
subjectivity and expand to admit the new and the numinous without reducing it to its contents,
dismissing it as meaningless, or treating it as a symptom of something gone wrong.

Myth and Model

Patients and analysts are constantly using different terms to describe situations that
appear to have the same configurations (Bion, 1965,124).

One of Bion’s solutions was to utilize the languages of mathematics and logic to represent the
invariant configurations of phenomena - mental contents and statements about them - which
manifest in the variety of terms by which we describe the infinity of particular situations. Bion’s
emphasis on geometry highlights the issue of the configuration of experience, that is, the relation
of mental objects to one another and to the whole they constitute.

Bion conceives myth as the instinctual psychic effort at “apprehending, working through and
preserving transcendent insights about human nature and psychology” (Sandler, 2005, p.509). It
is a bridge-building enterprise, adding dimension, traversibility, and space for ideas to the two
dimensions, sensation and passion. These templates of human experience have always emerged
instinctually in the form of stories elaborating the “constant conjunctions” (Bion 1992, p.228) of
the enduring yet plastic elements of human nature. They are the presentation, in mutable story
form, of the psyche’s own perspective on the world and its place within it, in narrative,
personified and deified form. Truths begin life as epitomes, gods, and demons. Bion discusses
the inevitable private version of myth, in dream-life, that expresses the particularity of the
individual’s effort to learn from experience, the “primitive apparatus of the individual’s armoury
of learning” (Bion, 1963, EP, p.66).

Bion thus illuminates the dual role of myth and myths in psychoanalysis. First, they served Freud
as universal human examples of the narrative forms of whole complexes of experience, by which
he could apprehend and organize the facts pertinent to psychoanalysis. They are also the
individual’s natural means of organizing experience into coherent vehicles for thinking, offering
a power that simultaneously generalizes and particularizes. This dual, mythic model serves, in
the immediacy of both ordinary and therapeutic experience, to organize stable and flexible
apprehension and interpretation of reality. Moreover, this concept of myth offers us a defined

33
view of the object of psychoanalysis: the whole subject at the horizon of experience, whose
actions achieve meaning within a context, a history, and a set of possibilities. Rather than,
figuratively speaking, focusing on something “fundamental”, an organ or particle or microbe,
beneath or within the psyche, our focus rests on the subject himself. The subject arrives at this
horizon with the potential for organized, dimensional apperception. The structured and dynamic
relations with the world conveyed in myth, in partnership with passion and sense, provides the
templates and tools for thinking (Bion, 1962).

“The Oedipus myth may be regarded as an instrument that served Freud in his discovery of
psycho-analysis, and psycho-analysis as an instrument that helped Freud discover the Oedipus
complex.” (Bion, 1992)

So important is the structural property of myth that Bion utilizes seminal myths such as Oedipus,
Babel, and the Sphinx to express the axiomatic function of myth for the psyche comparable to
that of mathematics for natural science (Bion, 1992). Myth, then, is fundamental to
psychoanalysis and not simply an object of its inquiry, and therefore is not a matter to be
explained solely in terms of psychoanalytic principles. It is the ground of those principles, and
the mediator or bridge linking inquiry to events and their interpretation, describing the primal
creative organization of the images of instinct into the higher symbolic forms.

Freud addresses a scant few exemplary myths, selected as models to anchor key points of his
theoretical edifice. The Oedipus complex, for example, is no longer generally considered
universal as a developmental phenomenon, yet the Oedipal myth and Sophocles’ drama each
express ubiquitous configurations of knowledge, ambition, guilt, and a key triangular structure of
relationship. These are key human dilemmas. Yet, psychoanalysis and its variants are themselves
myth-making and myth-using enterprises. For if myth, as explicated by Bion, carries a primal
truth-value with respect to the forms of human nature, akin to that of mathematics for natural
science, then myth is no longer identified with wish-fulfillment and illusion. It is the structural
template for theory. It is the very container for knowledge about human nature as studied by
psychoanalysis. More basically, it is the vehicle by which knowledge of the world can be
abstracted from our encounters with its particulars. And so again it is the structure to be found
and imparted to imaginal forms (Corbin, 1972) at the subjective horizon, the apperceptions,

34
imagoes, and impacts registering upon the experiencing subject. This is, in turn, his possible
agency for action, for knowledge, and for self-consciousness. In this light, Freud’s lifelong
struggle with the opposing gods of reason and illusion, itself takes mythic form as a struggle for
a viable mythology of the psyche.

But what, then, of the core insights of Oedipus, that structure of desire, self-deception, murder,
and revelation? Surely there can be no Freudian, sober understanding of psychic life without this
dense kernel of passion, sense, and myth, whose rhizome weaves through the strata of the psyche
and the family. To the extent that there is something real described by the character of libido,
something essential about our demand for and avoidance of knowledge, something universal
about our dependence upon and rejection of the conventions of society, Oedipus remains a great
cautionary tale. But turned on its head, we can see the irony in Freud’s attempt, seen as his own
myth, to be an intellectual conquistador, to have his theory encompass all of human nature, to
own sexuality, to be Tiresias to all future analysands, yet also Oedipus in thrall to the power of a
single version of the story. The problem is not that the sexual theory is false. The problem is that
it is tyrannical, and aims at displacing a pantheon, or at least ignores the rest in the effort to
illuminate a single essential drama. Tiresias serves Apollo, not Oedipus, and speaks the truths he
sees, irrespective of the veils and vanities of the status quo. Here he is speaking one such truth,
that what Oedipus does not know is precisely the truth he seeks, but will not accept, and cannot
change. Bion may well have been right that Freud did not discover the Oedipus complex, but
through the Oedipus myth discovered psychoanalysis. Without its lessons, we are at risk of
blindness to our own lust, impulse and aggression, self-deceptions, vanities, resistance to seeing
ourselves as we are. But where else in nature have we been able to rest on a single force, a single
principle? Hence, the persistent place for Freudian work on and about neurosis. But it is only a
theory of pitfalls and tragedy, of the inner petards by which we are hoist and the particular
liberations this knowledge affords. Let’s not forget that Freud both vigorously guarded the sexual
theory, and turned reluctantly but repeatedly to other myths when struck by a mystery. Neurosis
and the dreamwork do not adequately represent the rest of what we are, of beauty, paradox,
endurance, other forms of tragedy, and all that falls under the rubric of love.

35
Crossroads and Knife-Edge
Freud placed himself perpetually at the cross-roads of culture and science. We can readily
understand the crisis of his ambivalence; he could not proceed very far down either road without
reaching across to build tributaries between them, often hidden ones. This was necessary, given
the complexity of his task, for Freud was neither a mythographer nor, any longer, working as a
neurologist. Subjectivity in Freud’s handling responds to all of the following views: a scientific
method to account for mental energies, objects, and structures; a cultural and social view in
which the individual always manifests himself within and against the boundaries of time, place,
custom and morality; a medical model which accounts for its disturbances and treatment; and a
mythology and cosmogony which cast scientific concepts as allegorical characters in a tale about
the growth and struggle for emergence of the mind. Freud alternately places all mental life under
the rubric of neurosis, then turns outward to mythic and philosophical processes more
encompassing than neurosis. Through all of these overlapping perspectives we can observe
Freud’s deep ambivalence about the process aspect of representation. This is a factor which
remains volatile, paradoxical, and yet fundamental in the work of the psyche – namely, that
representations of truth and meaning in living subjects are possible only through processes of
transformation in which boundaries are perpetually elaborated, dissolved, and re-drawn. Freud’s
attention to this paradoxical factor remained tentative, preparing the soil and a few germinal
ideas to be cultivated by others. Yet, the vitality of this post-Freudian development addresses a
particular ongoing challenge, to both the emergent human psyche and to psychoanalytic theory:
the challenge that it remain integrated and capable of expanding its mythemes in the face of
turbulence, frustration, and paradox.

This challenge becomes one more expression of a principle common both to numerous post-
Freudians and to Freud himself: that mind evolves in response to a reality that always exceeds
our grasp, which “frustrates” us. The intuitive movement through the conflictual,
unrepresentable, and unknown is a core of the work not only of Bion, Winnicott, and Loewald,
but also of Jung. Winnicott speaks of the artist as the “knife edge,” exemplifying the precarious
balance between impulse and relational boundaries (1986b). Winnicott’s infant struggles

36
throughout life to achieve something authentic in the dance between his own elements and the
facts of life. Bion writes of the necessity for catastrophic change (1966) at the brink of
transformations, in which thinkable thoughts and a mind capable of delivering them arise from
surviving the nameless dread of matter becoming an organism with inklings of consciousness.
Along with Winnicott and Bion, Julia Kristeva writes of the flexible containing space of the
other, both womb and reverie, which models the containment of turbulence within the individual
psyche. Kristeva, attuned to the world behind language, showing through in its ruptures and
prosody, places the creation of meaning “on the fragile threshold, as if stranded on account of an
impossible demarcation” (Kristeva, 1982). The reconnection with the wholeness and movement
of subjective life which is contorted by vicissitudes of language and desire is a leitmotif unning
through every limb in the tree of psychoanalytic thinking.

In his work on art, Freud vacillates between mechanical science and his love of literature and
myth. As an unsatisfactory compromise between them, he ultimately reaffirms the one that
makes imagination an instrument of wish-fulfillment; he is unable consistently to locate the
synthetic, creative position that reveals art itself as the integration of faculties and potentials par
excellence. Occasionally, however, he finds in art and artist, and in the scientist who has not
sublimated too fully, something sublime: both an implicit knowledge of the unconscious and a
generative sexuality to which is restored a wholeness he ascribes to a divinity, Eros. None the
less, the nature of sublimation, in essence concerned with transformation above and beyond
wish-fulfillment, he leaves open, an unfinished and unintegrated movement in his symphony.

Each author I’ve selected carries something essential further along Freud’s sublimatory path.
Each modifies the knife-edge between poles of psychic functioning, shifting the horizon at which
all psychological progression from unconscious to conscious takes place. Both the generation of
meaning, and mind itself as an evolving, generative whole, emerge from the continuity and
diversity of psychic transformations of tensile energies. It is to be found, among other places, in
works of high intellect, in suckling, in child’s play, in healing, and in jazz. Sublimation
represented to Freud, in the midst of a creative dilemma, the wish, only partially granted in his
lifetime, that something worthy of representation by a goddess (Eros, restored to sexuality in
sublimation) come from passage beyond neurosis and, wish-fulfillment.

37
Although the perpetual shift of meaning is implicit in Freud’s dreamwork, he tried to master it by
means of the geography, politics, and physical mechanics of the mental “apparatus.” We have
the dreamwork, the establishment of topographical regions and borders, and then the political
intricacies of the structural theory, once the mythic agencies of the psyche began to diversify.
But such diversity demanded more than the 19th-century metaphor of a manufacturing machine or
an uneasy alliance among three psychic countries. Freud’s mythology of the psyche – “our
mythology” (Freud, 1933, SE22, p.95) and its “purely descriptive” ( in Freud, E., 1960, Letters,
#246) figures of speech – is richly derivative of a much more pervasive set of myths. The
elements of his hermeneutic chimera, some more ancient and some more contemporary, are
classical myth and cosmogony, reconstituted philosophy, alchemy, most largely disavowed or
incognito. Not only did his sexual theory not supply a bulwark against the mud of occultism
(Jung, 1961); but also, while building his fortress, and ablating (Rycroft, 1985) his ancestors to
support the illusion of a new science of subjectivity, he enlisted those denizens of the past as the
building materials and soldiers of the fortress. Freud’s own myth can be seen as an advanced
condensation and displacement of the mythic and intellectual history from which he took pains to
distance himself – in his own original terms, a product of dream-work.

Throughout the scope of Freud’s discourse, we find a fluid core of mythic deities, imaginary
regions, and hermeneutic constructs populating a transitional area between science and
mythology. These are most visible in his writings on the oceanic, the musical, and the mystical,
the most mercurial and least reducible expressions of the psychic repertoire. The topic of fluid
forms, whose names slide off, and of elusive knowledge in perpetual movement and partial
reconciliation, re-emerges in efforts by Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva. Rejecting metaphysics,
these writers approached the same scene from the perspectives of linguistics and post-
modernism. It also enters the work of Jung, Winnicott, Bion, and Loewald, who concerned
themselves not simply with the mechanics of the unconscious but also with the primacy of
moving and shifting imagery, with mythic organizational agencies, and with the integration of
the archaic denizens of the psyche through progressive orders of psychic organization. These
thinkers collaborate in describing the mercurial element of the psyche with which Freud
struggled. In each writer we see how movement, change, and expansion are naturally interwoven

38
with structure and limit to produce a threshold of coherence at which dream, consciousness, and
meaning emerge and evolve, and with them, the possibility of psychological development,
healing, and integration. Freud placed himself at a crossroads where paths diverge to
circumnavigate a greater field, or ocean. These paths cross again at numerous points, where myth
in the guise of theory, and ritual in the guise of technique, de-center scientific authority, and
cross-fertilize and re-draw boundaries despite all efforts at orthodoxy and rigor.

Mercuriality and a Space for Myth

There is in human existence a principle of indeterminacy, and... it does not stem from
some imperfection of our knowledge...Existence is indeterminate in itself, by reason of its
fundamental structure, and insofar as it is the very process whereby the hitherto
meaningless takes on meaning...
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The Phenomenology of Perception

It is when working on movements which are still irresolute, unstilled, which may not
either be called diversions or laws, works of art or theorems, movements which, when
completed, lose their likeness to each other, that the operations of mind can be of use to
us.
Paul Valery,
Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci

In reading Freud, one comes up against multiple mythic ways of characterizing the inherent
drives and configurations of psychological life. These drives move toward restoration,
generativity, and love (Eros), toward cessation, destruction, and death (Thanatos and Nirvana),
and toward the knot of desire, appeasement, identification and knowledge (Oedipus). It is
important for us to acknowledge, along with Freud’s most creative followers, that if we are really
to honor Freud’s own main hermeneutic tendency—one that strives to represent the transmission
of messages about these drives—then we, too, will deploy mythic structures in trying to interpret
psychic drives and their processes. I suggest a closer look at the god of the elusive principle
which embodies meaning-through-change across those infinite mental frontiers at which
unconscious becomes conscious.

The tendency that remained unrepresented in Freud’s work, even though it ran consistently
through his tangled efforts to articulate the images and transformations belonging to dream, art,

39
and religion, is best represented by the mytheme of Hermes/Mercurius. This figure exemplifies
the elusive play of psychic forms explored by Jung. Like Freud, Jung could make no sense of
music, but went further in opening up the definition and possible transformations of libido in
image. To pay attention to the mercuriality and music missing in the Freudian lineage, and their
persistent if subtle return, is to join a hermeneutic mythological project already well in progress
among humanist scholars across disciplinary boundaries. In that project psychology remains
“like” a myth of cultural scale in its ways of telling the story of psychic life and development.
Myths and mythologies across millennia have themselves functioned de facto as systems of
individual and cultural psychology embedded in cosmogony and moral tales. They have been
analogous to a hybrid of religious and scientific aspects, serving some of the purpose of what we
would today call a paradigm or a cultural worldview, by weaving a constellation of underlying
principles, values, and assumptions into an iconic narrative. However, they are not meant to be
eternal, rather expressing the transitional appearance of an insight or dilemma as it appears at a
particular time in the dream-life of a culture. The transitional quality is most important, without
which the modern, monolithic concept of the scientific dissolves all meaning. As expressed by
Joseph Campbell
Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The
living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult
to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to
reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link
between the two perspectives becomes dissolved (Campbell, 1993, p.249)

The figure of Hermes/Mercury covers much of the missing transitional hermeneutic territory in
psychoanalysis. Freud’s topographical theory was an articulation of the boundaries between
conscious and unconscious, with the preconscious as a transitional zone. These “regions” of
“topography,” however, statically represent a basically active principle, in which consciousness
“becomes” out of unconsciousness. Hermes etymologically derives from the herma (Nilsson,
1972) or heap of stones marking a crossroads, a grave, or property lines. At one and the same
time the name suggests a crypt, a horizontal and vertical boundary between regions, between
strata of underworld and day-world, and between multiple zones, territories, paths, and
possibilities. With Hermes the demarcator, messenger, and guide of souls, we have regions and
the possibility of movement through them as well as the hint that psychic space itself is both
discovered and created as the fruit of this differentiated movement. With the structural theory,

40
Freud demonstrates that in this creation of psychic space increasingly differentiated agencies of
id, ego, and superego emerge from a more primal level of organization. Each has a purpose and
a nature of its own, and each addresses the language and demands of the others while at the same
time terra-forming and revising the boundaries of consciousness and the unconscious.

Freud created a dreamwork of finite mechanical forces involved in the manufacture of indicators
and substitutes, road signs for ways traveled, or grave markers for ghosts who continue to haunt
consciousness. Despite its mechanistic limits, the dreamwork contains partial acknowledgments
of the mercuriality of the psyche, or its play of living forms. But many modes were simply
unrecognizable to Freud. An exemplary case of passage between boundaries, in which form is
both changed and achieved, is music, the psychoanalytic dead zone or aporia, which inspired
Rycroft’s challenge. Certain possible paths through that hermeneutic roadblock were tentatively
opened up by the early psychoanalytic explorers.

First, in answering Rycroft’s call for an auditory model, we must consider the ways in which the
auditory makes special demands. What, for instance, does the wave-nature of music demand, and
how does it apply, concretely, to our psychological lives? Waves and vibrations are the mode of
transmission of energy involving everything from the touch of a mother’s heartbeat felt and
heard in utero, to the synthesis of Vitamin D and circadian hormones from sunlight by our
receptive zones, to the music we love, to the workings of our computers and stereos. Energy is
either a wave or a particle, or both, depending upon our mode of interaction with it, or our mode
of apprehending the interaction. When our technology quantifies a signal of whatever kind into
binary code – “bits” – it is because we have found a more efficient way of translation and
storage. We eventually reconstitute the bits into the waves with which our senses and minds
engage experientially. The auditory paradigm constitutes an entire domain of physical reality
complimentary to the chemical and mechanical paradigm in Freud’s model. For Rycroft (1979)
the evolution of our ability to translate and integrate image between domains without egregious
errors enables meaning to survive and evolve in the transition. This ability furnishes an aesthetic
value of basic importance, which is musical in the broadest sense: the reading and reshaping of
vibratory reality. This is a functional aesthetic that penetrates into and permeates science, art,
dream, and psychoanalysis.

41
A musical event is a transitional construct; its material is temporal transition encoded in the
vibrations of a physical medium. To the extent that vibrations move through a medium, an
intermediate zone is involved. The character of these vibrations depends on the nature of the
zones of contact – the air, the wood and brass, the walls of the hall, our bones and auricular
mechanism. Hermes is the mythic personification of such movement. The story tells that he
invented both the lyre and the flute9 – two versions of the instrument-body whose tuned resonant
chamber and bodily interface create resonant harmonies which penetrate between realms. He
signifies this movement and its challenge to static order. As a child Hermes stole Apollo’s solar
cattle. He reversed the direction of their hoof prints in order to confuse any attempt to trace their
comings and goings. Zeus, as creator standing above the fray, admired Hermes’s cleverness but
ordered the cattle returned; however, Hermes had built a lyre from a tortoise shell and a cow’s
intestines – from rigid boundary and pliant viscera - and played it for the offended Apollo.
Enchanted, (seduced by song), Apollo forgave Hermes and offered the cattle in exchange for the
instrument (Kerenyi 1980).

Hermes personifies the paradoxical truth that a rigidly balanced order cannot account for
meaning and truth, but can only account for its static proportions and symmetric boundaries.
Such order must negotiate with flow, impulse, induction, asymmetry and process in order to
aspire to beauty. Only in this affinity between divine proportion and the aesthetic and
transcendent, can reason aspire to truth, to paraphrase Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Hermes
directs the negotiation between factors in tension or opposition that creates the possibility of
exchange. Boundaries must become thresholds and frontiers if there is to be communication and
a new state of affairs. What appears to the controlling agency as thievery and escape is really the
natural mobility and resonance of nature, which is the medium for the creativity of mortals and
gods alike – beyond ownership and destined to slip away, prompting the negotiation amongst the
gods themselves. This theme arises, too, in Prometheus’s theft of divine fire from the gods on
behalf of humanity, ushering in the many forms of science and technology – a deed that calls
down the extremes of punishment and redemption. Compared to Hermes, Prometheus had

9
Hermes the provocateur invented the instruments pivotal to Apollo’s demonstration of his supremacy, as well as
the cruelty embodied in the order and symmetry he represents. Apollo flayed the satyr Marsyas alive after defeating
him by playing the lyre upside-down, whereas Marsyas could not do the same with his flute.

42
neither the status nor the innate cleverness by which to bribe or plea-bargain his way out of his
sentence.

Hermes is also a wind-god, wind being an exemplar of invisible force that sets boundaries in
resonant motion. He calls attention, by means of echoes and reverberations, to unseen truths. The
structure-process paradox, the Apollonian-Hermetic dynamism, emerges into clarity only when
both poles of that paradox are fully engaged with each other. The fixed but flexible boundaries of
known orders of meaning must possess not only Apollonian structure but also Mercurial
plasticity if they are to resonate at all. A cracked saxophone fails to contain resonant motion, so
that the vibrations fragment rather than cohering into the tones and pulses of music. This
structure-process paradox is akin to the mind, per Bion (1962a), which must conduct and
transform (alpha-function) its energies, without which it cannot turn turbulence (beta elements)
into coherent forms for thinking (alpha elements), and hence can neither dream nor really wake
up (ibid.). Or, as explored by Jung, remaining closer to Charcot and Janet, this mind can only
dissociate. It would fail to reconcile the psychic cacophony of images which gather in the wake
of unmanageable turbulence, and could not organize its nascent complexes into functional ego
states or sufficient continuity to support identity. The structure-process paradox holds true for
verbal communication, visual image, and music, as it does for a mind capable of dreaming. In
making and hearing music, we can hear, transparently, the integration of resonances, condensed,
displaced, and resolved into a coherent, plastic, audible dreamwork.

To re-invoke Rycroft’s point: the integration of tensile structure and fluid play, as dovetailing
dimensions, makes possible the transformation of multiple voices and contrasting rhythms
constituting the music of psychic life. A dream, in Freud’s original sense, must be able to contain
its conflicting wishes in a stable structure that preserves sleep. In Bion’s revision, this
containment allows us to dream in order to make conscious, mindful life possible. In this way a
containing boundary becomes a threshold, and thus a place of synergistic exchange between
frontiers that join known with unknown, and conscious with unconscious. At the root of this
boundary-line theme rests a mercurial fact that holds true for physics, biology, neurology,
psychology, art, dream, and myth. Irreducibly, both images and our ability to work with them –
to dream them, to think about them, and to artfully create new combinations in different sense

43
modalities - emerge from the dynamic organization of structures, from the interplay between
their components, from their combinatorial synergy, and from the nature of the medium in which
they move (Koestler, 1969). The consciousness, dream, and art that Freud, Bion, and Jung
explore are the fruits of an organizational synthesis. This synthesis depends upon its
mercurial/hermetic plasticity in order neither to collapse nor be destroyed by the turbulence of its
contents, and in order to yield appreciable, subjectively rich, and meaningful phenomena. These
are constructed out of the flood of sensations which the artist and dreamer, each according to his
own distinct “style” (Kristeva, 1998), seeks to resurrect from his memory of an unbroken
experience and bring across multiple borders into consciousness. As in Hermes’ bargain with
Apollo, the remuneration for all this trespassing is beauty and flow, exemplified in the music of
lyre and flute.

By the Roman name of Mercurius, this figure is the Jungian archetype of the Trickster, who
mediates between static or conventional positions without deferring to either; both rebel and
creative problem solver. Psychologically, he is a liminal or boundary figure – a “psychopomp” or
soul-guide whose symbolic function mediates between conscious and unconscious. He is
responsible for the negotiation of differences on either side of a threshold, turning tension and
negation into the dissemination of meaning. Difference is the possibility of reconciliation and
action. In physics and chemistry, it can be thought of as an energy gradient. The difference
between words and things, between sleeping and waking, between this and that side of a cell
membrane, between the characteristics of introjects, or between the inside and outside of a guitar
or drum, are examples of such generative thresholds. At the boundary between one thought and
another, or between the tendencies we learned from father and mother, between a hateful and
conciliatory impulse, between stick and drum head, or reed and mouthpiece, between a major
seventh and a minor third, between a plastic hammer and a toy wooden soldier, hovers a
potentiality which can yield meaning, experience, and surprise, as well as pleasure, frustration,
and anticipation. Hermes/Mercurius helps us to see the multiple connotations of boundary: as
point and medium of separation and demarcation; as threshold where commerce and
communication can occur between distinct regions; and as frontier where a known space opens
onto an unknown space about to be either penetrated or experienced as influx. In each case,
separation and structural coherence, distinctiveness and differentiation, and fluid interpenetration

44
and integration are inseparable characteristics of resonant boundaries. At these points, energy
transmutes and transmits new forms, putting them into play. Dominance by one or the other part
of these pairs threatens the collapse of the subject who must endure the transformation in order to
be present for it. Only a mindful subjectivity, able to make unconscious conscious by
participating in the flow of images, thereby being mutable, stays in the game. Mutability is found
in both adaptability and subversiveness; it is evolutionary, and accounts for an essentially
Jungian element of psychological life for which there is no adequate Freudian equivalent.

One can readily see the clinical significance of such principle, seen either as archetype or
allegory. In psychoanalysis, meaning is created or revealed through the passage from
unconscious to conscious. The mercurial perspective more clearly frames the need for plastic
boundaries between conscious and unconscious, as well as for a subject with the capacity to
survive being present for this process – as one mercurial author of fiction suggests, to be present
and able to read one’s own mind (Simmons, 1993). Hermes, then, expresses in mythic terms the
innate psychic “tendency to give definition to perceptual and mental horizons, to mark edges, to
define spaces” (Stein, 1999, p.4) – spaces perpetually also in movement and renegotiation - by
which process it becomes possible to achieve a mind and psychological agency, rather than
simply register, react, and impose order arbitrarily upon forces within and without. Apollo gives
definition but Hermes develops, fertilizes, and cultivates the territory.

Without this movement and play of forms- without the mercurial – there can be no meaning
because no active process of differentiation, no variation. There would be a pathological
deadening, the repetition or automatism of patterns in which the subject exerts severely limited
agency, and as a result, a limited world of possibilities for understanding, expression, and
relating. Metaphorically, such a patient becomes one who cannot resonate and harmonize, whose
broken or static rhythms neuter any sense of the melodic continuity and transformation that
confer meaning, or the polyphony that confers depth, distinctiveness, and space in which to make
a real interpersonal connection. Psychoanalysis thus struggles not simply with the elusive myth
responsible for this plasticity and flow, but also struggles with itself as an expression of that
myth. This endeavor is bound to yield an expansion and fortification of its original insights—

45
“bound” as in both destined and fluidly boundar, fortified as in having been loosened up at the
bastions and gates - by a necessary trespasser, Hermes, who confers meaning and identity
through inexorable tension and change. At the same time, the Mercurial perspective on both the
creativity of dream-life and the development of depth psychology theories reveals the very
ambiguity and ambivalence that made Freud’s life-work such a fertile ground for its own re-
imagining.

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Chapter Two
From Freud’s Ambivalence to the Coherence of Instinct
_________________________________________________________

Freud’s Ambivalence About Art and Artist

The difficulties encountered by Freud over the issues of art and artists contain both the resolution
of psychoanalytic paradoxes and catalysts for further growth. At various junctures in his career
Freud expresses his envy of, kinship with, admiration of, and contempt for art and artists. As the
inventory below makes clear, he treats both art and artists in a cyclical, ambivalent mode. The
contradictions and tensions within his treatment of these themes form the seeds of developments
by subsequent psychoanalytic thinkers and schools of thought. Freud’s ambivalence is a
foundation – rather than simply a casualty -- of the growth of psychoanalytic aesthetics. Thus the
ambivalence at the inception of psychoanalysis serves as the “impressive caesura” (Freud, SE 20,
1926) delivering a necessary paradox into the field, in the form of Freud’s struggle to contain
and transcend the irreconcilable impulses in his own thinking. This focus will allow us to follow
not just the sequence of ideas, but the fruitful, catalytic dynamics between them.

The inventory breaks into two groups, the first detailing Freud’s reductive critiques of the artist
and his work, while the second includes all those qualifications or contradictions of the first
group, including Freud’s reflections on his own situation10. Where relevant, I will indicate
connections between Freud’s concepts and the developments of later thinkers.

Group One

1. The artist is akin to a daydreaming child, entirely focused on pleasure and the expression
of the pleasure principle (Freud, 1908, SE9, p.143). The artist’s linking of his imagined

10
Thanks are due to Norm Holland for his cogent examination (1998) of Freud’s contradictory attitudes with respect
to artist and poet.

47
 objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world…is all that
differentiates the child’s play from phantasying…. The creative writer does the same as
the child at play” (ibid).
2. Of visual artists Freud wrote to Ernest Jones that “meaning is but little to these men: all
they care for is line, shape, agreement of contours. They are given up to the Lustprinzip”
(Jones, E., 3:412).
3. Art is “harmless and beneficent; it does not seek to be anything but an illusion.” It is
therefore juxtaposed with science, which is the “most complete renunciation of the
pleasure principle of which our mental activity is capable” (Freud, 1933a S.E., 22: 160).
4. The artist creates a pleasurable alternate reality without having to actually alter,
accommodate to, or thoroughly adapt to this one. The discrepancy between the illusion
and reality does not interfere with the artist’s enjoyment (Freud, 1930, S.E. 21: 80), in
contrast to the renunciation (Freud, 1933, SE22, p.160), ceaselessly groping labors,
tormenting uncertainty (Freud, SE21, p.133), and sexual inferiority of the scientist and
intellectual (Jones 1: 111; 2: 433).
5. Art is an analog of neurosis, or a more or less successful alternative to it, constructed out
of the same processes and materials. However, the artist finds his way back to reality
(Freud, 1935 SE 20: 73), and his bounty, the great pleasure he has generated, has lifted
repression and liberated unconscious phantasy (Freud, 1915-17; SE 16: 376).
6. Freud stated that sound relationships and music “always vexed me because here I lack
the most elementary knowledge, thanks to the atrophy of my acoustic sensibilities”
(Letter to Fliess, August 31, 1898; cited in Barale & Minazzi, 2008)

Group Two

7. At the same time, Freud believed that the artist possessed the intuitive and complete
knowledge that he himself struggled to achieve. The artist “with hardly an
effort…[achieves] the deepest truths to which we others have to force our way,
ceaselessly groping amid torturing uncertainties” (Freud 1908; SE 9:143).
8. The artist achieves his knowledge of the deepest truths without suppressing his instincts,
and achieves greater sexual and social success than the scientist. “There is general enmity
between artists and those engaged in the details of scientific work…. We know they

48
 possess in their art a master key to open with ease all female hearts, whereas we stand
helpless at the strange design of the lock and have first to torment ourselves to discover a
suitable key to it” (Jones 1: 111; 2: 433).
9. The artist is mistaken in regard to his powers (in 6. & 7.). He is on the path to neurosis,
impotent and oppressed in the face of his instinctual demands; he is defined as “not far
from removed from neurosis.” “Honor, power, wealth, fame and the love of women” are
the objects of his desire, “but he lacks the means for achieving these satisfactions….
Consequently, like any other unsatisfied man, he turns away from reality...to the wishful
constructions of his life of phantasy, whence the path might lead to neurosis” (Freud,
1915-17b; SE 16: 376).
10. Freud warned against equating adult primary and secondary processes to the temporal
order of child development, stating that “no conclusion can be deduced from our
description…of what the content and connections of that system (Ucs) are during the
development of the individual” (Freud, 1915b 14: 189). He concedes that primary and
secondary processes, and their expression of the duality of the pleasure and reality
principles, are “fictions”. Nevertheless, their discursive use is justified because the
mother-infant dyad “does almost realize” (ibid.) such a psychical system, even though an
infant limited entirely to the pleasure principle and primary process from birth would, in
truth, be inconceivable, and could never survive (ibid., 220). Freud recognizes that
primary and secondary are discursive devices for discussing a hierarchy of organization,
not statements of temporal sequence. He seems to anticipate theoretical developments,
such as those exemplified by Winnicott and Loewald, indicating that infant and mother
engage in an irreducible and subtly interactive relationship. He recognizes and quietly
dissolves the literality of his core dualistic construct: the implication of a dualistic
relationship in which the infant is the unformed bearer of impulses and the mother the
midwife into reality.
11. Freud suggests that pathological conditions will alter the relation of primary and
secondary processes (Freud, 1915b 14: 189). He implies that he intends us to understand
them as plastic and capable of taking on different characteristics, or mimicking one
another, under pathological circumstances. He suggests that the construct made of
opposed primary and secondary processes is the common mechanism of both ordinary

49
 neurosis and problematic pathology. In so doing, he highlights the confusion and/or irony
in his statement that dreams are the only symptoms the healthy person is capable of
constructing (Freud, 1915-17, 456-7). This ambiguity confuses his intent as to what
constitutes the normal and the neurotic, as well as the distinctions between neurosis as
actual pathology, neurosis as a structural peculiarity common to all modes of mental
life, and neurosis as an expression of the ontological problem of having a mind which
cannot help but represent, but whose representations cannot help but distort and
misconstrue the events, within and without, it cannot help but witness (ibid. 358).
Confused as well are the distinctions between child, dreamer, and artist, as these three
stand in relation to each other, to pathology, and to health.
12. Art is an alternative to neurosis, constructed via the same mechanisms but stepping
beyond day-dreaming to benefit others and yield pleasure for oneself. It offers a
meaningful, if illusory, impact on the world. Sublimation is discussed in earlier works,
such as his paper on Leonardo da Vinci (1910b, SE11), though not developed or
integrated into his main body of theory. In sublimation, Freud poses art and civilized,
cultural activity in general as the ways in which the drives as expressed are optimally
cleansed of their instinctual origins (Freud, SE 18, 139). He cannot separate the
transpersonal value of art from the value of pleasurable illusion; thus, even art does not
quite aspire to the concrete benefits by which true and successful sublimatory activities ,
as exemplified by science, effect changes in the real world. Rather than loving, desiring,
or giving forth precious reflections, the scientist investigates, explores, and does research
(Freud, 1910b, p.70). The result bears little or no trace of the original elementary instinct,
which is now sub-lime, or below the threshold. The artist, by contrast, is still in thrall to
the pleasure principle, as is his audience.
13. Freud contradictorily positions the artist as both exemplifying and refuting the analogy to
the daydreaming child and seeker of meaningless pleasurable forms; the artist avoids,
transcends, and exemplifies the neurotic process. He knows what the psychoanalyst
knows about the unconscious. However, he does this by channeling the excess of his
instinctual forces into illusory forms by which others may glimpse his implicit knowledge
of human truth, rather than into thinking, research, and the scientific parsing of reality
from phantasy. In spite of the pathogenic risk in the artist’s embrace of illusion, the

50
 creative writer’s gift is one that “we should all discover something analogous to in
ourselves (Freud, 1908; 143).
14. Art is one of the “highest goods of humanity’ (Freud, 1923, p.234).
15. The artist has turned away from the real world because of his inability to reconcile it with
his excess of instinct, but finds his way back to achieve a “peculiar” reconciliation
between the pleasure and reality principles. He has revealed via his special gifts “truths of
a new kind,” (Freud, 1911, SE 12, p.224) which do not change external reality but offer it
back to men as “precious reflections” (ibid.), which men (sic) may then use in order to
effect genuine change to external reality.
16. Freud described himself not as a thinker, in spite of his valorizing of sublimation in the
form of thinking and its apotheosis, science, but as a conquistador (Freud, Letter to
Fliess, 1900) -- a man of daring, adventure, and tenacity who would not be thwarted in
matters of knowledge, and, via knowledge, the conquest of sex. This offers a dramatic,
wishful contrast to the torturous struggle to gain knowledge, and bafflement at the lock
on the hearts of women.
17. Freud does with the sculpture of Moses what he does with the words of his patients – to
seek and explain the underlying wish as it is encrypted in the details of the work. Yet he
goes on to state that “some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels
against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is
that affects me” (Freud, 1914, 211). Freud states that in cases such as music, where he
has no capacity to explain the cause of his reaction, he can feel no pleasure.
18. Freud states a position left unchallenged through the rest of his work – namely, that
neither dreams nor the plastic arts can represent the logical relations that make
sentences intelligible (Freud, 1900, SE4, p.312). Freud equates meaningful thought with
language, and claims that meaning per se is possible only through verbal thought. His
main stance, then, is that the verbal mode, which is the province of secondary process, is
absent or deficient in the non-verbal arts, and that the non-verbal art forms are thus
limited to primary process and wish-fulfillments. However, he goes on to illustrate in the
adjacent text several examples and procedures by which dreams and sequences of dreams
do in fact convey meaningful and systematic relationships, leaving a loophole for an
undefined mode of logic to be implicit in the non-verbal, quasi-symptomatic form of

51
 dreams. Yet Freud still applies the limitations of the pleasure principle to music, which is
no more than a purely sensual depiction of states (Meltzer, 1983; p. 15). Lacking an
interpretive foothold, Freud could find neither meaning nor anything worthwhile to say
about music. Although Freud elsewhere portrays artists as possessing a thorough and
implicit knowledge of the unconscious, bypassing verbal, secondary process, he
unambiguously projected his own speechlessness about music onto music itself, as
though music were intrinsically empty.

From 1910 to 1934, Freud follows a convoluted and circular trajectory with respect to art, but
which in the end displays some flexible and nuanced developments. In Leonardo he states that
the nature of art is inaccessible because its impulses have been transmuted via sublimation
(Freud 1910, SE 11, p.63). Later, he renounces the matter on behalf of the field: “whence it is
that the artist derives his creative capacity is not the question for psychology” (Freud, 1913, SE
13 p.187). By 1914, Freud anonymously publishes a loophole to this limit. He asserts that the
ways in which we are gripped by art are reached by the artist’s intention, which is beyond
intellectual comprehension. The artist’s intention 11 is “a mental constellation” of factors, a
holism, related to his impetus to create, trans-personally awakening pleasurable insight in us,
the audience (Freud 1914, SE13, p.212). However, though Freud is still put off-balance by the
sensual, aesthetic impact, which undermines intellectual analysis, and cannot fathom the artist’s
experience, he can analyze the motivations encoded in formal properties of the created product.
Yet he defiantly questions whether the dynamic system of artistic impulse, form and response,
framed in terms of the artist’s intentions and audience’s pleasure-seeking receptivity, should
necessarily remain beyond words, as they consist of analyzable impulses. Freud will not accept
this limit, asserting that psychoanalysis alone is uniquely qualified to render artistic process
intelligible (Freud, 1914, 212). Many years later Freud declares a qualified success: “What
Psychoanalysis was able to do was to take inter-relations between the impressions of the artist's
life, his chance experiences, and his works and from them construct his [mental] constitution
and the instinctual impulses at work in it - that is to say, that part of him he shared with all men”
(Freud, 1925 S.E., 20; 65). In a single sentence, Freud identifies the transpersonal dynamic at
work in art, the inter-relations as distinct from the elements themselves, as key to psychoanalytic

11
The question of intentionality with respect to creativity is a great topic unto itself, which there is insufficient space
to explore here.

52
access to art. He anticipates many of the dimensions of aesthetic subjectivity opened up by the
subsequent decades of psychoanalytic theory, and closely parallels Jung’s definition of visionary
art and its relation to the collective (CW15).

In 1934, Freud places analysis at the service of sublimation, the mechanism which 24 years
earlier rendered analysis impotent; in this role, analysis becomes the partner to the natural course
of the individual, and can succeed or fail along with it. In his letter to violinist Miss Maria
Thoman, he writes that

analysis (can result) in its being impossible to continue an artistic activity. Then,
however, it is not the fault of the analysis; it would have happened in any case, and it
is only an advantage to learn that in good time. When, on the other hand, the artistic
impulse is stronger than the internal resistances, analysis will heighten, not
diminish, the capacity for achievement (Jones, 1953-57, Vol. 3: 416).

In the final reckoning, Freud remains unsettled and equivocal about aesthetic impact and his own
experience of it (ibid. 415).

Absolutes and Movement Toward Integration

___________________________________________________________________________

In Freud’s contradictory account, the artist is alternately a hedonist and a seeker or conquistador
of truth. Storr offers this description of Freud by Breuer: “Freud is a man given to absolute and
exclusive formulations: this is a psychical need which, in my opinion, leads to excessive
generalization” (Storr, 1989, pp. 6-9; Jones, 1953).

Storr (1989) states that Freud’s need to control, channeled through these over-generalizations,
led to his inflation of psychoanalysis into a comprehensive system of thought, intended to
accommodate the psychological dimension of all human phenomena. Freud also admits a
tendency toward splits in his personal relationships; of his famous dream in which his eyes
became weapons, he writes that “my emotional life has always insisted that I should have an
intimate friend and a hated enemy.” Jones 1: 23; Holland, 1998). The same tendencies are at
work in his relationship to ideas, whether in the enantiodromia of ideas cyclically inducing their

53
opposites, or in the simultaneous oppositions forming dualistic systems. He posits each
formulation in terms of opposed principles, of psychic agencies in a state of inexorable tension.
Freud’s intimate friend is the orderly secondary process; the hated enemy is the shape-shifting,
Mercurial primary process, which Freud diminishes to a chaos, a cauldron of animal wishes. Yet
he repeatedly strays from his intimate friend, who fails to satisfy. He is drawn in a compensatory
way to his enemy, as if recognizing that he has underestimated this imaginative and generous
mistress, who, spared of too many demands, is no enemy at all.

To Freud, science and art are incompatible stances toward the world. This view is the product of
a forced opposition of several sets of categories: illusion and reality, truth and deception, and
reality and pleasure. This view also follows from Freud’s equation of the resolution of conflict
with compromise and hence neurosis; there is nothing within the theoretical structure of neurosis
to express psychic reconciliation and integration. Finally, it is also the product of a fallacy, an
evolutionary idée fixe, the problems with which Freud acknowledges but does not transcend.
Namely, that primary and secondary, infantile and mature, archaic and adaptive, correspond to
the linear temporal sequence of development. It is as though one function is supplanted by the
next in the developmental evolution of the psyche, and that pathology indicates regression to or
fixation at the hypostatized “earlier” state.

In ordinary experience these supposedly opposing or sequential processes are co-existent and
integrated. Again, following Rycroft, normality will be seen as the psychic capacity for coherent
movement, responsiveness, plasticity, and the adaptive ability to maintain these attributes across
multiple contexts and stressors. Pathology arises from a failure of integration (Rycroft, 1962,
pp.112-13). The implication of this broader view is that imagination and reason are distinct only
when dissociated. Under normal or optimal circumstances they are faculties of the same
symbolizing psyche, in which every feeling awaits upon its gesture (Welty, 1995), the basic unit
of which is image, the constructive process of which is phantasy, weaving the tapestry called
dream-life. This tapestry and its many steps and loops, in all the different sensory modes, both

54
has its own texture, grain, and immanent intelligence, and will be subject to all manner of force,
imperfection, restriction, coercion, sabotage both intentional and aleatory, which in the final
analysis amount to character and identity.

Again, Freud admitted his need to intellectually understand a phenomenon in order to feel it; he
would have been unable to join music’s primary sensuality and emotional evocativeness (Freud,
1926, SE20, 120; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, 232) without interrupting it. Without an
analytical foothold for these facets of music, he could handle neither its affective nor its formal
qualities. He excluded an entire, universally human sensory domain, thereby begging the
question as to what music, properly appreciated, might reveal about the dreamwork. Since
dreamwork is bound to processes that Freud ascribes to creativity, the potential yield to
psychoanalysis from such an effort are considerable.

Freud’s Transitional Concepts

____________________________________________________________________________

To recapitulate, Freud says of himself that he neither knows the means by which art is produced
nor has any talent for it (Freud, 1914, SE13), and that his pathography is simply an exercise in
the application of psychoanalytic theory which will not render the achievements of the artist
intelligible (Freud, 1910b SE11). He states that the intellect ought to suffice, even prevail over
other methods of understanding art (1914, SE13). He asserts, in Leonardo (Freud, 1908, SE 11),
that the inaccessibility of art to psychoanalytic endeavor is due to the work of sublimation,
cleansing it of telltale traces of instinct that would render it analytically intelligible. Eventually,
he writes that, confronted with art, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms (Freud, 1928, SE21), a
failed military initiative.

55
After stating, in “The Moses of Michelangelo”, that “some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn
of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected
and what it is that affects me” (Freud, 1914, p.211), Freud goes on to state, asking the reader’s
indulgence, that in cases such as music, where he has no capacity to explain the cause of his
reaction, he is incapable of feeling any pleasure (ibid.). Freud thus chooses to address the forms
which he can enjoy, limited to the scope of his explanatory tools. Freud both begs the reader’s
indulgence and sets his own terms. On the one hand, he confesses that he is at a loss with regard
to most of what the artist experiences and intends, admitting that aesthetic impact, in the form of
pleasure, is impossible for him if he cannot encompass it intellectually. On the other hand he
again wishfully embraces intellectual, verbally mediated conquest, by stating that “it is with the
greatest reluctance that I could bring myself to believe” that any aspect of the artist’s work
should exceed his capacity to understand and interpret it. He claims that any work of art should
be comprehensible in words, like any fact of mental life. He does with the sculpture of Moses
what he does with the expressions of his patients – to seek in that chosen form the wish (or in the
case of art, the artist’s intention), as it is expressed in the details of the work, and to explain it
intellectually. And furthermore he claims that it is not simply a task of ordinary intellectual
comprehension, but is possible with great works only by means of psychoanalysis; and that the
work must “admit of such an analysis,” be suited to or worthy of it, by being “really an effective
expression of the intentions and emotions of the artist” (ibid., p.212).

In this passage Freud ranks psychoanalysis as the epitome of means to understand great art, the
sine qua non, even though at its root Freud’s intellectualism is insensitive to the aesthetic impact
of the work. Knowing becomes a substitute for the impossible, experiencing, perhaps an analog
of DaVinci’s tragic knowledge coming at the expense of love. In a single sentence toward the
end of the passage he conflates a work of art’s need for (and worthiness of) this interpretation,
with Freud’s own need to interpret art so that he may allow himself to be moved by it, to
experience it. Freud, neither seduced nor seducer, is here the conquistador of the art, the
conqueror of the artist and the recipient of art’s inaccessible pleasures by means of intellectual
force. He then expresses the wish, anticipating Winnicott, that his rationalistic use of the object
(Winnicott, 1971) will not diminish its effect, and that the object should emerge unscathed. In

56
this passionate passage Freud makes psychoanalysis the ideal and necessary approach to the
interpretation of the wishes behind any great art – but one in which objects yielding to Freud’s
particular analytic approach have in this way proven themselves worthy of analysis. Yet the
aesthetic whole and its symbolic and experiential impacts are left unaccounted for, having been
analytically deconstructed or passed over as unapproachable. Adding to this are two more
problems: The finite quantity of libido Freud suggested at the time of his paper on Leonardo,
amounting to the paradox that to know too thoroughly exhausts libido, with the tragic result that
knowledge comes at the price of experience denuded of its richness (Freud, 1910b; 73); and the
conundrum that one also has no right to love or hate if one has not acquired a thorough
knowledge of the object. This tangle of contradictions puts the spotlight right back on the
paradox at the heart of psychoanalysis at this early stage.

We can begin to sense the emotional and relational reasons for Freud’s claims thus far. His
thinking appears to be moved by either the drive toward reparation for the imagined intellectual
murder-by-analysis of Michelangelo’s work, or toward the restoration of missing connection. His
confessional passage in “The Moses of Michelangelo” is one of the most profound and
instructive in the literature. In it he reveals his wish for connection with what eludes him in the
experiential dimension of art: merger and acquisition through the intellect, of those tantalizing
mental products which are not merely intellectual but contain in their aesthetic richness an
intellectual aspect that merits and can withstand psychoanalytic attention. The products that can
first admit and then survive this analysis are those proven worthy of attention in the first place –
a purely circular method that fails to resolve, and even compounds, the paradox of love and
knowledge posed in “Leonardo”.

By his own standards, this confession would invite us to qualify the entire endeavor as a
reflection Freud’s wish-fulfillment, taking a huge toll on the coherence of theory. If this
treatment of Freud seems too much like pathography, I point to Freud’s confessional tone in The
Moses of Michelangelo, and his acknowledgment that great art is a riddle to the intellect and

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window onto his own psyche. We must grant Freud the right to be as contradictory as any artist,
and at the same time question the interpretive hegemony he, and orthodox approaches to
analysis, ascribe to rational, secondary-process verbal interpretation. Freud seems both serious
about his rationalistic aspirations in achieving parity with the great artist through his own
particular set of tools, and ironic in his awareness that he is driven by his own incapacity for
pleasure or apprehension in art except through the pleasure granted by intellectual analysis. This
combination of serious aspiration and earnest irony issues an open invitation not only to explore
unresolved and transitional concepts of art and the artist but also the key problems of Freud’s
canon. In brief, the shortcomings in Freud’s treatment of art invite the rest of the psychoanalytic
world to interrogate further the text, music, and phenomena of mental life, and of the
psychoanalytic approach itself. Moreover, the validation of this ongoing effort, the
acknowledgment that Freud was onto something more he would not reach in his own lifetime,
can be found in post-Freudian writings, and more clearly in the gaps among his own ideas.

The growth of Freud’s work over time raises a related question, which makes theoretical room
for his contradictions. This question turns on how a foundational conqueror/thinker, out of the
need to secure a beachhead for his continuing advance, chooses to represent his primary concepts
from the outset. Numerous thinkers, for example Rycroft (1962, 1979), have recognized Freud’s
reductivism, and his errors in explicating phenomena in terms belonging to another realm of
nature or another level of discourse. Typically these realms are medical and scientific. They are
used to treat the mind “as if” it were a demonstration of particular physical laws, manifest in the
vicissitudes of anatomy and physiology. By placing Freud’s reductivism in the context of his
own disclaimers and speculations, and that of his era and culture, I put aside the claims of
reductive science and treat his theories, his mythology of mind as he occasionally did (Freud,
1916, SE15; final BBC radio address), as efforts to create an approach that could bring some
relief to human suffering. That Freud mistook his myths more often than not as invariant laws
only demonstrates the reliance of the mind and theory alike on absolute interpretations of such
mythic vehicles for emergent truths, and the amnesia or blindness of the scientific mindset about
the mythic roots of its cognition. The fact that the mythic advance-guard of new paradigms is
either confirmed or turned back by the systematic, objective knowledge which follows them only

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affirms the mutual necessity of these two domains of knowledge. The mythic/aesthetic and the
scientific turn out to be complementary modes of knowledge in the same way as primary and
secondary processes.

Freud repeatedly refers to the provisional and unsettled nature of his formulations. Therefore any
account which attempts to treat his ideas as credulously wedded to reductivism misses the
recognition of “live metaphor” (Carveth, 2001) at the heart of psychoanalysis. This phrase
describes the flexible, transitional language which serves the formation and emergence of as-yet
unformed insights. These mytho-poetic figures of speech12– such as id, ego, and superego - are
speculative, figurative agencies rather than concrete objects. Like dream and myth figures, they
are in transition and capable of carrying multiple and shifting meanings. Freud’s awareness of
this factor, and his willingness, at times, to own and not dismiss the value of his own experience,
makes his scientific terminology provisional in the best sense.

In 1930 he observed to Romain Rolland (Freud, E., 1960, Letters, #246, pp.392-393), that “our
terms such as regression, narcissism, pleasure principle are of a purely descriptive nature and
don’t carry within themselves any valuation.” Freud here sidestepped one illusory domain to be
intellectually deconstructed – art - for another - the mystical, which he allowed at least a brief
acknowledgement. He ironically asserted to Rolland that, notwithstanding his dismissal of
religion in The Future of an Illusion (Freud, 1930), “I am not an out and out skeptic…. I am
absolutely positive: there are certain things we cannot know” (ibid.). These comments prompt us
to move beyond static terminology into efforts at live poetic metaphor. In his account of his joy
and astonishment at the Acropolis, Freud says that it “could have had another explanation,”
entirely subjective and not a product of the “special character of the place” (Freud, 1930, SE 21,
p.25). Yet Freud here still opposes what he knows to what he feels; his experience splits into
what is true and what is, perhaps, subjectively meaningful; he concludes that he should “not lay
too much stress on the significance of the experience” (ibid.) in which significance corresponds

12
Jung recognized this approach in his own writing, and referred to this sort of construct as “borderline concepts”
(Shamdasani, 2003)

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to objective, verifiable knowledge. None the less, there it is: he expresses reserve toward analysis
in the face of his resonant feeling, a subliminal perception of attunement that was sufficiently
powerful to vie with the intellect.

Clearly, in his more theoretical and speculative writings, Freud alternated between embracing
and deconstructing subjective phenomena, particularly those which affected him personally. His
clinical theory was more unequivocal in its separation of reality and wishful illusion. In freeing
Freudian concepts from their claim to defining the full range of the psyche according to the
pathological mechanisms of neurosis, we therefore also free ourselves from the need to
pathologize Freud. We can now appreciate how Freudian theory, and the range of depth
psychologies developed over time, are themselves demonstrations of the poetic means by which
the intellect, as one dimension of creativity dominated by secondary process, seeks to present
itself and deliver ideas about its encounters with the world. Our critique of Freud in regard to art
is developmental in several respects. First, the genesis of psychoanalytic theory may be seen as
having been constrained and also delivered by the same mechanisms that apply to dreams and
creativity in the broadest sense – both wish-fulfillment, compromise, and mytho-poesis. As a
creative synthesis, psychoanalytic theory depends on a primary act of figurability, by which any
intuition acquires sufficient differentiation and coherence to function as a mythic vehicle for idea
with the potential to cross into consciousness and communication. All emergent phenomena rely
upon, and are also constrained by, the strength and plasticity of their container in order to
manifest in the world. The concepts of the caesura (Bion, 1977/1989), and the potential space
(Winnicott, 1971), which I envision both as womb and as the resonant body of a musical
instrument, express this principle, and will be part of this discussion.

Revisions of Dreamwork

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Freud’s ambivalence concerning art and dream, and the place of neurosis in both healthy and
neurotic people, in sickness and creativity, is traceable through his revisions of his central
theoretical work, The Interpretation of Dreams. Revisiting its central issues, Freud observes that
“the dreams of the neurotic do not differ in any important respect from those of normal people”
(Freud, 1915-17, SE, 16: 456-7). “Normal” people have in their possession the tools of the
neurotic, but as a rule employ them only in the night-world: “the healthy person is a virtual
neurotic; but dreams appear to be the only symptoms he is capable of achieving” (ibid.). Freud’s
assertion that the artist is a virtual neurotic (Freud, 1935 SE20: 73) makes clear that neurosis
persisted as the anchor point of dreams and creativity through to the end of his career.

Although the theoretical core of The Interpretation of Dreams remained largely intact, its
successive revisions reflect Freud’s efforts to reconcile the positivist certainty of scientific
research with the subjective nature of the dream-life. He struggled with the conflict between the
maintenance of scientific objectivity and the confessional, self-analytic source of the dream
theory. The opposing fields of rigorous natural science and of the mind – the latter having been
until then the province of metaphysics - were brought together in a new discourse, particularly
novel in showing the rigorous scientist attempting to observe his own intangibles. Freud’s re-
visioning and shifting of perspective from personal to objective was the necessary means of
seeing something larger than the immediate scope of vision. It also necessarily highlighted his
personal struggle with certainty, self-disclosure, and the perception of his own duality. Had he
done this work fifty years later, he would have had a similar struggle, but with an expanded
repertoire of paradigms, terms, and contexts, less concerned with opposites and hierarchies of
nature. The dualism at the base of his discourse could not accommodate fluid relationships
between the subjective and the scientifically rigorous without scientifically responsible
reconsideration and revision. His efforts can be seen to alternate between protectively guarding
his intuition, then asserting it as evidence and theoretical linchpin, while he continually recruited
validating insights from colleagues.

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Let us take an example. Grubrich-Simitis (in Pick and Roper, 2004) examines Freud’s attention
to the Dream of Irma’s Injection in the first German edition of The Interpretation of
Dreams. With this dream Freud had identified the crucial wish-fulfilling function of dreaming as
early as 1895, giving it a section unto itself in the first edition of The Interpretation of
Dreams. Freud ends this chapter by stating that the dream is more than “an expression of a
fragmentary activity of the brain” (Freud; 1900, SE 4: 121), and that symbolic interpretation of
its details reveals its purpose of fulfilling wishes.

The wish-fulfilling agency is, however, outside one’s conscious control and intention – indeed it
exists to exclude consciousness of the wish. It operates autonomously, weaving personal detail
and impersonal “inherited” tendency by way of a psychic mechanism to which we are subject but
of which we are only partly aware. The conflict between the personal material and the
impersonal mechanics of the psyche highlights the generative paradox at the origin of
psychoanalysis. By interpreting dreams, Freud engaged with both the objective phenomenon we
call the psyche - the objective fact that psychic reality consists of the subjective, deeply personal
details of human experience, and the human truths that can be known only by means of attention
to the deeply personal dream-life. The dream is the analytical royal road to the objective,
scientific system of knowledge of the unconscious, the soil bed of subjectivity, the dynamics of
which are those of the dreamwork. Compounding this paradox is the fact that the source of this
rigorously construed presentation of the psyche as an object and its wish-fulfilling, subjective
dynamic is Freud’s analysis of his own dreams.

Freud’s own reaction to these paradoxes is the point here. He mapped it out in the qualifications
added to successive editions of the book. Freud was strongly cautioned by Fliess to maintain the
boundary between his private life and his published science; Freud had written that in exposing
his dreams as the foundation of his science, even in redacted fashion, he had himself “lost the
feeling of shame required of an author” (Freud/Fleiss, 1887 – 1904). However, in the first
edition, Freud asserts that the dream’s status as “the first member of a class of abnormal

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psychical phenomena” (Freud, 1900; p xxiii) assures that his work had not “trespassed beyond
the sphere of interest covered by neuropathology” (ibid. p.xxiv). He was, in other words,
assuring both himself and us that although his data were personal and symbolic, they were
evidence of pathological process that can be generalized as falling within the scope of medical
science. Treating the dream and its mechanics as a medical phenomenon allowed him this
legitimizing rationalization.

These cycling qualifications continued through subsequent editions. The second edition begins
with testimony to the personal impact of the death of his father. Two years later, Freud
introduces the third edition with an emphasis on the gains in scientific knowledge since the first
edition, through the theory of sexuality’s deeper handling of the “more complicated forms of
psycho-neurosis.” In other words, theoretical growth in accommodating the subjective,
dreamwork-based dimension of life lent containment to the confessional element. The third
edition inaugurated the contributions of others, most notably Rank and Stekel, both of whom
could lend consensual validation as well as elaboration, leading to what one writer calls “a
growing orchestration or a transition from solo voice to choir” (Grubrich-Simitis, 2002/2004,
p.27). At this time, during their visit to Clark University, according to Jung, Freud expressed fear
of the loss of authority that would have come from divulging uncomfortable details of his dreams
(McGuire, 1994, p.246). Freud’s 3rd revision, subsequent to the incident mentioned by Jung,
invokes again the authoritative presence of science to justify the attention to the personal. If the
latter is true, it adds to a number of tactics and counter-maneuvers aimed at both asserting the
personal/subjective and disguising or armoring it against shame and loss of authority. He invokes
authority and science to guard against the risks of disclosing too much personal material despite
his assurances to the effect that such disclosures did not trespass beyond the sphere of
neuropathology. He thus continued a process begun prior to the first edition, when Fliess
admonished him about self-disclosure in ways Freud himself considered “too drastic” (Grubrich-
Simitis, 2002/2004, p.25).

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In retrospect, Freud’s oscillation between positions, while gathering qualifying voices and
opinions of colleagues, the choir of contrasting and complementary voices extending across
decades and schools of thought, reads as a symphonic movement toward the opening of space
where theoretical reconciliation of incompatible attitudes about the personal, the scientific, and
the transpersonal, might occur. Freud’s episodic articulation of the characters and conflicts of a
myth of psychic creation was the main act in the inaugural opening of a world-space for a
science of subjectivity. Neither objective science nor personal or collective mythology were
adequate frameworks; what was required, and what became evident in Freud’s alternating
movements along his path, was a model that might grow to demonstrate how a generative
psychic space – a container and vehicle for meaning – would arise through an integration of
faculties. This is precisely the area elaborated by Jung, Bion, Rycroft, Winnicott, and Loewald,
in a further generation, or symphonic movement, in the generative symphony begun in Freud’s
inner circle.

Libido: Promethean Fire, Psychosexual Energy, Mythological Currency

__________________________________________________________________________

I have addressed the ways in which Freud’s work as a whole may be construed as a mythology
and a cosmogony, each of these categories making use of the terms and concepts of natural
science. The question of energy applies to both mythology and cosmogony. The myths of
antiquity were “the physics, biology and psychology of the pre-classical world” (J.R. Raper,
PSYART, 9/17/2007). The gods’ agency expressed the energies of creation – Prometheus’ stolen
fire, Mercurial music, the lightning bolt of Zeus, the generative passion of Eros, are just a few
examples. Freud’s own unfinished movement towards sublimation was several things: a mythic
movement toward the retrieval of Erotic wholeness from debased sexuality; a quasi-alchemical
process of redemption of essence from base matter; and an anti-entropic principle in which the
fleeting energies could be transformed into something real, lasting, and worthwhile.

Libido expresses wish or desire, the repression and redirection of which form a main concern of
Freudian theory. However, Freud never equates libido with wish, but instead uses it to denote the

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quantity of energy available for mental work. Also, until the advent of the structural theory, it is
specifically energy with a sexual valence. Conceived initially as the purely sexual energy
deriving from bodily needs, libido is fluidly available to any of the erotogenic zones of the body.
It is also described as “a measure of the processes and transformations occurring in the field of
sexual excitation, [whose] production, increase or diminution, distribution and displacement
should afford us possibilities for explaining the psychosexual phenomena observed” (Freud,
1905d, SE7, p.217).

Libido is thus defined circularly and complexly. Its meaning is adopted from wish or desire, as a
quantitative construct of psychosexual energy which itself can be displaced from one source and
object to others. But then it is also defined as itself an indicator or measure of the
transformations in wishes and desires, whose nature is defined as psychosexual and which follow
the quantitative laws of energy. It is also, however, as Rycroft (1995) states, a hypothetical form
of mental energy, which, according to Freud, conveniently “affords us possibilities of
explaining… phenomena observed” (ibid.). It is thus a hermeneutic device, and a currency for
myth-making and mythic transformation as much as it is the psychosexual energy of the body.

The hypothesis, or mytheme, of libido is changed and displaced, as Freud’s model changes.
Several non-sexual or de-sexualized forms of libido are postulated after the introduction of the
ego and the structural theory. The ego has concerns, such as the preservative and narcissistic
instincts, which are not conceived of as erotogenic or based on wishes. With the increasing
attention given to the ego and the life and death instincts, Freud redefines libido “…as a
quantitative magnitude (though not at present actually measurable) of those instincts which have
to do with all that may be comprised under the word ‘love’” (Freud, 1921c). It is quantitative but
not measurable. It falls under the master category he calls love.

Yet Freud’s mercurial work on libido also conveys the sense of the inexorable in the psyche, its
drivenness, its function as bearer of potential, of current in waiting to drive the expressions of
love and work. This brings us to a problem – namely, if there is any primacy to image, as the
primary activity of the psyche, then we are faced with a return of the polymorphous, which, on
first encounter, Freud labeled perverse, expressed through erotogenic bodily zones and

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membranes other than mature genital sexuality. Without being distracted by the conventional
sexuality held as the supposed standard for the well-adjusted adult, the polymorphous is
important stuff if we are to uphold the link between the living energy and its expression in body
and image, through every zone available to our experiential and presentational palette. Further
theoretical developments, such as those along the avenue of phantasy, add to the palette of forms
and qualities endowing the underlying dreamwork, expanding Freud’s already broad definitions
of libido, to the extent that continuing to call libido sexual is nothing more than a convention, a
habit, or an effort to remain moored to terminology in the face of the anxiety of insight. Tiresias’
message to Oedipus, among other things, was that things are not as you wish them to appear, and
the current hegemony will not hold, least of all in the domain of words. When Jung defined
libido as not essentially sexual, but "…the energy that manifests itself in the life process and is
perceived subjectively as striving and desire" (Ellenberger, p.697), he was not denying the
importance of sexuality, but placing it back within the repertoire of human predispositions,
which, in the psych, emerge as symbols. Sex is central, important, problematic but not the
definition of libido. Libido is then capable of being directly expressed in sexuality, in the
enthusiasm to fuck, to fuck with, more complexly to love. But it is in itself the cash in
Hermes/Mercury’s pocket, the current generated by his battery, powering his most defining
characteristics – to enchant, to change shape, to leave symbolic traces and resonances taken up in
the meaning of our relationships, our discourses, our dreams, our choices. Mercurius trumps
Oedipus, or rather, Tiresias, Apollo, Oedipus, and Freud. But he does not banish them, lacking
this power – he leaves them delighted, outraged, fascinated, shaking their heads as they gather
and account for the shifting shapes of their truths, which remain true, but with qualifications.
Mercurius, too, only opens the playing field to a radical inclusion of the archaic psychic forms
that are nothing but the expression in image of our nature. There is something basically
compelling about the tenet of Archetypal Psychology (Hillman, 1972, 1989), that development
of Jung’s Analytical Psychology: namely, rather than thinking of a transformation of libido into
image, the archaic patterns of psychic functioning are themselves the organization and
organizational principle of psyche. The particular images populating psychic life are – if we feel
compelled to keep the metaphor of libido, that exemplar of the Freudian indefinite-magnificent -
the conduits of libido into whatever passions, engagements, projects in which we are enmeshed.
Thus, Freud’s reliance on a small and ill-defined pantheon of mythic characters and concepts for

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all his pivotal ideas was but a stunted intuition that all of psychological life is mythic,
mythopoetic, all our psychology and science mythological endeavors. Yet, again, even the
champions of image, the archetypal psychologists, have barely touched the surface of music –
they largely remain with the visual and the narrative. One might have to return to the 15th
century for Marcilio Ficino’s musings on music and the soul to find a dedicated archetypal
treatment of music. Examples of efforts to find the musical corollary to visual and narrative
themes as expressions of the underlying structure of psychic life do turn up, but not without
considerable effort.

Freud, if not the majority of Freudians, flexed considerably to encompass intuition into the
insufficiency of atomistic explanations and definitions. With the introduction of the life and
death instincts, Freud’s explanatory repertoire is considerably expanded. He hypothesizes the
action of two general tendencies, one that serves the enhancement of complexity and perpetuity,
and another that guides excitations and action toward zero. Together they suggest an instinctual
expression of the tension in all nature between elaboration and stasis, dispersal and containment,
and transformation and deadness. This new duality supersedes the pleasure and reality principles.
Excitation and pleasure/displeasure, in the final instinct theory, are largely supplanted by the pull
between enhancement and stasis, both of which contribute to the experience of the pleasurable
and the unpleasurable in complex ways. Yet the thermodynamic treatment of libido persists: the
forces of nature are still suspended between the mythic deities that embody them in the mind and
culture, and the brute physical view by which libido is seen as a currency of available energy to
be impelled, exchanged, and extinguished. Freud’s model thus shows its ambivalence, suspended
between a clinical model of personal wishes, in their symptomatic distortions and ill-fated
expenditures of libido, and a mythology that makes these human follies a microcosm of a higher
order beyond the horizon of the individual psyche.

Missing from Freud’s manifest mythology is a sense of what life is - the dynamic within matter
that conducts libido in the service of love, and which is torn between perpetuation and extinction.
Our willingness to entertain contemporary scientific metaphors is helpful here, as the nature of

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life, “psychic space” and the hypothetical energy of its inhabitants is at the heart of Freud’s
inquiry. The presence of matter, even in vacuum, has a dynamic effect on the space around it. In
vacuum, the effect is relativistic, involving gravitation as well as quantum effects. Matter itself,
which we are told is mostly empty space, is an epiphenomenon of the interpenetrating dynamic
fields of tension between particles of opposing and complementary charge, whose solidity is an
illusion. On the macro scale, these amount to the distortion in space-time known as gravity,
which binds us in irrevocable spatial interrelation determined by no external authoritative law
apart from the that governing mass and distance, and their effect on the particular dimensional
medium, space-time, in which they are nested. In solid bodies and within the human bodies that
grow within and among human bodies, matter makes itself known in ways both seismic and
resonant; in air it is acoustic, a complex interaction of energetic wavefronts. Also in air, we find
the olfactory sense that engages the chemical signature of life, the fragrance of those geometric
knots of energy known as molecules, which has such a distinct impact on mind and body. The
particle itself, we are told by one mathematically compelling but controversial model, is one end
of a vibrating string woven through a higher-dimensional matrix, its energy the product of the
harmonics of that string, its place in the physical order of mass and energy the product of its
resonant relationship within the orchestra of particles/strings.

The life of the psyche-soma is nested, Freud tells us in his theory of life and death instincts, in
the primal and higher order of the natural world. This means, if we are to have some equanimity
with regard to figures of speech that “afford(s) us possibilities of explaining…phenomena
observed” (Freud, 1905d, SE7, p.217), that both simple and complex, dead and living matter
resound and extend beyond themselves in every modality available to nature. The organizational
complexity of atoms and cells, and simple empathic attunement among people, attest to this fact
and its range. A musically-attuned psychological awareness will allow us to more fully attend to
the dimension of coherent resonances of complex, mindful, coherent matter –particularly the
psyche-soma - in a world that resounds at every level. Language can only imperfectly articulate
what happens on this level. In the embrace of these resonant aspects of life, the simple dualities
which served the first iterations of psychoanalysis – primary/secondary, pleasure/reality,
manifest and latent – either fall away or take on expanded meaning.

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2.g Revisioning The Structural Theory

___________________________________________________________________________

With the structural theory, and the birth of id, ego, and superego, Freud called attention to the
division of the mind not into mechanisms or regions, but rather agencies in tensile,
complementary relationships. Seen as a mythology, all these agencies are quasi-deities, standing
in for epitomes of chaotic appetite, censure and prohibition, negotiation. As in a cosmogony, the
psychic world is born from the reconciliation of the work among these gods. More importantly, it
represents the flowering of subjective agency from the dynamic integration of functions. The
following review of the qualities of these quasi-deities is not meant as a primer, but in order to
emphasize their mythological and process characteristics in terms consonant with the themes of
this project.

Id:

Freud’s id is a Latinate variation of Groddeck’s “das es” – the it (Groddeck, 1923). Freud
departs from Groddeck, who in turn derived the term from Nietzsche’s definition of das es as
“whatever in our nature is impersonal and, so to speak, subject to natural law.” Groddeck’s
Nietzschean meaning is far more inclusive, being close to that range of human life designated by
Jung as the objective psyche (Jung, CW7) and the collective unconscious (Jung, CW6); it is, for
Groddeck, the impersonal force which lives man, rather than the reverse (Groddeck, 1923).

Freud adapts “id” more narrowly than Groddeck and Jung, to designate that part of the psyche
which is sheer instinct. It is known by analogy – a seething cauldron, a chaos of unorganized
energies (Freud, 1933a, SE 22, 73), or a great reservoir of libido (Freud, 1923, SE 19, 30, n, 1;
46), present from the beginning of life. It obeys no logic, does not know time, wants only the

69
immediate satisfaction of appetites, and recognizes no structures or rules. Laplanche and Pontalis
(1973, p.198) point out that its lack of organization is apparent by contrast with the
organizational mode of the ego. Rycroft more critically points out that the manner in which
Freud unintentionally describes the id is identical to the “apophatic” or negative method by
which Christian mystics described God (Rycroft, 1979, 154-155). Jung adapted Kant in calling
his own analogous transitional constructs “borderline concepts”, emphasizing their positive
function as symbols for what can only be intuited in the absence of direct apprehension. It
thereby represents Freud’s mystification of the id, in the process both denying any inherent
structure and intelligence to the primary process by which the id’s influence is expressed, and
emphasizing its limitless energy and unknowable nature, thereby making it wholly-other and
infinitely powerful. Hillman (1972, p.138) asks
“Why, may we ask, were the new continents of the psyche not named with
more felicity? Irrational and unconscious, like insane, are negative signs,
begrudgingly affixed by reason to what it does not comprehend. One might
have called Uranus or Neptune “non-Saturn”, Australia “un-Asia”. (It) betrays
the same pejorative bias toward the speech of the soul, whose expressions are
simply imaginative, symbolic, fantastic, mythic – all words standing on their
own, requiring no prior terms that are rational, conscious, and sane.”

This contradiction cannot suffice – as discussed, Freud had already relaxed the opposition of
primary and secondary, and pleasure and reality, treating them as figures of speech for mental
endowments that can switch places, take on each others’ characteristics, and which do not exist
as such in the actual psyche. Others have said much about the innate structure and generative
potential of the id. Grotstein (2000) and Loewald (2000) both suggest an id which is more than
the repository of blind forces. It is rather a complex, intelligent alter ego prepared to mediate the
infinities of instinct and internal event into forms of desire with psychic potential, that is, which
are capable of being represented. As a psychic agency, the id is the “pulsion,” a French usage
favored by Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) and Kristeva (1980) among others, a richer term
suggesting not simply drive but pulse, an acknowledgment of the endowment of biological
rhythm, structure, and temporality - a vector, rather than just a scalar quantity of energy. This
sense of the id reflects the coherence of the body, and is thus more faithful to biological tenets
than the Freudian negative characterization, which attributes to it inexorable chaos and appetite,
a descriptive antithesis of order. Grotstein’s formulation evokes Bion’s (1992), to be explored in

70
later chapters, in which alpha function at the archaic level of the psyche, as the creative principle
at the base of psychological life, transforms sheer excitations (beta-elements) into usable mental
elements.

Chaos and psychosis correspond then not to the nature of the id, but to the failure of its formative
process; they derive from the fragmentation of the dream-task, failing to integrate the pulsions
and turbulences of the body into coherent subjectivity. The id is re-conceptualized as inchoate in
the sense of primal, self-ordering potential, rather than as chaotic. The id is, or constitutes, a
horizon; its drives serve as mediating and semiotic forms for bringing the infinities of inner and
outer events and sense data into the scope of subjective life, into psychic existence. It thus
serves, in its mediatory function, as an “alter ego” (Grotstein, 1992, p.76), or what I would call a
proto-ego. Thus, primary process and the id have no essential relation to psychosis. Psychosis
stems from the fragmentation, attenuation, or corruption of inherent subjective structure and the
resulting capacity for subjective experience (Rycroft, 1962, 1979). The id comes to serve as the
mediating horizon between the objective world of instincts and impersonal events, all which falls
outside the purview of the ego, on the one hand, and the energy and formal matrix for
representation and its experiential and communicative qualities– hence the shared horizon of
dreamwork, mystical/religious experience and aesthetics.

Ego:
Freud‘s handling of the ego was particularly unsettled. He considered the ego at various points to
be all of the following: (1) “I”; (2) the aspect of the id that has been adapted to social reality; (3)
the functional aspect of the mind that allows a person to adapt to reality by limiting and guiding
the satisfactions of the id and adjusting attitude and behavior to circumstances; (4) the structure
of the mind resulting from the influences of key experiences and relationships, and determining
the future tendencies of perception, emotion, and relations; (5) the mediating and mastery-
focused agency that utilizes reason and delay of gratification in order to maintain stability and
effectiveness; and (6) the shifting border zone between subjective states belonging both to the

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conscious and unconscious, containing the capacity for awareness, choice, and action upon
impulse and inhibition.

Laplanche and Pontalis (1973, p.141) discuss a “second perspective” on Freud’s concept of ego
that shares characteristics of the figurative horizon I describe. They refer to the notion of ego as
the psychic expression of a specialization of bodily functions, the progressive differentiation of
bodily agencies which expresses the organization and continuity of the psyche-soma. It serves as
a matrix which organizes the instincts in preparation for symbolization or repression by the
psychic apparatus. Then, they describe an ego constructed of projections of this form of bodily
representation and functional organization onto a perceptual surface that registers the impacts of
intersubjective experience, preparing them for identification and introjection.

The ego, then, is an agent of apperception and its metabolism and transformation into psychic
structure. It is not by definition conscious, but is rather the watcher, guide, and mediator who
brings the mercurial forms of the id within the apperceptive sphere of consciousness. There they
can be registered and reflected upon by a reflective subject, an inner analyst, alert to the
dreamlife and able to work with it.

Superego:

The superego is an agency or personification of vigilance, an assertion of limits and opposition,

in contrast to the propulsive and demanding id. Freud came to associate the superego with the
death instinct, weaving aggression, judgment, guilt, and conscience into a dynamic of projection
and internalization. Melanie Klein, following Karl Abraham, treated the superego as originating
at the beginning of life as the vehicle of the death instinct, its aggression projected into the
experience of the breast and then introjected as guilt. Klein’s extension of the link of the
superego to the death instinct, and her location of it at the beginning of life instead of in the
identifications at the resolution of the Oedipal phase, show the superego as an archaic agent of

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phantasy. It both endows and torments or destroys psychic structure, guiding the Oedipal
phenomena rather than resulting from them. The failure to symbolically contain and transform
psychic violence and retribution results, for Bion, in attacks on linking, or the rupture of
symbolic capacity, and the affective character of “nameless dread” (Bion, 1962, 1963). The
critical importance of handling of destructive energies also formed a central theme in
Winnicott’s work. Before the capacity to think, work, and love can begin to manifest, the
emerging mind struggles to survive the violence of its own underpinnings. Britton (1998, p.55)
associates the mythic character of Bion’s “ego-destructive super-ego” (Bion, 1959, p.207; 1992,
p.97) with the cosmological myths of the Vedics, the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, in which
the gods of creation are opposed by a monster who threatens to dismantle creation and return the
world to primordial chaos.

Britton points to the ways in which processes and tribulations of mental creation involve a
complex geometry of forces and voices, which lend themselves to a full, cross-sensory range of
aesthetic and imaginal life. One way they emerge into subjective life is as cosmogonic myths and
other primal stories, populated by an organization of deities and monsters, personifications, and
allegorical figures. Here is another level on which the Jungian concern with fairy tales as
vehicles for archetypes intersects with, and even demonstrates, the Kleinian dimension of
phantasy and its emergence into consciousness and culture. On this primal level of organization,
underlying that of ego-mediated creativity, the images and themes populating the endless
variations of dream, art, and religious mythology emerge in their “original” form. According to
Britton (2003, p.74): “…the Chaos Monster should properly reside in that “deep unconscious,”
the phantasied internal counterpart to pre-Creation in mythology.” Thus, the super-ego, first
thought to be the internalized construction of secondary process phenomena, aural and verbal
traces of the parental superegos, in fact, as Klein saw, has its roots in the figurative, mythic
ground of the primary process, expressing the destructive and aggressive instincts, later to evolve
into the functions and challenges associated with the superego. The superego seen this way is a
self-limiting psychic structure evolving, from the dream-life’s reconciliation of inexorable
aggression (a chaos monster, imagined in terms of primary process), heredity, culture, and the
introjection of the family dynamic.

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I modify Britton’s analogy by reference to Hermes/Mercury: the super-ego is a vigilant god
whose role in the cosmogony of the mind is to spot rogue, absconding forms and either destroy
them or demand sacrifice or tribute. In this way errant voices are harmonized or muted, and the
gods of elusive movement and of rigid proportion find points of reconciliation. Chaos is the
cacophony of voices of psychic gods who have failed to strike the bargain such as that between
Hermes and Apollo. Zeus ordered Hermes to return the cattle he stole from Apollo, but he
permitted the negotiation – Hermes’ ace in the hole - which brought music to Olympus and
mankind. In working our way musically and mythically through Freud’s diversification from
topography to dynamic structure, we find that chaos and order, primary and secondary, pleasure
and reality all have very different meanings, psychologically speaking, from those limited
dualities to which we have grown accustomed. In this way, we affirm Rycroft’s musing about the
relations between ideas, thought of as themes and modes, and the challenge of translating and
integrating the transmissions from our pluralistic inner culture. Their counterpoint of themes,
modes, and rhythms demand an expanded paradigm, a suitable instrument and compositional
structure, in order to sound as a coherent orchestral whole in spite of necessary complexity,
dissonance, and uncertainty.

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Chapter Three Beyond Repression, into Eros

__________________________________________________________

The Myth of a Science

Representation is not necessarily the outcome of repression. Prohibition and distortion in the face
of the instincts, based on Freud’s model of repression, compose one level of the forces that shape
the manifest form of an idea, image, or act. Yet the distortion exemplified by the neurotic model
is only one part of the larger mental and human picture of those processes. Neurosis, normal and
pathological, must be variants within a larger repertoire of figurative processes by which any
thought arises from its inarticulate beginnings into appreciable and meaningful form, and the
psyche into one capable of such processes. Apart from the substitutions, disavowals, and
deadenings, we also have the struggle to think in the face of the elements. These are represented
well by music and physical analogy. The unsettled quality of Freud’s musings on art and the

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oceanic are among the theoretical guideposts which suggest his deep dissatisfaction with his own
central, reductive model whose metaphors are “purely descriptive… and don’t carry within
themselves any valuation” (Freud, E., 1960, Letters, #246, pp.392-393). They also suggest
Freud’s awareness that the aesthetic and the mystical are to be better addressed by means other
than those derived from and applicable to pathology and neurotic suffering. There is a
momentous Freudian roster of transitional, signpost ideas, chimeras built of physical and mythic
terms and concepts. This roster includes: deferred action / Nachtraglichkeit, sublimation, primary
repression, and a few myths and allegories, such as Oedipus, Eros, and Thanatos. These
unresolved threads, remote from the scientific molds which never adequately contained them, are
evidence that Freud’s own work, particularly in the last phase of his life, was a transitional step
towards perspectives to which he could never adequately reconcile himself, nor make compatible
with his central tenets.

Up to this point I have traced the development of the overall structure of Freudian space, and the
organization and transformation of discrete structures within it. I have presented it in accordance
with Freud’s own assessment, as an effort at a mythology of the psyche, and as a method to
relieve neurotic suffering. To this end, I have presented the scientific and therapeutic
underpinnings of psychoanalysis rather as mythic underpinnings, articulating the psychological
affinities between the two means of describing reality, each of which weaves the organization of
the phenomenal world into an explanatory structure which bridges the “objective” reality of the
objects of physical science with the dream-discourse about it, the story told by humans. I have
suggested a mythic character, Hermes/Mercury, to account for a missing principle of motion,
boundary, elaboration, and transformation common both to the psyche and the natural order. This
character was known in antiquity but all-but-dissociated from the psychoanalytic canon. It
fortuitously links music, missing from psychoanalytic discourse, to language, representation,
myth, and natural science.

Freud's early medical model, by which hysterical symptoms were seen as transformations of the
psychological into the physical, made it necessary to conjure a language by which to posit the
energy, objects, and processes taking part in the transformation. Their topography grew into an
organic map of psychic chambers, into which differentiated structures - id, ego, and superego -

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fit at their respective, overlapping levels. The functional relations of these organs gave them a
degree of interdependence irrespective of their place relative to consciousness, but their
interdependence required complex routes and increasing space for exchange of energy and new
forms.

This requirement was one large factor behind Freud's movement toward synthetic principles,
such as Eros and sublimation. He began early to see the affinities of myth and science, and
attempted to represent their relations in a chimerical language, part science and part myth. The
connection to biology was maintained through sex, its excitations and discharges, and to physics
through the mechanics of energy routing and conservation. Yet more and more, the functions of
the hypothetical organs of the psyche began to differentiate into the subjective categories
representing Freud's other pole of concern – subjectivity, the human illusion arising from the
reality of the material world, and the perplexing fact that meaning, and therefore truth, seemed to
arrive in the vehicle of illusion.

Freud’s continued exploration of the forms of psychic life revealed to him a much wider
repertoire of maneuvers than those contained in his dreamwork. He also came upon logical
conundrums that called for theoretical re-fittings, which he treated as speculatively necessary but
indemonstrable – such as primal repression and primal phantasy. Moreover, Freud's early
interests in art and mythology asserted themselves, incapable of fitting comfortably within these
structures unless disguised as medical phenomena. The attempt to handle them in that fashion
did not last. The paradox of Freud's creation of a mythology by which to scientifically analyze
the processes of myth-making is partially resolved by a survey of his processes and principles.
There is, perhaps, no better way to represent the dynamic activity of subjective agencies than by
the movements and transformations of mythic agencies within a differentiated space. The
characters and themes in this chapter, given identities with both scientific and mythic qualities,
may be viewed as either science or myth. In cathexis, how is value assigned to special objects?
In repression, what objects and bearers are permitted entry to a region of the kingdom, what
sacrifice must be made, and what subterfuge is possible? What are the two or more tiers of truth
in the caste system of primary and secondary processes, what is the relative status of each, and
how do the delegates of each communicate and collaborate? In negation, how is a necessary truth

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communicated among the people without speaking the forbidden words? How is a royal road
built with day residues, found objects, and detritus?

These ways of rephrasing some of the topics in this chapter are not merely playful; they respond
to part of Freud's own scope of inquiry. He revisited psychic processes and principles which
were more obviously in the territory of Jung, and which are built on the premise that something
transcendent always happens in mental life; processes by definition always tend to lead beyond
themselves, or beyond the present set of conditions; and when patterns repeat, they do so in new
configurations and in new contexts, forming both the foundation of creativity and the persistence
and variety – the particularly failed creativity, or as Jung said, the attempts at solution - of
symptom formation, neurotic suffering, and character pathology. Therefore the cornerstones of
Freud's theory – repression and dreamwork, both descendents of a medical model of neurosis –
required radical expansion in the face of what was coming to be known about the imagination.

Primary and Secondary Processes and Creativity

___________________________________________________________________________

In their Freudian origins, primary and secondary process strictly divide the rational from the
irrational, and reality from wishful illusion. Thus they bring a dualist, rationalist perspective to
the products of the imagination, and to subjectivity per se. Treated concretely, they give rise to
circular interpretations of dreams, art, and other mental phenomena. Freud’s premise that
primary process, the wellspring of the dreamwork, is irrational and concerned with wishful
illusions, determines the conclusion that any of products is at least in part a wish fulfillment. The
key post-Freudian views of subjectivity transform primary process into something based less on
wishes than on a primary capacity for structured and organized expression of bodily or not-yet-
conscious events, in parallel partnership with the differentiation associated with secondary
process. Secondary process, both per se and in Freud’s theorizing about it, is itself more or less
blind to the implicit order to be found in primary process. However, in its natural partnership
with primary process, secondary process can be seen as preparing the presentational forms of

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primary process for reflection, communication, and work. Creativity is thus a dynamic and
flexible collaboration of the two adjacent regions between two opposite poles, while pathology is
a failure of their integration.

Others take the conflicts implicit in this clash as their points of departure. Rycroft challenges the
assumptions of primary and secondary process (Rycroft, 1962; 1979). He asks what a
psychoanalytic understanding of creativity and dreamwork would look like if the psyche were
seen not as the mirror of this radical duality, but as the aforementioned flexible and integrated
dimension in which primary and secondary processes adapt thinking in evolved ways for
different domains of life. His hypothesis repositions these processes as relative orientations on a
continuum which spans all mental life. Art, science, dreams, and pathology would then each
partake of the mechanisms and metaphoric processes of dreamwork, as Freud indeed maintained,
but free of the fallacy in which one variant subset – neurotic encryption of wish into a repressed
component and a substitute representation – serves as the model for all. I second Rycroft’s
position that Freud’s approach to art suffers from errors of translation of the creative and the
normal from their domain of experience into that of the detached analyst who represents
secondary process. Freud’s statements on dream interpretation support this. Interpretation is
“translation (of dreams) into the language of waking life” (Freud, CW 5:150); dreams are the via
regia to understanding the unconscious, but “work which proceeds in the contrary direction…is
our work of interpretation. This work of interpretation seeks to undo the dream-work” (Freud,
SE15, p.170), in the interest of the ego that speaks to the analyst in waking life. The value of this
clinical maneuver is not in question; its application to creative life, and perhaps to all life in
which love and work function well, is very much in question.

When Freud called his main terms – hallucination, wish-fulfillment, narcissism, psychosis, etc
purely figurative, and without definite valuation – he offered a caveat, knowingly or not, to
analysts making judgments about art, dream, and religious experience. Neither Freud nor his
successors could rest with a pathological vocabulary for the natural phenomenology,

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development, and aesthetic sensitivity and striving of the mind. Hence efforts such as Rycroft’s,
toward dissolving and transcending the duality of primary and secondary process. Before it is a
cure or an ethos, analysis is a means of translating representations of experience from the
symbolic mode into an analytic one. It cannot be that psychoanalysis has nothing to say about art
and integrated subjective experience; nor can it be that the artist is necessarily a virtual neurotic.
Freud’s own enormously plastic revisioning of certain aspects of his material, as well as his own
statements (Freud, E., 1960, Letters, #246, pp.392-393), already suggest that he knew implicitly
that such formulations were never more than provisional mappings, subject to change as the
complex subjective reality they addressed revealed more of itself. Both art and dreamwork are
precisely the parallel domains in which this continual re-imagining takes place. The analytic and
the aesthetic/symbolic can be, in Loewald’s terms, “fluidly interpenetrating dialectics” (Loewald,
2000; Mitchell, 1995), to our cultural, theoretical and clinical benefit.

Sublimation, in Theory

____________________________________________________________________________

Freud’s theory is built on the assumption that manifest experience is the product of a process of
substitution in which instinctual motivation is diverted and reshaped by the psychic apparatus.
The very first instinctual experiences are those that leave their mark in the form of primal
repression – a problematic construct which will be explored in greater depth in a subsequent
section. Primal repression blocks the very possibility of representing similar instinctual
experience. Freud, uncomfortable with the speculative status of this construct, needing to place
its origin as a innate mechanism in actual events, at one point posits primal repression as based in
the genetic traces of actual experiences from ancient history (1939a, SE 23), e.g. the patricidal
urge. Freud establishes a premise that instinctual excitations are always and without exception
diverted from the threshold at which they would become conscious thoughts. The manifest is
then something derivative and distorted, leaving behind a latent trace of something base and
instinctual, incompatible with consciousness. The psyche, in the individual and in the culture, is
then on guard, instructed by repressions passed on from infancy of the individual and of the race.

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Freud has made historical humanity a virtual neurotic, as he did with the group psyche, the
dreamer and the artist, and repeats a religious mytheme. Original sin has become psychological
principle and fate, ontogeny and phylogeny confused, in order to treat the imaginary events of
antiquity as the sort of pathogenic trauma that would endow the species with a neurotic
mechanism, which would in turn manifest at the inception of the individual’ instinctual life. We
will return to this problem.

Freud, though, establishes alternate lines of meanings, for history and myth as he did for the
individual, which hinge on sublimation. One view is concerned with the channeling of sexual
libido into redemptive acts, the turning of raw energy into civilized work. Another is his intuition
of an imaginal wholeness that rescues sexuality and theory from the reductive rubric of neurosis,
and the psyche from this debased and desiccated notion of sexuality. This creative principle is
symbolized by the goddess Eros. Having established repression as his cornerstone (Freud, 1914d,
SE14), he then states (Freud, 1937c, SE23) that the discourse requires alternatives to it. The
psyche possesses other means; the discourse had to make space and then develop them. Seen as a
developmental stage in Freudian discourse, this is the point at which a metaphor derived from
antiquated science and alchemy reaches its aporia, the limits of its explanatory power, and begins
to hint at what it cannot articulate.

Sublimation takes a pre-eminent place in the roster of Freud’s avant-garde ideas, revealing the
continuity between him work and his successors. Early on in the development of the concept, he
identifies the link between sublimation, intellectual apprehension of overarching patterns and
relations, and the integrated patterns of aesthetics. In this he anticipates the concept of the whole
object in Kleinian thought. He indicates that the shift away from the genitals can mean growth
toward appreciation and synthesis of organized forms, an Erotic redemption of sexuality and its
place in human life and culture, as opposed to a neurotic concern for the channeling of libido. He
states that the visual fascination with the sexual object can be considered sublimated “in the
direction of art, if its interest can be shifted away from the genitals on to the shape of the body as

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a whole” (Freud, 1905, SE7, p.157) – in other words, away from the locus of bodily satisfaction
and onto the appreciation of form, anticipating the Kleinian development from part- to whole-
object relating.

Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) point out alternative meanings of “sublimation.” The first is the
denotation associated with the adjective “sublime” - beneath and beyond the limit or threshold
which links fields (Cohn and Miles, 1977). This sense refers to great works of art, idea, and
nature that elevate us and surpass our accustomed frame of reference. The other is that of
chemistry, in which sublimation is the passing of a solid into a gas, bypassing the intermediate
liquid state. That sense of the term also belonged to 14th century alchemy, in which it referred to
the purification of a base substance by heating it, separating the base residue from the rising
vapor which contains its pure essence. This illustrates the contrast between two polar views of
the purpose of psychoanalysis: one, the release of the higher (achievement in the form of work
and love) from the lower (instinct); the other, more consistent with Jung’s concept and that of
some Kleinians, the ascent of an evolved whole through the symbolic bridging of opposing
positions.

In his paper on Leonardo da Vinci (1910b S.E. 11: 57-137) Freud first proposed that in
sublimation one creatively transforms the sexual instincts into work. Rather than loving or
desiring, one investigates, explores, and does research (Freud, 1910b, p 81). The result bears
little or no trace of – is cleansed of disturbing reminders of -- the original elementary instinct.
This idealized account of the transformation of the instincts from which all mental life arises
(Freud, 1923a; SE18, 255) would apply to art in qualified ways.

In this early version of sublimation, one delays and substitutes, and at the end has investigated
instead of loving. For Leonardo this resulted in a life poorer in the “richest experiences…than in
other great men, and of other artists” (ibid.). Freud identifies experience and its richness as the
reward sacrificed for complete sublimation. Yet it is no longer the spurious reward of illusory
wish-fulfillments that stand opposed to insight. Freud paraphrases a translation of Leonardo’s

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statement that “one has no right to love or hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough
knowledge of its nature” (Freud, 1910b; 73). Yet if one knows too thoroughly, by Freud’s
reckoning, the passions pass, paradoxically, beyond reach. Freud attempts a compromise: to live
the rich life of the fully human being, one must not excessively neutralize the passions and
thereby sacrifice the affects and relationships that make life rewarding, although the passions
drive wishes and therefore fuel the attachment to illusion. Truth such as Leonardo achieved
cannot be the true goal of sublimation, because it diverges and detracts from love, and thus Eros.
The knowledge of form is not equivalent to the erotic experience of form, such as the love of a
whole person. To conquer by knowledge is tragic, leaving one desolate, bereft. And yet
intellectual conquest, as Freud the conquistador well knew, will admit nothing less. Again, Freud
reaches an aporia, a blocked path. The sublimation that restores the divine essence to sexuality,
and locates it in rich experiences, love, and precious reflections of life and love in art and work
(Freud, 1911, SE 12, p.224), is now incompatible with the sublimation that has conquered
illusion, standing against wish-fulfillment or finding a quantitative compromise with it. In
sublimation Freud seems to be seeking a way out of his dilemma of placing intellect against
illusion, image, and instinct. However, he never completes his exploration of it.

In Freud’s solution, sublimation therefore remains a quantitative ratio through most of his
writings. The discharge of libido by the sculptor, for example, is partial, as he has both created
his sublime form, and engaged and offered to others it sensually and pleasurably, as a precious
reflection of a truth. The scientist – also exemplified by Leonardo--represents the complete
discharge of libido which comes at the price of love. Here, Freud echoes his concern, from the
same period, that the intellectual loses women to the artist. He stands helpless, without the key to
the lock of the female heart, while the artist has easier access (Jones 1: 111; 2: 433). At the same
time the artist knows intuitively the deepest truths which the scientist can know only by tortuous
effort (Freud 1908; SE 9:143), and so the artist wins on both counts. Freud attempts to keep the
work of the intellectual and scientist identified with reality through the alleviation of suffering
and the building of civilization. Yet art’s yield of pleasure (ibid, p.153) also amounts to
something more: the return to reality that brings illuminating pleasure with the power to lift
repression and alleviate suffering (1915-17, SE16, p.376), yielding a world worth building and
knowing, at the very least. Art here achieves, in Freud’s own terms, most of the very goals of

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psychoanalysis. It does so through the creation of complex symbolic forms which are irreducible
to any particular wish or drive, but which instead synthesize and integrate. The dichotomy
between the modes of the artist and the scientist, and with them between pleasure and reality,
collapses.

Sublimation, through the creation of symbolic forms as precious reflections of reality (Freud,
1911, SE 12, p.224), can thus restore a sense of the sacred and whole to what has fallen into
profanity and fragmentation. Freud identifies (1910b, p.97) the loss of the divine essence of
sexuality as the reason we must sublimate. Therefore Freud’s second line of thought on
sublimation identifies culture and history as having robbed sexuality of its divine essence, such
that the sexuality we express today is an “exhausted remnant, [which] fell into contempt”
(1910b, p.97). Freud transparently paraphrases Nietzsche’s aphorism that “Christianity gave Eros
poison to drink; he did not die of it, but degenerated – into a vice” (Nietzsche, 2000, aph.168).

The theme of restoration of a primal psychic function is evident as early as 1910, while Freud
was still engaged in his dialogue with Jung. The instincts are problematic, by this account, not
simply because of their conflict with reality and reason, but because we have lost our connection
to them and their historical meaning, and to the primal humanity which grounds us. The mythic,
historical sense of the erotic in sublimation seems to function as a transitional construct, allowing
primary process, with its associative virtuosity, to structure aesthetics and dream-life as
something other than a system of wish fulfillment. It integrates and balances a theory torn by its
dualities. In opening the discourse to a psychic function of integration as opposed to discharge
and substitution, Freud presages the work of Klein and suggests a partial rapprochement with
Jung.

For psychoanalytic theory, the reconnection achieved is that between the editorial processes of
Freud’s dreamwork and the structural presentation of the instincts by means of phantasy,
structuring instinct as image, including the qualities of image capable of being experienced and

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thought about. Phantasy expresses the mythopoetic functions belonging to primary process, such
as those known as condensation and displacement. However, once one has decentered the place
of wish-fulfillment and established the id as a coherent alter-ego in its own right and context
(Grotstein, 1992, p.76; Loewald, 2000/1971 pp.102-137; Rycroft, 1979), it no longer remains
adequate to rely upon the concepts of condensation and displacement in their original sense, as
instruments of compromise and substitution. The id may indeed be hungry, but it is a coherent
agent tasked with the initial structuring and presentation of instinctual imaginal life, the first
interface of subject and instinct, next to be proffered into integrative synthesis with the adaptive,
“secondary process” functions. Pathology is thus no longer a function of the subversive nature of
the id and its wish-fulfillments, but rather the relative failure of integrative synthesis, leaving a
compromised ego beset by thoughts it cannot think, and feelings it cannot hold together.
Phantasy, too, describes an activity – of issuing and organizing image and perception. A focus on
phantasy still addresses the fabrication of psychic objects and contents as Freud’s dreamwork
did. However, it assigns a greater role, and ascribes greater capacity on the part of to the
presentational, first-line activity of the id upon the instincts, to pre-figure and construct imagery.
In turn, it ascribes a less definitive and exclusive role to repression, to the modifications and
encryptions of insufferable, latent wishes presumed to be dynamically exiled from
consciousness, on the part of what is traditionally thought of as secondary process.

Other Means than Repression

Repression is the cornerstone of psychoanalysis – the active principle at the “root of the
constitution of the unconscious as a domain separate from the rest of the psyche” (Laplanche and
Pontalis, 1967). Yet, at the end of his career, Freud wrote that “there was never any doubt that
repression was not the only procedure which the ego could employ for its purposes” (Freud,
1937c, SE23).

Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) critique Freud’s aforementioned early conception of repression as
“intentional forgetting” (Breuer and Freud, 1894). They present it as problematic, leading us to
consider the problem of ascribing intentionality or mechanical necessity to unconscious subjects
or agencies that draw contents away from the conscious subject. As I have established already,

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Freud’s models were populated by mechanistic forces and structures, many of which functioned
as subjective agents and deities; these figures of speech were, again, a discursive convenience,
without intrinsic value, as Freud wrote to Rolland ((Freud, E., 1960, Letters, #246, pp.392-393).
However, what is unquestionably valuable is the mythic structure and relationships of the entities
and forces constituting any model of subjective complexity. This brings to the stage the concept
of “complex,” which Freud and Jung relied upon with different emphases. “Complex”
consistently indicates this organizational principle. Freud’s use of it, (though he eventually
dismissed it as an awkward term) is a reduction to a few particular problematic constructions.
Jung’s refers to the general psychic geometry, made up of individual constellations of
representation and meaning around particular contents and affects, and their relationship to the
particular complex called “ego”. For Jung, it was the central concept, reflected in the fact that
Jungian analytic psychology was for a time to be called Complex Psychology.

Freud’s writing on repression also suggests that, without using the term “complex” in the same
sense that Jung did, he maintained a central place in his metapsychology for a narrower
expression of this geometry in the psychic architecture. Beneath the horizon of consciousness,
the psyche demonstrates an aggregation of meaning-based and complex structures and processes
organized according to primary process, beginning with a nucleus of crystallization (Freud,
1926, SE20) drawing excitations of associative similarity away from consciousness. This lies
outside both the awareness and control of the conscious subject and expresses the self-protective
needs of the organism. However, apart from its defensive function, this Freudian process
describes a system of unconscious ideas whose separation from consciousness and from other
such unconscious complexes maintains affinities with Jung’s (CW6, para 700; CW3, para.80)
more than previously thought. Jung’s complexes of “feeling-toned groups of representation”
“behave like independent beings” (CW8, para.153), and organize apperception and behavior
around affective centers of gravity. They are unconscious, determine the pattern of the
personality and of conscious experience, and are not by definition associated with repression,
though this can be one of their functions. In this, they are highly consistent with phantasy and its
role in structuring the object world as understood by Klein and her successors. At this point,
though, Freud’s treatment of the “nucleus of crystallization” (Freud, 1926, SE20) was focused on
its function, in repression, of drawing instinctual representations, and transferring and

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discharging energy, away from consciousness; it was not presented by Freud as an instrument of
psychic construction.

I direct our attention back to the Mercurial metaphor of the psyche as a multi-dimensional space
whose aggregate construction is dependent upon the collaboration of multiple agencies. Here, we
consider Freud’s pathocentric bias: the sensory material of the dream is never more than day
residue, enlisted and mobilized to discharge libidinal stimuli in compromise formation. There is
nothing new emerging from the negotiations at psychic boundaries. But with the structural
theory, boundaries arise between complex subjective agencies, rather than fixed and
categorically distinct zones. These agencies are epitomes, quite god-like – lust, censure, and
compromise. Freud understands the id the way theologians have understood God,
“apophatically” in terms of categorical negatives: what is impossible to be said or known of it,
what it cannot be (Rycroft 1979). The exception is also what theologians have said of God, as
boundless energy, or pure creation and pure formless chaos; the spark of life that resists all order
and reason besides its own. In the ego, too, we have a set of paradoxes indicating an aporia, an
end-of-the-road of discourse. The ego awakens from the energy released when contact is made at
boundaries of different complexes or dynamic regions, reconciled and integrated in a way that
yields a spark, amounting to meaning, or anxiety, or a dream; at any such boundary of known
and unknown, any meeting of impulse and unfamiliar order. The challenge is to master or to
negotiate with the subject residing across the dark divide in the other region; it is also to maintain
coherence and reduce disorientation while directing reconnaissance into the new frontier –
which, it is found, always has a culture and history of its own. This reconnaissance is perpetual:
the drives do not stop, and the ego is always tasked in this manner, at every crossroad and
threshold. For this reason, we speak of the challenge faced by Freud at his theoretical threshold
as a demonstration of the dreamwork’s inexorable struggle to create and sustain subjectivity. He
tried to but could not contain it within a metaphor of conflict, manufacture, and compromise.

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In the structural theory stir the inklings of attention not simply to the negations, repressions,
disavowals, and deadenings of the ego in the face of its encounters within and without, but also
to the hearing and learning of new forms, to the connections made and those missed because
there was no equivalent for them in the ego’s lexicon, no readiness for this or that intuition, no
receptor capable of either detecting or tolerating its frequencies. The ego fragments and
dissociates in the face of too much to bear. The ego sometimes cannot keep up, attaining
awareness of the expanding and differentiating boundaries of the psyche more slowly than they
present themselves. At this, we experience disorientation and impotence in a field too vast to
master, at moments overrun by forces and patterns – perhaps, in the manner of phantasy, coming
to us as characters, visions, insights, and nameless dreads and ecstasies, testing the overall
resilience of an ego which may yet re-constitute with knowledge of a new personal frontier.13

These concerns correspond precisely to the ambivalence to which Freud himself admits, as
explored in the previous chapter’s inventory. Freud wishes to be a conquistador, and in so doing
tips his hand to his approach at new frontiers. It is that of a militant and dominating intellect,
desiring imperial possession of all new lands by the same methods, and only reluctantly
admitting weakness or sentimentality. He finds himself repeatedly stymied – a lost, insensate,
and fearful conquistador encountering the creative dimensions of psychic life and begging the
reader’s pardon - anonymously, even, as in the first publication of “The Moses of
Michelangelo” (1914) – as he delimits, with irony and some humor, his crude and unknowing
approach to art, and his obliviousness to its music. Yet he repeatedly finds himself in precisely
that place where his intellect and intuition fail him – before the uncanniness of the Acropolis,
among the myths and hardened lava flows of antiquity, in the pre-verbal “extra-sensory”
encounter between mother and infant, and in the ocean. He is to be found there in the company
of an adept or ambassador – Salome, Jensen, Jung, Rolland, et alia. He will form passionate
alliances, which may or may not survive, deconstruct the phenomenon and hope that it survives

13
At time of writing, the first publication of Jung’s Liber Novus, or Red Book, is weeks away. This vigorously
guarded tome is Jung’s mythic, imagistic account of this very process of breakdown, re-constitution and assimilation
in the years following the break with Freud. It documents the extraordinary measures he took to survive his own
inner flooding in order that he might return to his ordinary life enriched and intact; it is also dismissed, pre-
emptively, by those citing Jungs mental instability, as evidence that his ideas were not legitimate.

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his handling (Freud, 1914), and ultimately gives himself over to admitting the limits of his
repertoire as he qualifies and re-frames his tenets without relaxing for long his rationalistic grip.

Freud implores from his own thinking what he begs from his structural agencies – a Hermetic
means of decoding the confused tongues of each encounter at the crossroads. He seeks an
intermediary language so that negotiation might take place. The crossroads, again, represents
both the ongoing psychic encounter between agencies, that is, between unknown instincts,
existing faculties, and the ongoing theoretical encounter of psychoanalysis. As demonstrated in
the section on Mercuriality, throughout his career Freud stands at a crossroads whose vertex may
be seen as the corner of a vast field, the beginning of a new conceptual frontier. Either side of
each subdivision – whether the immediate landscape is that of hysteria, the meaning of dreams
and symptoms, art, myth, or authority - the roads around and through it finally converge. This
accounts for conceptual rapprochements with Jung, both in Freud’s own later wanderings and in
the further developments of Klein and her successors. Freud’s returns to myth, the oceanic, and
the uncanny parallel Jung’s assurances to a skeptical Freud that he would return from his
wanderings in the infinitudes with a rich yield of psychoanalytic treasure (McGuire, Freud/Jung
Letters, May 8, 1911). In intuiting but not quite trusting in this broader “fenceless” field
(Fordham, 1998), Freud expands his understanding of the nature of phantasy and qualifies the
“peculiar,” distinct (Freud, 1937c, SE23) character of repression. Repression continues to place
emphasis on the exclusion of contents from consciousness. Yet in his handling of primal
repression, primal phantasy, deferred revision, and negative capability, Freud begins to expand
the psychic space bounded by that horizon.

He continues to build his theory on the subversions of representation, rather than the challenges
to construct an ego capable of negotiating an increasingly complex and differentiated
subjectivity, beyond the reach of either the topographic or structural theories. Yet in
“sublimating” the sexual theory so that it could begin to yield to the larger space and movement
of the psyche, beyond the wish-fulfillments of the individual, he was preparing the field for his

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successors. In particular, he begins to diversify his understanding of the primal origins of
representation, straining the limits of his formulations of the id and of primary and secondary
process; he explores the life and death instincts, reminding us of the Erotic, mythic purpose of
sublimation rather than its economic returns on invested libido; and he revisits, in deferred
revision, the “re-transcriptions” (Freud, 1896, SE1) originally discussed during his studies of
hysteria. All these take a large step toward the non-neurotic handling of topics of creativity.

The Problem of Primal and Primary

Freud refers to “primary” and “primal” throughout his writings. There is a clear distinction
between primary as first in a sequence and/or hierarchy, and primal as original or fundamental.
But it is not at all clear that Freud was consistent or entirely intentional in these usages. He
utilizes the metonymic relationship between descriptive characteristics and their presumed
sequence - primary process, for example, as wishful chaos, exemplified by the infant at the
“origin” of life and psyche, which precedes and is then modified by the secondary processes of
order and adaptation identified with maturity. He writes of primal repression, in which a
repressed idea acts, in accordance with primary process, as a primordial nucleus (Freud, 1926,
SE20). This primordial nucleus attracts and crystallizes associatively similar ideas to itself for
further repression. Freud posits the primal as a necessity in order to maintain consistency with
his own premise (Freud, 1915d) that repression can only be caused by a pre-existing agency and
event drawing contents away from consciousness. However, it is by definition precluded from
representation, taking place at an inaccessible moment in infancy, and is never demonstrable. He
posits an organ of the unconscious upon which the workings of secondary repression and
secondary process are contingent, already there, prepared to organize the instincts, guiding them
to their proper place and privileges with respect to consciousness and representation, zones of the
available and the unavailable. It is, among other things, a way to negatively account for the
conundrum of innate and evolving structure, the organizational endowment which structures
appreciable psychic contents. In this way, Freud is attempting to cover the same territory handled
eventually and differently by Jung through Self, archetype and complex, and Bion by way of O,

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the conceptualization, the unsaturated symbol, and axiomatic role of key myths to describe the
configurations of thought and relation.

Freud’s attempt at resolving the paradox of having an innate organizational agency present to
manage the fundamental disorganization of the putative beginnings of psychic life led him then
to posit primal phantasy. This discursive device serves to maintain fidelity to the model of
repression in which the representational topography or landscape is an agglomeration of impact
zones – holes and absences – and of outcroppings, deformations, piles of stones marking where
something unthinkable happened. It materialistically ground psychological organizational
capacity, structure and representation, once and for all, in events. It reveals Freud in the act of
radically extending the horizon of subjective life back before the beginning of actual life, prior to
and outside the envelope of processes belonging to the life of the individual. This movement in
Freud’s thinking led him, baffled about processes and phenomena that seemed causally
impossible, to consider mother-infant communication, devoid of secondary-process language, as
a demonstration of ESP (Freud, 1933a, SE 22). It also led him to propose a violation of genetics
– the recording and transmission of seminal events so traumatic and important as to be passed
along in the genome (Freud,1939a, SE 23). These events, emerging from beyond the horizon of
the individual subject, are precisely those traumatic scenarios which make up the core mythemes
fundamental to the mind understood psychoanalytically, which are no longer attributable simply
to the content of wishes. This line of thought constitutes a Freudian version of the collective
unconscious, though one radically limited to the role of monumental trauma in creating only the
species-level dilemmas that would be recapitulated in the neurotic individual.

In his attempt to make sense of primal phantasy, Freud described the inherited configuration and
organization of images that express the impulse and organization of bodily instincts, and hence
to the beginning of what would come to be known as object relationships. It is the hypothetical
innate pattern imposed upon apprehension and behavior by primary process, originating in the
collective past and thus entirely beyond the horizon of the subject’s personal experience. In so

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doing, Freud arrived at the same point already occupied by Jung. But Freud arrived at this insight
hobbled by the need to find it limited to a quasi-content, a phylogenetic neurosis, like all mental
creations based on the dreamwork, a contortion of mind at the species level, in response to a
species-level instinctual dilemma. Freud was quite explicit that these primal phantasies are not
explained by any individual’s lived experience, but rather are phylogenetic inheritances of
memory traces common to the group and the race (1939a, SE 23). The universal images
themselves, at the basis of art and religion, serve as evidence of the neurotic nature of
humankind, grounded in real events at the collective level. However, Freud’s notion of primary
process reduced the nature and value of this fundamental organizing principle to the trauma of
instinct; Jung, by contrast, treated image as fundamental, expressing the shape and character of
instinct, of forces of nature, delivered through the endowments of the human animal per se, into
the apprehension and sensorium of the experiencing subject. Neurotic pathology expresses one
class of ways this process goes awry. But the dreamwork, and everything based upon it, is first
simply the imagistic, multi-modal thinking of the human body, which has a broader palette of
sensitivities to draw from.

Freud defined the concerns of primal phantasy as “whatever constitutes a major enigma to the
child” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967, p.332) – the primal scene, castration, the Oedipal complex,
or seduction. Hence, they are limited to those areas that, for Freud, express the universal human
concerns underlying neurotic conflict – i.e., they are all permutations of compromise with the
sexual impulse, with elements of aggression evident as well. In this sense, they also serve as the
pathogenic basis for primary repression; they exist to mark off the forbidden areas of experience.
However, Freud treats the original enigma as a proscription, like a disguised version of original
sin, rather than as a problem. It was the same problem faced by Jung and the post-Freudians,
regarding how we develop the faculties to present and represent the images of our nature, and
therefore inaugurating the very creative faculties whose repertoire includes but goes beyond the
neurotic dreamwork.

It should be noted that the notion of primal phantasy is of central importance for
psychoanalytic theory and practice.... There is no reason in our view to reject
as...invalid the idea that structures exist in the phantasy dimension which are

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 irreducible to the contingencies of the individual's lived experience. (Laplanche and
Pontalis, 1967 p.333).

In sublimation, Freud is looking to restore sexuality to an unbroken intrapsychic and cultural

field which envelopes the space-time of the body and the individual ego. He is not yet prepared,
with his repertoire of metaphors, to do so without invoking the violation of natural law, as it was
known then. Nor is he ready to see what, besides enigma and species-level instinctual trauma
(e.g. patricide), contributes to the shaping of the dream-life. However, by asserting in
sublimation the role of thorough knowledge (1910b, SE11) and concern with whole-patterns
rather than zone-gratifications (ibid.), he also intuits the primal figurative function of myth
addressed by Bion, Loewald, and Jung. This expresses a level of organization belonging not to
secondary process and the ego but to primary process and the id.

As early as 1900, Freud presents a key contradiction in his dream theory, which shows a
persistent awareness that there is an organizational coherence to primary process transcending
the wishes and tensions of the moment. He states that a) dreams have no meaning which
transcends the immediate tensions at the moment of dreaming, and that they are constructed of
sense residues utilized as raw material for condensation and displacement (Freud, 1900, 1901a,
SE5), and b) that these functions serve to preserve sleep against the disturbances provided by the
latent wish (ibid). Freud’s remarkably more extensive statement, however, is that

the content of all dreams that occur during the same night forms part of the same whole;
the fact of their being divided into several sections, as well as the grouping and number
of those sections – all of this has a meaning and may be regarded as a piece of
information arising from the latent dream thoughts” (ibid, p.333).

Here Freud postulates that an overarching theme is at work in each dream, into which all dreams
on the same night fit. This a priori narrative coherence mobilizes day residues not in order to
disguise chaotic and disturbing wishes, but in order to manifest and symbolize inchoate and vital
configurations of dream thoughts in ways available in pictorial and narrative form. These await
the assignment of manifest sensory details by a fundamentally creative and coherent primary

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process, to be developed and elaborated by secondary process. The temporal complexity of the
dream is indicative of the unconscious effort to weave experience into a unifying and
progressive pattern, in which the present moment is only a turning point. Freud’s re-
transcriptions (Freud, 1896, SE1) are as much creative syntheses – unconscious ones, running
counter to his waking reductivism - as they are defenses against disturbing latent wishes – those
that continually drew him to his shadow themes and mystical cohorts.

Deferred Revision and the Manifestations of Time

The issues of primal phantasy and primal repression open onto psychological time. In Freud’s
work, the nature of time is most directly addressed in deferred revision, or Nachtraglichkeit
(Freud, 1918b). Deferred revision is the psychic action by which repressions are not simply
exiled, but are also deferred from the present until such time as new instinctual provocations
(provoke = Latin provocare = to call forth) bring them into consciousness in altered form.
Deferred revision is to be found first in Freud’s statement to Fliess regarding temporal
“stratification:” “the material present in the form of memory traces being subjected from time to
time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a re-transcription” (Freud,
1896, S.E. 1: 233). This revised form of memory – which Freud claims takes place on at least
three strata, if not more (ibid.), suggests a rewriting of the facts in accordance with developments
in psychic structure and with new experience. This rewriting is linked to his archaeological
metaphor, in which he compares the psychic contents discovered by the analyst to the fragments
of life found ossified in strata of Pompeiian lava.

Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) and Green (2002) are among those who point out that
psychoanalytic concepts of time, which are addressed more explicitly among French writers than
others, are also expressed more fully and with greater nuance in French than English. Among
those English writers who incorporate temporality in their theoretical writing (Winnicott, for
example, in transitionality and going-on-being), time per se tends to be left vague and implicit.
We need to examine the linked concepts that deferred revision entails: first, symptoms, symbols,

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and actions happen at a temporal distance from their affective and instinctual origins; and
second, at that distance, degradations, alterations and accretions of new patterns occur through
the dynamic actions of the psyche. Events in the present have a significant and signifying effect
upon past events buried irretrievably beneath memory. In turn, the repressive demand of the past
event acts like a strange attractor (Van Eenwyk, 1997), and like Freud’s nucleus of
crystallization, drawing new experience inward and altering and encrypting its meaning along
the lines of a lattice of affect and association - in other words, without revealing itself, it compels
psychic action in the formation of complexes.

When time is referred to explicitly, lack, absence, or discontinuity are its main features. In this,
Freud can be said to have struggled with the same loss of words as did St. Augustine, who
suggested that the meaning of time is immediately obvious to him until he is asked to articulate
it. This muteness in the face of time is common; our negations of the presence and richness of
time are a dynamic condition of the psyche. This speechlessness about time is manifest in the use
of “timelessness” (another negative concept, a putative absence) to denote the deviation,
associated with the id, of a phenomenon from the ostensible forward and steady time of the
physical world. Such a steady time is an absolute and wholly imaginary temporal dimension,
fitting only very local and superficial conditions, and ignores the psychic, quantum, macroscopic,
or astronomical worlds. A psyche in which time is manipulated, fragmented, condensed,
attenuated, compounded, or in counterpoint is hardly timeless; although a sufficiently destructive
force may break the thread connecting subjectivity to its context, annihilating the psychic
spacetime in which to represent, relate, and experience (Bion, 1965; Eigen, 1998). This is a
failure of integration, anti-form, anti-time destructiveness on a catastrophic level, but it is not
equivalent with the id. It is the disintegration of psychic integrity. Users of language are baffled
that language itself suffers from a loss of potency and meaning in the face of time, while
permutations of time remain a mainstay of all emotional experience.

Freud’s use of the term “deferred” signifies action in the form of revision, put off, or put aside, to
be resumed at a later time and another space, depending upon the qualities of subsequent
psychic events, or experiences. It may be seen as the time-analog of displacement, the not-now
as opposed to the not-this. The same root is worked into Derrida’s neologism “differánce,” which

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nearly suggests the temporal lag and representational gap between the word and what it was
meant to signify – this representational gap will be addressed further on, in discussions of the
work of Derrida, Lacan, and Kristeva. Deferred revision is a transitional concept, linking Freud’s
earliest thoughts on repression to key elements of sublimation and Eros. It offers clear links as
well to the revisions of other thinkers, which address the way in which meaning is altered,
revisited, and elaborated throughout psychic development and, with it, the organizational
sophistication of the psyche. Deferred revision points to an elaborated version of the
collaboration of primary and secondary processes, in memory, pathology and creativity.

It may be said that we have no grasp of the future without an equal and corresponding
outlook over the past, that the onrush of our activity makes a void behind it into which
memories flow, and that memory is thus the reverberation, in the sphere of
consciousness, of the indetermination of our will. (Bergson, 2007)

Bergson highlights how the linear time and factuality of events is overshadowed by the perpetual
re-transcription of the associative links between the traces of experience. Experience is not
buried but rewritten, as it is subsequently and repeatedly revisited through new encounters.
Sublimation and Eros join forces in the progressive & passionate elaboration of the psychic
pattern; Eros “aims at complicating life and at the same time, of course, preserving it” (Freud,
1923b, SE19, p.40), revising old traces and new events, sublimated into progressively
sophisticated, useful, stable, true, and meaningful forms. In creativity the psyche transcends the
loss of vitality to entropy or the trauma of the instincts; Freud strives to allow the psyche to
transcend its status as an energy-management system, and as a device for encrypting what cannot
or must not be represented.

By way of the link between deferred revision and both primal and secondary repression, we see
the partial emergence of a theme that would become the thrust of much post-Freudian thought.
Freud links deferred revision to the hypothesis of primally repressed, ineffable nuclei that could
not have arisen from experience with an object (Freud, 1915e, SW14, p.181), and which do not
indicate a cathexis. Rather, they are ineffable, untraversible, permanent representational voids,
formed and maintained by anti-cathexes, which arise at the first encroachment of instinctual
threat against the nascent ego, from “excesses of excitation breaking through the protective

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shield against stimuli,” and from “very intense archaic experiences” (Freud, 1926d, SE20,
p.94). He makes these nuclei the ineffable precondition for later repressions, and postulates their
existence based on the necessary hypothesis, in secondary repression, of a hidden agency
drawing contents towards itself, away from consciousness. But in his language and subtext we
find his discovery that “excitations” cannot help but break through, and the possibility that at an
“archaic” level, that is, in the nature of the tissue and structure of the psyche, psychic boundaries
are tasked not with preventing breakthrough but rather guiding it selectively, as is the case with
membranes in a living organism. They monitor encroachments so that the result may be
discovery, communication, and synthesis, rather than invasion. Such mercuriality makes possible
the difference between the boundary as Berlin Wall and as the gateway or threshold at a frontier
where fruitful exchange takes place.

From Time Deferred, to the Plastic Time of Music

Music and myth each direct our attention to the space, time, and subjectivity of the body, and
their respective “languages,” characteristics, and modes. The history of the body is both the
history of the genome and of the dream-life that organizes the body’s fluid and wide-ranging
pulses. The integrative, creative synthesis laid bare in music, and the mind which grows from our
basic receptivity during intra-uterine life, are each born of a successful organization of
perturbations into imagery, and reciprocity with the pulses and resonances of our surroundings.
Mind and music, in their flow and integration, are only incidentally concerned with the
management of noise, of violence and discord, of explosive content. “Content”, per se, like ice
or rock in the stream, is the solid matter diverting or precipitating out of the flow, or the different
phases of the fluid, constituting zones of relative density. One is worn away by or carried along
with the other, and the other is deviated, dammed, or flows along, sparkling and making water
music from its contact with the perturbations and geometry of the river bed. The stone bears
marks shifting of the tide, sometimes a tide with the depth and mercuriality of the Bay of Fundy.
There is no mistaking the rock and the river, except when we are dealing with psychological
things. The hardest things in the world may be overcome by the softest, as Lao Tzu wrote, but
from the contact comes a symphony.

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Applied to the dilemma of primal repression, it is not that events predating the life of the
individual impose themselves upon the infantile instinct. Rather, the inherited organizational
endowment of the infant, both its defensive and synthetic aspects, undergoes an awakening.
Within limits and under good-enough holding circumstances (Winnicott, 1953, 1956) this
endowment yields continuity and the capacity for integrated, meaningful experience in the midst
of turbulence and complexity. Deferred revision begins to address how symbolic and aesthetic
form may one day arise from events which an unprepared psyche with a sensitive sensory
apparatus cannot yet contain. It begins at and below the horizon of subjectivity, as the turbulent,
rhythmic, instinctive precursor to symbolic activity. Thus the instinctual challenge to the nascent
psyche is to become a subject, with continuity, stability and depth of structure, and a repertoire
of symbolizing skills to withstand and transform turbulent and inchoate events into a going-on-
being (Winnicott, 1971), of accruing richness and meaning. The achievement of temporal
continuity and resilience occurs against a background of continual turbulence set against the
rhythms and resonances of the body and the maternal surround, and, over time, the revisiting of
repressed instinctual terrain and the re-transcription which arises from it.

I suggest that music, in distinction to other art forms, grants us a look at the coordinated
articulation of multiple layers of image within and across multiple streams of time and space. Its
condensation and displacement are apparent in a unified experience, an aesthetic whole, while at
the same time its parts are of shifting degrees of transparency to the senses. Music offers several
possibilities for revising the evocative but misplaced metaphor of Pompeii and buried artifacts,
an area explored fruitfully by Loewald. Loewald revises the archaeological metaphor so that
successive strata of conscious and unconscious, both past and present, together constitute a
resonant synthesis always and inexorably renewed in the present (Loewald, 2000, 102-137, 11,
20). Freud had compounded his “seething cauldron” metaphor for the id by analogy to another
metaphor – that of the destructive chaos of molten lava, hardened into strata whose hidden layers
are best approached by the psychoanalyst-as- archaeologist. Yet not only do music and the
musician synthesize multiple moving strata in a manner transparent to experience in the
moment. Music also carries and evokes memories, affects, and entire experiential contexts with it
in a fluidly-dynamic manner, in sharp distinction to the encrypted and symptomatized meanings
at the heart of pathology. This capacity is evident too in the work of the poet who marries the

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signifying objects of language to the musical flow of affect. In much language, like symptoms,
deferred revision and re-transcription appear fragmented, their artifacts scattered throughout the
strata by the violent irruption of geological forces, to be re-assembled by the arche-analyst.
Music reanimates the petrified strata of the psyche and makes its movement, in the moment,
transparent. By contrast, the focus on language and linguistics cannot help but find its objects
frozen in time, their structural and associative connections inferred through painstaking analysis
– or, by sensitive attention to the musical dynamics, or failures thereof, of speech and the written
text. When language is alienated from its inherent music, it becomes a collection of petrified
artifacts, fossils embedded in rock or amber, the stratified residue of something that was once
fluid. These ancestor-fossils are available to practitioners of psychic archaeology, though they
have living relatives in what remains of the fluidity and vitality of the relation between
consciousness and unconscious process and content. Here I extend Loewald’s metaphor of
“turning ghosts into ancestors” (2000), his own revision of the principle of making the
unconscious conscious. Alienated from the current and flow of dream-life, we become
symptomatic. Words are at risk of becoming like symptoms, gaps, rifts, or deposits, inert or
obstructive. The attentive analyst finds the restorative flow of music, in some proportion, already
and always present in the encounter with the analysand, and finds its partner in his own reverie.

It appears that Freud, focusing on time deferred, imagining the lava flow at Pompeii, intuited but
could not give voice to the missing dimension of movement. He saw that the integration of
instinct into complex modes of presentation, available for decryption or communication, depends
on a process of temporal accretion and differentiation. But much of what would be called
fundamentally unconscious falls into the category of the not-yet-formulated, or the difficult-to-
say – a banal way to describe Yeats’ dark beast, something transformative and subversive,
slouching toward Bethlehem to be born (Coltart, 1992). As the identity of a musical piece
emerges from its developmental sequence, so too does the apperception of a complex of affective
events capable of being mentalized (Fonagy, 2005) that exceeds what can be “said about” it.
Temporally, words lag and drag, slower than the pace of dreamlife, and out of tempo, out of the
groove, as commentary lags behind the event; this is a compositional challenge of translation, in
real time, between unconscious and conscious, which may have either much or little to do with

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the repression of wishes. On a broader scale, the personality pattern emerging from the evolution
of an individual’s instinctual experience, too, is an accretion of subjective form articulated
around signature events in motion; the thread of wish is a river. Rycroft’s question points to the
themes, modes, rhythmic patterns and contrasts, friction and dissonance, and moments of
harmonic tension of this river, which all derive their subjective meaning from their place in the
developing musical pattern. Their limits are maintained by the “acoustic” properties of the
psyche as a many-chambered instrument, tasked to transmute the energies and intentions of the
subject(s) who play them. Freud was right to hypothesize the temporal complexity of repression
and deferred revision. But he could attend only to discrete events and propose imaginary,
primary process modes of relation between events seemingly scattered in time. Music, by
contrast, offers the fluid organizational dynamics of time and presence, in a medium to which
Freud was unreceptive and inarticulate. In music, discrete events – this leitmotif, that minor
scale, this phrase, that rhythmic tattoo - mark selected moments in an overarching, elastic, and
temporally unfolding fabric of affective meaning. In the more reductive approaches to analysis,
there is the risk of the interference of an unnatural form of listening, in thrall to the confirmation
bias, the “gotcha” of detecting only what one expected to find, and interpreting it as one would
any neurotic symptom. The music of thought, of dreaming, of affect – their emphases are artful,
or they are natural crests and troughs, with their own logic; or they are products of conflict and
substitution. But the more one follows the combination of surprise and inevitability in music and
the music of other states of being, the more one understands just how rich are the means of
imagination apart from those of repression, as Freud admitted.

This aspect of music brings us to the affective contour and impact of experience, including the
experience known as thought. This dynamic shaping is the affective component of all psychic
life. The question of experiential states and ego organization becomes essential here. It becomes
the focus of Freud’s work with Rolland on the oceanic feeling and its relation to religious
phenomena seen separate from any content of belief systems. Intuition of that question did not
become active in Freud’s thinking until his encounter with Rolland and the enigma of oceanic
feeling (Parsons, 1999).

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Structure: Latent, Implicit, or Fluid

A musical view and an oceanic one have much in common. They share the chief property of
fluidity and movement in and through their medium. If music ceases to move, if the thread
unravels which binds notes and phrases in sequence, and which binds parallel themes to the same
musical event, we no longer have music. The unreceptive or overly intellectual listener may
undermine the phenomenon by relying too much upon analysis, and drawing the unfortunate
conclusion that the music is constructed of basic units of material, such as notes and pulses, and
that the purpose of listening is to apprehend their configurations. That it can be analyzed in this
way must not be taken to mean that these are its actual units of construction, or that one must
choose between experiencing and analyzing or deconstructing music. The contoured dynamics of
both affective and musical events are better thought of as phrases; constructed of units, but only
achieving meaning in terms of phrases, themes, motifs. The same can be applied to the dance of
atoms which yield an amino acid molecule here, the same atoms in a different dance yielding a
ceramic, a crystal, a toxin, or no superordinate structure at all; or the view that the atom and
molecule are only relatively stable configurations within dynamic fields of energy. Flow and
dynamic structure are primary; the dynamics of neurosis are only one variant. Emphasis on
fragmentary states and psychic detours around trauma zones, such as those Freud found behind
instinctual wishes, are thus either artifacts of an arduous analytic method devoid of proper
listening, or they are true intuitions of the patient’s alienation from life’s flow.

So too with the oceanic, whose namesake’s fluid nature is a particular phase of a structural
property, not a substance. Ocean life depends upon water’s fluid state, which maintains its
coherence staunchly in the face of extremes of climate and geology, sustained between
evaporation and freezing. In the deeper layers of the psyche, however, this fluid psychic layer is
not, by definition, chaotic, in the sense of being formless. It is a different order of organization,
in which movement and the negotiation of boundaries operate in another manner, and which
offers a different dynamic by which its objects are associated with each other. The ocean is also
where life begins, and a domain which life on land recapitulates within itself in every cell

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(Carson, 1991), in the bloodstream, and between every organ system. For Freud or any other
intellectual, to have no basis for relating to the oceanic (1930) is merely to be unreceptive to the
omnipresent, coherent fluidity of physical and psychological life.

Yet, probably unconscious of his own intuition, Freud was repeatedly drawn to phenomena and
discourse that tantalized him with hints of this very domain. This is particularly so with the topic
of implicit and emergent mythic structure, which corresponds to the postulate of the latent
dream-thought. Notably, Freud makes one assertion that is quite incompatible with the rest of his
main dream theory, and which links dreams, seemingly without his notice, to the prospective and
poetic work done while one is awake. Prior to the structural theory, the assumption is that dreams
serve the moment-to-moment purpose of preserving sleep. They are woven from bits of day-
residue, the latter forming dream-thoughts which cohere, through primary process, around bodily
stimuli during sleep and are linked to sensitivities from an earlier developmental state. The task
of remaining asleep depends upon processing these cohering dream-thoughts so that they do not
disturb the dreamer. As they are expressions of primary process, they are considered to have no
meaning transcending the management of the tensions of the immediate dilemma. Freud’s
remarkably more extensive statement, however, is that

the content of all dreams that occur during the same night forms part of the same whole;
the fact of their being divided into several sections, as well as the grouping and number
of those sections – all of this has a meaning and may be regarded as a piece of
information arising from the latent dream thoughts. (Freud 1900; p.333)

The “piece of information” is a structural relationship emerging prior to or in the act of

dreaming, intuited in the process of dreaming. Freud postulates that an overarching
compositional theme is at work, encompassing and expressing all dreams on the same
night. Most notably, this holism, this a priori narrative and/or thematic coherence of the dream,
can exist in Freud’s terms nowhere but in the latent dream thoughts rather than in any secondary
revision.

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Freud therewith has sketched a maker of ends, an internal artisan or poet commissioned by the
instincts to tell their myth. In dreams, some agency labors to compose a presentation of a
complex idea to the observing dreamer. Analysis, in this exceptional passage, reveals not simply
an underlying wish and the means by which it is encrypted, but the primary poetic structure of its
presentation. Freud here leaves a clue to the direction explored many years later in the structural
theory and Eros, one that he would never otherwise articulate. Namely, that dream thoughts
impelled toward expression exist prior to the dream itself (Meltzer, 1983, p.14), and thus are an
exception to Freud’s theory of repression, for the incompatible libidinal wish is no longer the
primary issue. This poetic or shaping intention serves to link and span successive dreams on the
same night, and they make use of day residues as part of their source of sensory detail.

These qualities already present in the latent dream-thought, as opposed to being conferred via
secondary revision, are quite at odds with the pleasure principle and chaotic id. Its primary
process is a dimensional construct of multiple faculties manifesting multiple vectors of instinct
and apperception, of which the ego is mediator and projectionist. In Bion’s terms, it contributes
to “psychoanalytic objects” with extension in passion, sense and myth” (Bion, 196) Inherent
structure and the impulse toward elaborated depiction are suggested in this marginal thread of
Freud’s. Hillman (1979, p.10) points out that the closest thing to a telos, or implicit goal, in
Freud’s dream theory, is the overarching goal to preserve sleep, to limit wishful excitation
through disguise and compromise. Yet we also begin to see that a very different undercurrent is
at play in Freud: the inexorable assertion of the instinct toward the expression and elaboration of
instinct in image. The dream is both preserver and destroyer of sleep (Meltzer, 1983). It is the
synthetic function of dream-life that makes it possible to wake up (Bion, 1967), to achieve the
threshold of psychic coherence that constitutes becoming conscious; it is no longer concerned
merely with preserving sleep. The dream has not simply captured a residue of the senses to
rework as a tool of the repressed wish. It has also joined and dramatized the stream of dream-life,
becoming synchronized with and elaborating its bodily pulsion for dissemination amongst the
senses and faculties available to the dreamer. In so doing, consciousness and unconsciousness
are no longer either systems or topographical zones – they are relative positions and degrees of
presence on a continuum of subjectivity. Consciousness is dependent not merely on the

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achievement of compromise but also on a coherent synthesis of agencies which bring the
workings of the “underworld” to the faculties of the day-world (Hillman, 1979).

Freud’s Eros, along with sublimation, suggests the tendency to perpetuate and strengthen
intrinsic links, to propagate the pattern of our own being, towards a future transcendent to
momentary tensions and past repressions. It mobilizes innate activities of imagination, of
symbolism that does not simply substitute but also indicates an intuited direction of meaning.
Correspondingly, it is the engine of an innate tendency toward differentiated and inclusive levels
of psychic organization (Loewald, 2000).

Perhaps the significance of space, of dimension, of pattern, of the very utility of geometric
analogy, is becoming clearer. The experience takes place within a space; but it also takes place
within a subject relating to the fascinations and frustrations of dimensional experience. Bion
(1990) wrote “Meaning is revealed by the pattern formed and the light thus trapped – not by the
structure, the carved work itself”. Firstly, the musical analogy leaps out: Musical meaning is
revealed by the pattern of sound formed, and the integration of thought, sensation, and emotion
thus achieved. But for Bion, the pattern aggregates around a selected fact – a kernel of meaning
which “unites elements long since known, but till then scattered and seemingly foreign to each
other, and suddenly introduce order where the appearance of disorder reigned” (Bion, 1962b).
“Our mind is as frail as our senses are; it would lose itself in the complexity of the world if that
complexity were not harmonious…the only facts worthy of our attention are those which
introduce order into this complexity and so make accessible to us” (ibid).

Freud’s nuclei of crystallization, and Jung’s complex, are again brought forward into a more
inclusive level of theoretical organization. But while Bion’s work is directly descended from
Freud’s, it is more resonant with Jung’s to the extent that the Jung’s complex and Bion’s
aesthetic object are meant as bearers of integrated experience, uniting affect, sensation, and
meaning as structural units of personality. By contrast, Freud’s makes no allowance for anything
resembling a whole object, the nuclei of crystallization instead drawing problematic psychic

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content away from consciousness, conferring only that psychological structure conferred by the
warps of repression.

Bion’s difficult, radical, but illuminating formulation makes the harmonizing14 of discord
necessary for the construction of mind, both collapsing infinities into sensible patterns organized
around conceptual kernels, and reconciling turbulent elements into constructs capable of being
experienced and thought about, and engendering further such transformations. The dissonant
chord is not disharmonious, but rather achieves its qualitative status – its potential for beauty - as
a musical element by virtue of its place in a movement of chords, within a larger pattern that has
not yet revealed itself.

Beauty, too comes into the discussion of the aesthetic, as a key element in the transformation of
aesthetic impact, of survival, hunger, astonishment, and rapture, into knowledge. Freud’s wish to
restore divinity to a debased sexuality is, perhaps, fulfilled by this psychoanalytic development.
Meltzer and Harris-Williams (1988), in their elaboration of Bion’s aesthetics in the “aesthetic
conflict”, locate the beginning of human mentality “at the time when man first saw the world as
beautiful” (M. Harris- Williams, personal communication). The prototype of this experience is
the impact of the breast, and extends outward into the world and Nature, provoking, to say the
least, mixed emotions. The “aesthetic conflict” arises when beholding that which arouses intense
desire, envy, fascination, awe, which gives but which cannot be tamed or owned. In Bion’s
terms, this transformation of Love/Hate into knowledge is designated by the formula L-H-K.
This is, in detail and contour, consistent with Jung’s principle of the transcendent function,
which provides for the symbolic reconciliation or uniting function between conscious and
unconscious elements, or between incompatible stances. As explored progressively in further
chapters, the penetrating, reconciling, enchanting powers of music add another dimension to our
understanding of the means by which we resolve our aesthetic conflict, doing justice to both
desire, emotion, the contour of our experience, and our intellectual strivings to present and
represent that experience.

14
Bion’s choice of “harmonious” was unlikely to have been an intentional use of musical terminology, yet it
expresses the natural sliding into a network of musically–associated terms when attempting to express empathy, a
coming-together, a meeting, a reconciliation of elements. These semantic serendipities unite, in related words like
“concord”, the association of musical agreement with etymological roots meaning both “of one mind” and “hearts
together”

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Eros and the Thread of Wish

Freud eventually treated Eros as a polarity of metabiological instinct, the inexorable life drive
which envelops the individual psyche in partnership with the death drive. In his discussion of
sublimation in Leonardo (Freud, 1910b, SE11), he characterized it as a restoration of wholeness
to sexuality, as those whole patterns which, condensed into deific images, serve to direct the
pattern of apperception. To recapitulate, I believe that this represents Freud’s wish for a
sexuality, and a psyche, that – like the work of art in “The Moses of Michelangelo” (Freud,
1914) - emerges whole, unscathed, and connected to its roots after the analytic procedure. It is
like a prayer that the patient is resilient enough to survive the actions of the conquistador. Eros,
however, also indicates a further step toward an intuition of musical process and continuity. As
stated, repression does not simply describe the burial and substitution of the unacceptable and the
traumatic; it is conceived also as an action which manipulates time by sculpting representations
and histories of instinctual experience. The patient’s endowment includes a mythic, aesthetic
capacity to present, represent, sculpt, and synthesize, sustaining multiple relationships between
past, present, and anticipated future, at the same time that it defends its coherence against
rupture. In so doing, the psyche voices its patterns of thought and affect in and through time,
through the resonant medium of the body and the physical and interpersonal worlds. And it does
so by means of sonic forms independent of but essential to language.

In his discussion of time, Freud opens interesting channels for its fluid complexities, and the
complex manner in which these temporal detours affect the form of instinct as it emerges in the
present. However, the relationship he posits between primal and secondary repressions is entirely
between past repression and the avoidance of present threat; it is the mechanical avoidance of
perceived psychic danger. Apart from to his insight that the latent dream thought is contained in
the relation between dreams on the same night (Freud, 1900, 1901b, SE5), there is little room for
anticipation or intuition, except in the form of wishful illusion. He makes it difficult to conceive
of creation. Dream material is never more than day residue (Freud, 1901a), and stages of the

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dream-work are only ways to compromise with instinct. None the less Freud’s secondary lines of
thought came to suggest something beyond these parameters.

Freud acknowledges a future imagined solely on the basis of the personal past. (Holland, 1985,
pp.91-94): "By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future.
This future, however, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his
indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past" (Freud, 1900). Through the development
of phantasy as the structural agency of the imagination, Freud’s theoretical framework grew
increasingly able to counterbalance its emphasis on wish-fulfillment by means of a principle of
organizational complexity. Both novelty and differentiation in dreamwork became possible.
Indeterminacy, mystery, and surprise could now be seen as parts of the endowment of the
imagination.

Freud goes on to identify a more open possibility for the conception of time:

The relation of a phantasy to time is in general very important. We may say that it hovers,
as it were, between three. . . moments of time which our ideation involves. Mental work is
linked to some current impression, some provoking occasion in the present which has been
able to arouse one of the subject's major wishes. From there it harks back to a memory of
an earlier experience (usually an infantile one) in which this wish was fulfilled; and it now
creates a situation relating to the future which represents a fulfillment of the wish. . . .
Thus past, present and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that
runs through them. (1908e, SE9:147-48)

Embedded within statements regarding wish-fulfillment, Freud here describes self-continuity, a

future, and a psychic dimensionality through which “the thread of the wish” binds instinct into
emergent image. At the end of The Interpretation of Dreams (SE5, 1900) Freud anticipates the
teleological aspect of dreaming. By giving form to indestructible wish, dreaming leads us into
the future imagined as a perfect likeness of the past, in dreams that are experienced as belonging
to the present. By perpetually re-transcribing the repressed wish, “past, present and future are
strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs through them” (Freud, 1908e,
SE9:147-8). The repressed wish is never repeated exactly, but only preserved through its re-
transcription in the context of changing experience.

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The life and death instincts are given teleological status as well. Freud treats them as purposes
intrinsic to life and matter: “The aim of Eros is to establish even greater unities and to preserve
them thus – in short, to bind together; the aim (of the death instinct) is, on the contrary, to undo
connections and destroy things” (Freud, 1940, SE23, 148). Thus, Freud’s formulation is one of
purposes intrinsic to life itself: to establish, maintain, and propagate coherent and cohesive form,
and then return to the inorganic state.

In positing Eros, Freud identifies no discrete, personal wish, but rather the overarching “wish” of
the psyche grounded in life itself to link, elaborate, and imagine itself into being. With the
recession of wish-fulfillment and the pleasure-reality dichotomy, this elaboration and imagining-
into-being is no longer at odds with reality. In this way, the imagination creates the links which
bridge the psyche’s own pattern and the problematic reality which never fully accepts its
projections, and always exceeds its grasp in some aspect. The psyche thereby anticipates a future
which does not simply extend the past but rather elaborates upon a dynamic that has, albeit
imperfectly, already been established and is in process.

As mentioned a few pages back, the dream may be understood as joining and dramatizing the
stream of dream-life, becoming synchronized to and elaborating the bodily pulsion. I am
suggesting that the dream per se is a presentation, to the conscious subject witnessing the dream,
of the flow of image which accompanies the flow of instinct. In joining these factors, the dream
is a presentation of the psychic conditions of the moment, a faculty described by Rycroft (1979)
and Jung (CW6). In a similar way, Bion’s reverie and dream may be seen as the space in which
dream-life rises to a threshold where it undergoes a phase change and becomes intuited as a
thought. Herein lies a key link to music, to the tuning and synchronization that bring disjointed
vibrations to the threshold where they become appreciable as a unified musical flow. It is the
“presentational immediacy” of music (Langer 1953) which offers the most fruitful link between
music and dream, as well as music and analytic presence. We see again the role of music in the
emergence of progressive whole structure from sequences representing the flow of instinctual
image, sequences which hang together to the extent that we can enable them to do so. The thread
of wishing is neither arbitrary nor the accidental accumulation of traces of desires, excitations,
and their objects. Nor is it simply a trail of evasive maneuvers and culs de sac leading back to

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originary wishes, though people clearly revisit their memories, patterns, and idiosyncratic themes
in both creative, idol, or neurotic ways. Rather it is the seeking and creating of whole images
which resonate with the continuity and dynamics of the pulsions – the drives – which feed them.
The noise and deadness from which music emerges is the elaboration of the disjunctive rhythms
and resonances of the body into something that presents and engages the affects, and connects us
to the physical and intersubjective world in a reciprocal way. This emergence recapitulates the
dreamwork, which dreams the inchoate turbulences of the body into something suitable for
thinking (Bion, 1962a), in the same way that a dream is an act of thinking during sleep (Rycroft,
1979). Thanatos, then, is not an opposite force to this Erotic elaboration of the drives, but the
other direction of the continuum in which the time and dynamics of the individual psyche are
nested. It is the diminution and surcease, the fading to silence and stasis, which expresses
entropy in musical terms; or the artist’s intentional shadings, mutings, and ritardandos, by which
he sculpts his analogue of life’s dynamic interplay. This entropy is neither the blind nor
compulsive winding down of the energy belonging to the physical world, but the manner in
which the living, subjective organism directs it, by muting, closing ranks, collapsing or
deadening its boundaries to serve the purposes of living. Dissociated, it becomes something
pathological. All sorts of meaningful experience – exemplified here by art, music, myth, and
dream – are coherent, durable, and capable of communication by virtue of their balanced
regulation of opening and closing, grounding, muting, and expansion.

Freud’s fascination with oceanic feeling, which I will explore in the next chapter, was an
attraction to the experiential qualities and “ideational content” (Freud, 1930) of this state of
being, achieved through the suspension of ordinary attention. His attraction to Rolland as its
spokesman must have involved the sense that it is extraordinary for such “timeless” states to be
achievable within the context of ordinary time, and within a personality healthy and durable
enough to endure the rhythm of differentiating and de-differentiating. Similarly, in both Eros and
Thanatos we see Freud struggling to articulate such a rhythm as the background against which
the mechanisms of neurosis and dreamwork occur, and from which imagination per se can
emerge. He has now named his overarching duality of life and death instincts after mythic
deities. This marks a transition: From a characterization of subjective life as a best understood as
the product of a physical, mechanical apparatus and its process, to a synthesis of evocative forms

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that display the reconciliation of personal history and impersonal, natural rhythm and
potentiality, each retranscribing and revising the other in the dreamlife.

Negation and Negative Capability

Gradually, Freud’s roster of concepts, metaphors, and techniques leaned toward accommodating
the space in which the unconscious manifests its phantasy, the experiential characteristics of that
space, and the ego’s mutability within it. When this space is daunting and floods Freud’s
conquistador intellect, it presents as the ocean – the fluid and primitive place of unrecognizable
feelings and forms. Freud suspended certainty about his concepts during his correspondence with
Rolland. His embrace of the negative capability described by Keats – the suspension of “irritable
reaching after fact and reason” (Keats, 1959, p.260) - represents his intuition that the conquering
intellect must relent and allow the intrinsic form of the archaic psyche to present itself, and not
prejudge its intentions or meanings. In suspending the arbitrary differentiations of intellectual
fact and reason, he begins to appreciate the “space” of oceanic feeling, like the ocean, as neither
undifferentiated nor chaotic but a different order of organization.

“Negative capability,” was adopted from Keats (1959, p.260) by Freud and then Bion. It
recognizes and tolerates the limits of knowledge and representation in the interests of empathy.
In Freud’s second formulation (Freud, 1925h), it is related to negation by its challenge to the
analyst’s ego to survive being limited to gradual, incremental and imperfect understanding of the
indirect indications of unconscious processes and intuitions. In Bion’s usage, it is the analyst’s
suspension of memory, desire, and understanding in order to intuit the analysand’s reality (Bion,
1970). It indicates a willingness to tolerate the disjunction between reality and one’s capacity to
apprehend it, so that an irritable, wishful, or forceful use of reason does not threaten to destroy
the inherent value of the phenomenon or its intuition. We seethe difficulty of its challenge in
Freud’s insistence on a level of interpretation that can both preserve the work of art unscathed
and verbally encompass whatever may be expressed in the artistic medium (Freud, 1914, p.212).

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Both are revealed as wishes – that analysis be omniscient, and that art survive such necessary
and sufficient interpretive procedures.

Though based on a self-confessed wish of Freud’s (ibid.), these complementary positions are not
useless or unscientific. As with the work of negation, so too with representations: something in
every experience is inevitably lost in the process of symbolization, and something meaningful is
gained besides a yield of pleasure. Art says what it says; and interpretation, though useful for
certain things, neither competes with nor completes the art, but only frustrates the analyst who
isn’t satisfied by his intellectual domination of the aesthetics of the encounter. Similarly, the
interpretation of the dream itself is hindsight, even more radically than with art, because the
dream is a self-presentation from another domain of consciousness to which the analyst can
never have an eyewitness view, and the dreamer can only have it once, behind the veil – unless
they can help co-create and share in the conscious reverie that makes a dream-experience of the
session. Most importantly, interpretation need not insist on laying bare the motivations and
causes of art and dream. Freud and Bion’s reliance upon Keats’s principle of empathy and
patience as well as rationality already indicates the value of balance in both art and dream, as
well as analysis and interpretation: each thing in its own way as much as possible, and also
nothing too much. Negative capability and psychoanalysis insist less upon “knowing” than upon
responsive and intuitive submission to the area of psychic reality to which they are dedicated,
and for which they often have no adequate words and no fully encompassing theory. We do,
however, have the sense to listen, as did Freud in his advocacy of evenly hovering attention
(1913, SE12), Bion in reverie (1967), and Winnicott in holding (1986).

Negation and negative capability demonstrate the complementarity of intellectual/reductive and

holistic/synthetic stances, as well as the tension between experiential states and the imagery
accessible in them. Negation allows us to intuit and discern from spaces, differences, and
absences; negative capability allows one to suspend intellectual impatience so as to appreciate
the aspects of psychic reality which escape the net of words and concepts. We understand the
defensive aspect of negation, namely, that things stand for what they are not and hide the
subterfuge. What is not so easily recognized is the dimension of the artist’s, dreamer’s, and

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patient’s use of negation as it appears in Freud’s later conception, as the sculpting of the
unformulated into the gradually revealed form; the negations in which the sculptor whittles a
shadow, an arc of limb; in which the musician skips a beat or repeats a melody first against a
major seventh, then against a suspended fourth, then ruptures the sea floor with a blast of brass
and drums, followed by silence. These are examples of the fluidity and mutability of the medium
used in the revelation of meaning not previously apparent. Negation is thus more than the
psyche’s linguistic inability to truly represent; it is the indicator of Hermetic challenge to both
preserve and translate meaning at the exchange at the meeting of two states, the solid and the
liquid, for example. What can be said when one domain has exhausted its vocabulary? How does
a particle, an object of language, attest to the “meaning” of something that lives in fluid motion?
That particle of language is suspended in a sea of meaning that can proceed or regress in a near-
infinity of directions. The liquid erodes the solid, the solid diverts the liquid; this is no chaos but
a freer interplay of forces, yielding objects of different contour, demanding a more differentiated
and fluid understanding of affect and meaning. The figuration or sculpting of music out of
acoustic turbulence, remarkably like a liquid in its dynamics, is a similar example. It attests to
motion, rhythm, multiplicity, and condensation of voices in a manner that demonstrates the play
of affect and form between the differing atmospheres of consciousness and the unconscious.
Primary process has already done much of the work; but it is a primary process rich in our innate
sensitivity to rhythm, tone, harmony, and sequence. The myth, passion, and sense (Bion, 1963,
1992) of music is not a primary process of wish-fulfillment

Thus, negation may be seen as a link between the relative roles of primary and secondary
processes. It is a sculpting which eliminates excess to reveal essence; in this case essence is not
metaphysical, but suggests meaning, aesthetic wholeness, symbolic value, resonance, intuition,
and dream-thought. Negation is not the inexorable parsing or analysis of an isolated secondary
process, for it is subservient to an ideal of emergent form and underlying idea. Nor is it the
elimination of all discord so that thought and thing can always maintain a wished-for perfect
identity, as in Matte-Blanco’s symmetrical unconscious (1975). Music demonstrates, among
other virtues, the creation of harmony and rhythm from difference and delay. The creative
process, broadly, is always a circling in upon serviceable forms, negotiating the elements and the

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indeterminate path to things intuited but not yet formulated. Thus negation suggests Freud’s
awareness of the work required to manifest something meaningful, in dialectical tension with the
work required to avoid something subversive. The figuration of both “dream-thought” and
artistic intuition is one pole of the creative dynamic, the other being the repressive encryption of
the subversive wish. Formulated discursively as “poles,” they can be seen as the unifying limits
of an indivisible whole. If divided, the work either collapses or becomes pathological.

Time, too, becomes a pivotal factor. Much of what we work with in dream, art, and music is
intuition and memory: what has not yet taken shape but is approaching our figurative horizon,
and what is slipping away from that horizon, or entangled deeply but persistently resonating
within. Negation thus expresses the reconciliation and integration of opposing tendencies in
service of a yield of meaning vaguely remembered, anticipated, or intuited, and in need of steady
attention and a conducive space in which to achieve cohesive shape.

Freud’s gradual acceptance of an open attitude led him to the consideration of the oceanic. After
his deconstruction of religious belief and institutions in The Future of an Illusion, he engaged
with Rolland over the experiential space and ego state common to religious experiences and
corresponding to aspects of the infantile psyche. One outstanding conundrum for Freud was that
this state and space were independent of any belief system, any particular religious or ideological
content, embodied no particular wish, and could not be analyzed as an artifact of repression.

Into the Ocean

Thus we arrive at the crossroads marked by the psychologies of Freud, Jung, and Klein, with its
offshoot paths to be taken up by Winnicott, Bion, Rycroft, and Loewald. Their work addresses,
in complementary ways, the question of how and to what extent the inherited formative
capacities of the psyche interact with personal events to constitute the processes, structures, and
imaginal forms of subjectivity. Jung’s contributions to the discussion are wastefully marginalized

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in much post-Freudian discussion. Jung focused and developed a metapsychology that accounts
for the functioning of the impersonal, inherited portion of the mind, in concert with but not
reducible to the processes and events of personal experience. He attributes to the image a
primary spontaneity and primacy, stating that “image is psyche” (CW6). Repression, wish-
fulfillment, and neurosis taken together are not eliminated but are marginalized as important but
limited, clinically and theoretically useful constructs. Jung also addressed the connection
between the mythic ground, which he treated as archetypal, and the ego and its experiential
states, focusing on the place of the extraordinary and numinous in the development and creativity
of psychological life.

Ego and experiential states represent a return of the repressed for Freud. His earlier difficulties
with Jung’s mythological interests were revived in altered form in the exchange with Rolland.
His privileging of rational capacities and intellectual analysis met their limit in pure and
irreducible experiential states, and in the symbolic contents arising against that experiential
background. Jung’s work represents not simply a definitive break in the mid-point development
of psychoanalysis, but also phenomena and perspectives with which Freud wrestled: the
relationship between image and psychic process; inherited memory; and the status of art and
artists. I contend that the aesthetic, and what some have misinterpreted as the mystical element in
Jung’s work, together mark his basic divergence from Freud with respect to dreamwork. They
also identify an axis of ambiguity in Freud’s own thinking. As the aesthetic will be freed from its
association to neurosis, so too will the mystical be freed from its association with religious
metaphysics, with a realm of gods and transcendentals separate from human existence. Whatever
the independent truth of gods and artistic creations, of spiritual and aesthetic forms of
participation, each is a natural orientation of the mind, a point revisited in Freud’s
correspondence with Rolland.

3.m Freud and Romain Rolland

_________________________________________________________________________

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 By religious feeling, what I mean—altogether independently of any dogma, any Credo,
any organization of the Church, any Holy Scripture, any hope for personal salvation,
etc.—the simple and direct fact of a feeling of “the eternal” (which may very well not be
eternal, but simply without perceptible limits, and as if oceanic). This feeling is in truth
subjective in nature. It is a contact. (Rolland letter to Freud, Dec. 5, 1927; in Parsons,
1999)

AS WITH HIS FASCINATION WITH ART AND

ARTISTS, FREUD WAS DRAWN TO ANOTHER KEY

AREA OF NON-RATIONAL LIFE WHICH HE

ANALYTICALLY PLACED UNDER THE RUBRIC OF

THE NEUROTIC AND THE INFANTILE. FOR THE

SECOND TIME HE SOUGHT TO ENLIST A

REPUTED MYSTIC INTO INTELLECTUAL

PARTNERSHIP. THE TERM “OCEANIC FEELING”,

OFTEN MISATTRIBUTED TO FREUD, WAS

COINED BY ROMAIN ROLLAND TO DESCRIBE

THE FEELING OF BEING ONE WITH THE WORLD,

OF FLOW AND CONNECTIVITY.

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Rolland used the term in his response to Freud after the latter gifted him with a copy of The
Future of an Illusion (Freud, 1927). Rolland objected to Freud’s excessive identification of
religious experience with conventional, institutional religion and its ideology, which Freud
dismantled in his book. Rolland made a sharp distinction between the conventions of religious
practice and institutions – which he characterized in agreement with Freud as the adolescent
beliefs of the common man’s religion - and the oceanic feeling, which Rolland sees as preceding
religion and functioning as the experiential core of religious sentiment. He treats it as content-
free, psychologically meaningful, independent of any tradition, and conducive and compatible
with reason, insight, and social adaptation.

Freud characterized oceanic feeling as a “shrunken residue” of an infantile ego feeling, existing
“side by side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of maturity” (Freud,
1930; 66-67). This strikingly intuits the development, exemplified by Ehrenzweig (1967), of the
healthy ego as capable of rhythmically pulsing between openness and differentiation as part of its
ordinary repertoire, regardless of any considerations of “regression” (Kris, 1952). Freud went on
to identify it as a residue of the primary narcissistic bond with the mother, exemplified by the
infant’s experience at the breast (Freud, SE31, 1930). However, I suggest that the oceanic feeling
is a function of a normative innate capacity necessary for, and elaborated in, creativity and
health, and disrupted in pathology. It offers experience of one’s continuity of being and
irreducible connection to the world. To treat it as an artifact of the infantile ego is to engage in a
genetic fallacy, another confusion of the primal and the primary.

Oceanic feeling is not in itself a sufficient example of the non-verbal, creative, primary process
ground of subjectivity. It is, however, a useful far point along an experiential continuum, and
provides a useful point of transition from Freud into Jung and the post-Freudians, showing the
nascent logic, taken up by these other thinkers, of Freud’s intuition. Let us trace in the following
paragraphs the development of logic which presented itself to Freud as he faced this topic.

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First of all, Freud’s comment to Romain Rolland - “How remote from me are the worlds in
which you move! To me, mysticism is as closed a book as music” (Freud, E. 1960) – again
underscores Freud’s common difficulties with the realm of the intuitive and the aesthetic. In the
absence of physiological data, he stated that there was no choice but to analyze the “ideational
content” in the oceanic (Freud, 1930a, SE 21; p.68) and in so doing, to adopt the same stance
toward the aesthetic. He could relate neither to the experience nor the technique, but he could
bring a few of its characteristics within the scope of psychoanalysis as ideational content (Freud,
1914 211). However, Freud could find no “content” to be analyzed in the oceanic. He could only
speculate that the feeling of eternity might not be the primary fons et origo – source and origin -
of religion (Freud, 1930a, SE 21; p.68). He preferred to see it as derivative from infantile
experience in a manner consistent with his own view of primary process and the infantile. He
asserts that because of its clash with “the fabric of our psychology” it then “is justified that we
attempt to discover a genetic – that is, psycho-analytic – explanation of such a feeling” (ibid.).
He had no firsthand knowledge of it, and attributes his own preferred “ideational content” to the
oceanic, seeing it as a regression to a state of primary ego feeling identified with a specific
infant-to-breast developmental moment. This claim already hints at an awareness that terms are
shifting, and anticipates a creative solution to the paradox: the phenomenon of the oceanic
clashes with his paradigm, and in the absence of a clear solution, he will for the time being hold
to the psychoanalytic interpretation of a genetic, causal explanation, but only provisionally and
rhetorically.

Secondly, Freud entertains an intermediary position, attempting to reconcile both views of the
oceanic and the infantile while diluting any causal relationship. He reasons that this primordial
state (not content), “corresponds to” (ibid., 68) and exists “side by side with” (ibid.) an event in
infancy, rather than being reducible to it; the sequential trace of concrete events from infancy,
the temporal rupture of repression, is gone from the explanation. Oceanic feeling is the shrunken
“residue” of a capacity, or an affective atmosphere. Its inaccessibility is the spatial problem an
adult has in locating the feeling, or retrieving the long-absent or dissociated self who owns it,
rather than one of psychoanalytically freeing the repressed meaning. Though still illusory in the
broad sense of involving a transitory perceptual state, within the innate psychic repertoire, the

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oceanic feeling is no longer associated with neurosis in any other essential way. Freud’s solution
is to reveal that a basic human quality of experience is shared by adults and infants alike. It is not
caused by or rooted in infancy but merely inaugurated then, although it is fleeting and all but
invisible to most adults. It is thus a casualty of the developmental complication of organization,
the dissociation of states within an increasingly complex and compartmentalized mind, as much
as or more than a problem of dynamically repressed wish or “shrunken residue.”

The infant in Freud’s example has greater opportunity than the busy adult for ideal experience at
the breast. The mystic, artist, and dreamer all have, in their optimal states, and with their innate
and cultivated repertoire, some degree of access to the primal maternal fons et origo. The
ordinary adult must struggle to make room for this feeling; Freud echoes stances taken twenty-
two years earlier, in which he sincerely recommended that we all find some way to achieve in
our lives something analogous to that of the creative writer, so that we do not lose access to our
source of nourishing illusions (Freud, 1908; 143), and that rational people who do not operate in
this way must struggle tortuously for treasures obtained naturally by artists (Freud 1908; SE
9:143; Jones 1: 111; 2: 433), and now by association, mystics, babies, and mothers. But this
becomes more and more possible, as we are challenged to create an intermediate zone in which
to make our space and plant our seeds of insight, creativity, even ecstasy. Freud seems to presage
Winnicott for a moment. As the infant develops, and reality becomes more complicated, so do
the sophisticated means by which he participates in and modifies the internal and external
conditions upon which the quality of his experience depends. Here the ability to play, as an
active expression of the need to maintain the fit between self and world, expresses an
increasingly active and autonomous stance toward both. Increasingly, he must create the
conditions that facilitate his own creativity. They are his relationship to that source in himself,
and in his capacity to “play” in an intermediate space between his own subjective horizon and
the external world.

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This playful creativity depends upon and comes to foster a flexible, empathic connection to the
world. The latter is a mainstay of the aesthetic reciprocity necessary for the creation and
appreciation of art. It is a subset of the ways in which receptive individuals play with their
connection to the world and each other, and embrace surprises that do not feel like intrusions.
Unable to conceive how the mental apparatus of the infant would communicate in the absence of
symbolic capacities, Freud speculated that the infantile bond he associated with oceanic feeling
represented an archaic form of extra-sensory communication. He conceived it as a common
ability “in the background, and still able to put itself into effect under certain conditions” (Freud,
1933a, SE 22). However, already twelve years earlier Freud had offered more clearly the insight
that empathy on the level of primary process would explain the growth of the mind in its
relationships with others better than ESP: “A path leads from identification by way of imitation
to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to
take up any attitude at all towards another mental life” (Freud 1921c, 11f). This connection
draws upon the resonant properties of physical as well as affective and metaphoric psychic
space. It is one in which representation is less a factor than attunement to fluctuations in a
relational, shared, resonant medium, which, approaching the threshold of consciousness, may
then be identified with and become a field for dynamic participation. This is exemplified in the
communion of improvising musicians, lovers, parent and child at play, or of analyst and
analysand co-constructing a dream-space.

Thirdly, then, Freud begins to approach a solution to the paradox, reconciling the infantile and
adult stances through the role played by empathic connection in nourishing the relational and
poetic faculties. Anticipating Klein, to the extent that phantasy and the superego arise much
earlier in infancy, the infant in this resonant dyad is well-equipped with adaptive capacities for
primary and secondary process. He is more or less prepared for the interactions from which his
mature capacities will develop, dreaming and creating not least among them. Contemporary
infant research confirms the cognitive diversity of the infant, who is prepared from the start for
differentiated modes of relation with the world (Stern, 1985). By Freud’s own description, the
infant is involved in a profoundly reciprocal and interactive engagement with the mother in a
jointly constructed psychic system (1915b, 14; 220). The infant, once the epitome of

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helplessness, wordlessness, and wishfulness, is now understood as a capable agent in his own
right, involved in a primal and immediate form of communication. “Infantile” and “non-verbal,”
in the context of the imagination, are no longer “regressive,” but are themselves domains of
experience which can be disrupted in pathological states. Oceanic feeling is simply one state,
among many meaningful non-verbal states, which served to help Freud address the non-
pathological end of the scale of ineffable phenomena. The whole range of these phenomena
includes those well-attuned moments, active and passive, familiar to infant and adult alike.

Freud freely but too infrequently admits that his key concepts and the terms in which they are
embedded are entirely descriptive (ibid.; Freud, Jan 19, 1930; cited in Parsons, 1999; 176), and
“myths magnificent in their indefiniteness” (SE15, 1916). His formulation is nearly elastic
enough to endure this shift in paradigm from one built on repression, regression, and a chaotic
primary process to one built on relationship, organized resonance, and an intelligent primary
process that pre-figures higher levels of psychic organization; but he required the next generation
to explore its possibilities.

Negotiating Oceanic Feeling: Knowledge versus “Fit”

One of the cruxes of our argument hinges on the contradictions and tensions outlined in the
earlier inventory of Freud’s approaches to art and artists. The zones of art and oceanic feeling
both elicit from Freud the persistent wish to know the whole content and motivation through
psychoanalytic means (Freud, 1914, 212) of the phenomena in which he felt he could not
otherwise participate. Oceanic feeling reveals the paradox that Freud was clearly aware of:
figures of speech belonging to a paradigm based on repression cannot describe a content-less
state that pre-figures the symbolic processes of which repression is one derivative
variety. Oceanic feeling, then, highlights the representational limit of Freud’s metapsychology. It
alerts us to the feeling basis of art and dream; as we have already established, in phantasy,
instinct subjectively presents itself as image, thus rendering the manifest as being at least partly
grounded in a primary process distinct from and prior to repression.

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Freud’s linking of oceanic feeling with the infantile feeding-dyad also usefully maintains the
body and the instincts at center stage, where oceanic feeling could be subject to new
formulations. A primacy of image and the natural “vacillating rhythm” (Freud, 1920g, p.41) of
the psyche-soma are both broad characteristics of the individual within a context – the maternal
dyad being the prototype of context. Through this contextual fit emerge the manifest details of
functional psychic life through functions associated with ego and its task of negotiating with
reality. This brings us to a reevaluation of the contrasts and affinities between Freud and Jung,
and their intersection in Klein. Thereafter, I will address how the bodily realm also brings us to
the complex play of space and time in relation to the symbol, image, and language of desire,
inviting a limited excursion into the contributions of Kristeva, Derrida, and Lacan

Phantasy, the Numinous, The Sexual, and the Infantile: A Convergence

Libido for Jung is psychic energy in general, potentially available for work and transformation.
Jung’s Symbols of Transformation of the Libido (1914) was a turning point in his split with
Freud. At this time, Jung took issue with Freud’s emphasis on the monolithic sexual nature of
libido, while maintaining that libido itself is polymorphous and plastic and that it manifests in the
primary function of symbolic imagination.

Libido can never be apprehended except in a definite form; that is to say, it is identical
with fantasy-images. And we can only release it from the grip of the unconscious by
bringing up the corresponding fantasy-images. (Jung, CW 7, par. 345.)

He also refers to libido as “subjectively and psychologically…desire” (Jung, CW4, para.567), or

“appetite in its natural state” (Jung, CW5, para.194), which includes but is not defined by
sexuality. In all instances, libido is manifest psychologically as image, whose symbolic forms
reveal the range of instincts, including the spiritual and the sexual, which express natural
appetites.

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Jung defines both image and dream as spontaneous depictions of the psychic situation as a
whole, at that particular moment, not simply its unconscious components (CW6, para 745).
Along the same lines, he defines the poetic synthesis of imagistic representation as reflecting the
“natural urge of life” (Jung, CW7, para.488). Imagination is figuratively spoken of as the
depiction or self-portrait of the instincts, the “definite form” with which libido is endowed. These
configurations, as organizations of energy, behave like energy and flow along a gradient,
producing an infinite variety of forms variously available to consciousness depending on its
conditions. The full range of this formulation is implicit in the following:

Psychic energy is a very fastidious thing which insists on fulfillment of its own conditions.
However much energy may be present, we cannot make it serviceable until we have
succeeded in finding the right gradient. (Jung CW 7, par. 76)

That is, Jung addresses the inexorable quality of psychic energy in terms resembling those of the
id and primary process, while displaying the affinity of each for form and structure. The psyche
wants to choose not only its objects but also their configurations, according to “its own
conditions.” In this passage Jung does not separate the mechanism or system from the energy
which it processes; the autonomous, coherent, and self-organizing – “fastidious” – qualities of
psychic energy, manifesting as image, are the psyche. “The right gradient,” in this passage,
refers to instinctual necessity, according to which the psyche seeks a subjective balance and fit
among its objects and images. A “gradient” is a difference in energy on two sides of a threshold,
which in physics is resolved through a release or exchange of energy, and in aesthetics or
psychology through the presentation and transformation of an image that generates meaning and
turns a boundary into a threshold. Freud’s approach to the metaphor of energy is by way of
excitation and discharge in a wish-gratifying compromise. Jung’s is the achievement of balance
through a compensatory transitional image; toll paid, change received, progress and symbol
achieved.

The physical metaphors of energy, gradients, and dynamic systems here dovetail with questions
of subjectivity, empathy, and epistemology. The aesthetic dimension covers the same territory as
the therapeutic: each depends upon the resolution of differences in a conducive setting, through
symbolic activity which involves two or more subjects – artist and audience, patient and analyst,

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or unconscious attitudes guided by the transcendent function (Jung, CW6). Empathy, the
subjective and emotional dimension of this fit among patterns, figuratively speaking is a
counterpart of libido, in that it constitutes the conducive quality at the threshold between subjects
which allows something transformative to occur. Empathy is thus a therapeutic and aesthetic
necessity, making it possible for the intellectual content of interpretation to have a meaningful
effect. Jung describes a patient’s lack of receptivity to the “possibilities rationally presented to
him” (ibid.) in analysis, suggesting that the psychological impact, meaning, and efficacy of an
experience depends on aesthetic rightness and relevance – the right gradient - rather than rational
criteria. The meaning and effectiveness of content is thus contingent on a conducive subjective
state. Experience felt as meaningful is evidence of libido finding its gradient, for example,
supported by rapport and empathy as much as by correctness.

Jung’s “numinous” state is analogous to Rolland’s oceanic feeling, though different in key ways.
Each describes a distinct feeling state possible through suspension of ordinary awareness. Like
Freud, Jung focused on the extra-ordinary qualities of mystical experience. Freud’s stance was
suspicious and wedded to the intellectual conquest of the unknown (Freud, 1914, 211-12; letter
to Wilhelm Fliess, Feb. 1, 1900), but still fascinated; Jung’s was more natively at home with the
state, but devoutly empirical. Debates about which investigator’s sensitivity to ordinary feeling
states was greater become entangled, unfortunately, in the biases of the observers, and are
therefore largely unfruitful. But it can be said that unlike Freud, Jung neither reduced the feelings
associated with the extraordinary to infantile regression and wish fulfillment, nor identified them
per se with psychosis. “Numinous” denotes an empirically observable change in awareness upon
encounter with that which is extraordinary to the ego. This encounter registers as suprapersonal,
something exceeding one’s will or control, and archetypal. Like oceanic feeling, the numinous is
a non-pathological subjective feeling state characterized by the surpassing of personal
boundaries. Felt as awe-inspiring, it may become a catalyst for change and growth. Unlike
oceanic feeling, it is felt as the presence of a greater power with enigmatic meaning. It depends
upon “belief, unconscious or conscious, that is, a prior readiness to trust a transcendent power”
(Samuels, 2003, p.100). Jung explicitly avoided attributing metaphysical status to the god of
such experience, treating the god-image instead as a product of the collective psyche, the

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personification of a psychic tendency. It is not a contact with an external deity, but a natural
phenomenon of the psyche, manifest in the numinous sense of contact with something archetypal
or primal, the mythic embodiment of something “higher” than the ego.

The numinous experience is thus more specific than the oceanic with respect to its “ideational
content” (Freud, 1930, SE21, 68) or significance, to the extent that it is the experiential aspect of
the larger principle responsible for endowing idea, affect, image, and behavior with their
particular tendencies. If we replace the word “archetype” with the concept of romantic love, for
example, we can see easily that the experience is only the subjective level of a category
encompassing idea, affect, image and behavior, and which reaches into the collective as a
cultural value and motif. The oceanic, by contrast, is expressed as a non-specific feeling, to
which we ascribe qualities – eternity, connectivity, boundlessness. Jung specified that the god-
image is an inherent phenomenon of the psyche, expressing an underlying archetypal
configuration; the apprehension of this level is experienced as something out of the ordinary and
in sharp contrast to mundane details and the everyday attitude, and seems to come unbidden from
elsewhere. It thus corresponds, in Jung’s idiomatic language, to the organizational and affective
determinants of phantasy, as described by Klein, (1923), Isaacs (1948), and Bion (1965, 1992).
The numinous feeling corresponds to the uncanny (Freud, SE17), nameless dread (Bion, 1962),
and to the self-other confusion characteristic of projective identification in fragile ego conditions,
as explored by Bion and the other Kleinian authors (ibid.). The experience of the numinous as an
outside power, however, can be attributed to its contrast with ordinary states of mind, and
illustrates the complexity of psychic space and its contents. It is experienced as “outside”
because it is alien to the ego and the personal unconscious, and is a projection of the transcendent
sense of encounter exceeding one’s horizons, into a perceptual metaphor of infinite spatial
horizons. It bespeaks the complex organization of plural subjective centers and the ego that
navigates them (Jung, CW6), a key feature of Jung’s approach.

Jung maintained that his concern was with empirical facts of the psyche, the sense and meaning
of that which is mystical to the ego and to consciousness, not with metaphysics. He attempted to
reassure Freud that no harm would come of his

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 wanderings in these infinitudes. I shall return laden with rich booty for our
knowledge of the human psyche. For a while longer, I must intoxicate myself
on magic perfumes in order to fathom the secrets that lie hidden in the
abysses of the unconscious (McGuire, Freud/Jung Letters, May 8, 1911,
p.183).

Whatever else may be said of Jung’s zeal for such treasures, he attempted to keep it grounded in
a scientific attitude toward their manifestation and meaning in the ordinary psyche. Jung, like
Freud, was committed to empirically documenting the contents of the psyche and the types of
experience, as they could be observed, experienced, or inferred. Freud parted company with Jung
primarily over the question of a religious instinct and the unitary, sexual basis for libido; yet
Freud indulged his own fascination with an expanded horizon of subjectivity, both before and
after his collaboration with Jung, expressed in such subject matter as parapsychology (SE17, 18)
and extra-sensory mother-infant communication (Freud, 1933a, SE 22:55).

Yet in the mainstream of his metapsychology Freud would maintain this marginal class of
experiences as spurious, neurotic, and glaringly distinct from the truths of the material world.
Jung’s “infinitudes,” with their mythic ideational contents, were treated by Freud as exemplary
illusions and hence infantile or symptomatic. Still, he was moved none the less to address this
zone again a decade later, approaching Rolland in a spirit of both challenge and reconciliation.
As we have seen above, oceanic feeling permitted Freud to address the religious experience as
distinct from any wish-fulfilling content; it was a content-free representation of the territory
otherwise impassable by a metapsychology designed for the analysis of conflict, repression, and
their impact on representation.

However, religious experience, regardless of belief system or truth-claims about god or gods, is
more than a positive feeling state, and is replete with cognitive, moral, affective, and imagistic
components. The experience of deity is one manifestation of the mythic, idealized
personifications of phantasy emerging from beyond the horizon of the personal ego. It is
something fundamentally human and thus impersonal, but also archetypal, reflecting a
characteristic mode of imagination. As with all phantasy, it assigns personified qualities and

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relational configurations to experience. A god-image, mythic image, or otherwise idealized
image is the mode by which extra-ordinary experience tends to be represented. Huxley, in Point
Counterpoint (1928/1996, pp.508-9), used the experience of a Beethoven string quartet to
illustrate a state both oceanic and ecstatic, almost convincing the cynic of the existence of God.
In other words, Beethoven evoked a state of awe, an experience which seemed to touch God,
which, in Jung’s view, is first and foremost a psychic fact. It illustrated the collapsing of
boundaries between oneself and something greater, hair-raising, alternately beautiful and terrible.
When one is gripped in such a way, the scale and configuration of psychic space changes; the
ego is decentered, both shrunken and edified into its larger context, and the perception of one’s
“place” in the world stands altered. The term “ecstasy,” standing-outside, denotes the affective
extreme familiar in mystical, aesthetic, and sexual contexts, and frames the spatial perspective of
an ego that changes in relation to changing and extraordinary subjective states. And so the Greek
ekstasis, “standing outside oneself” or “self-displaced,” already marks a shift in the relation of
the ego to the broader subjective horizons found in Jung and Bion (1965, 1970, 1992). This
spatial reconfiguration plays host to symbolic power that spurs growth and is neither
pathological nor infantile.

Jung has been criticized for having neglected the infantile and excessively concretizing the
archetypes and their images. However, this can be understood in part by way of the
epistemological difference between Jung and the Freudian lineage. This difference has been
partly compensated by a division among Jungian schools along theoretical lines in a manner
analogous to the splits occurring in the history of psychoanalysis. Although Jung wrote a number
of pieces on infant and child development (CW17), he left them sketchy and undeveloped. He
proposed neither some form of literal developmental sequence nor an analogous recapitulation of
this sequence in adult psychology; nor did he claim that there was no basis for analogy between
infantile experience and adult fixations, positions, or patterns. The focus of his developmental
theory was framed in general terms as “ego-formation within natural growth” (Ryce-Menuhin,
1988). Rather than a model of mind based on the re-assertion of infantile patterns and forms,
Jung articulated instead an epistemological and metaphorical system of the psyche, engaged in a
dialectical rhythm of emergence from and immersion into the collective and its archetypal forms,

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in counterpoint to the experiential details of personal life. The continual reconciliation of these
aspects brings about symbolic growth, reintegration, and emergence on higher and more
differentiated levels of organization (Koestler, 1969). On a radical level, this ontogeny of human
subjectivity is treated as a principle of nature and applies at every point of life. This view places
Jung and Loewald, whom I will discuss in the next chapter, on the same footing with respect to
the rhythm of reconciliation and elaboration of innate form, new experience, and changing
context. In the work of each, the personality’s distinct pattern emerges anew on increasingly
differentiated levels of organization.

While Jung acknowledged the crucial developmental importance of the quality of the maternal
bond, including the psychological dynamics of the parents and the perceptual match of outer
experience to archetypal potential, he articulated the broad process of integration as applying to
individuation across the life span. Writers such as Neumann (1972, 1976), exemplifying
classical Jungian thought, saw in child development the same process – the containment in and
deliverance from the maternal archetype into the differentiated logos of the father archetype -
applying to the infant and the culture as a whole. This process is analogous, in Jung’s frame of
reference, to the Freudian movement from the pleasure principle to the reality principle through
the differentiation of secondary process from primary process.

In the few pieces he did write on infancy and childhood, Jung summarily embraced the broader
outlines of the holding environment, reverie, introjection, and good-enough care, in ways that are
broadly consistent with the formulations of the Kleinian writers. These accounts of child
development were fleshed out empirically by several thinkers, chiefly Michael Fordham, who
spearheaded the developmentally-focused London School. Fordham addressed several
dimensions of child-development which brought object relations and Jung’s broader concepts
together. His work reconciles several Kleinian themes with his Jungian foundation (Fordham,
1973, 1996, 1998). The undifferentiated Self at birth is not “empty,” but is neurologically
prepared for imaginal life and differentiated perception by means of its archetypal potential. The
infant will hallucinate the breast, as the symbolic equation of object and its satisfaction (Segal,
1948). However, impingements and frustrations will “de-integrate” the infantile sense of

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wholeness and continuity, provoking the archetypal (Jung) or phantasied (Klein) breast as a
proto-symbol, the beginning of a functional symbol that can sustain the infant in the breast’s
absence, and thus avert trauma in the ego’s differentiation from the Self. A proto-symbol
reintegrates the ego that has become de-integrated from the Self by the rupture in continuity
caused by frustration, hunger, etc. This symbolic capacity yields a psychic durability and
elasticity analogous to object constancy (Mahler, Pine, Bergmann, 1975), which enables a
continuity of relation between ego and Self. However, the capacity to achieve it, in the Jung-
Fordham view, is an innate archetypal endowment, by which the infant is born prepared for the
interpersonal resources on which he will depend (Ryce-Menuhin, 1988).

Fordham’s work says little about the developmental nature of intuition, mythic imagery, or
numinous states, giving preferential treatment instead to the structural and development role of
the archetype and the Self in the mother-infant relation. However, a link can be inferred. Firstly,
he links the developmental achievement of symbol use with the ego’s differentiation from the
unitary oceanic background state, the latter corresponding to the subjective totality Jung labeled
the Self. He then gives the archetype the developmental role, much like Klein’s phantasy, of
innately assigning formal imagistic properties to the turbulences of the Self which spur ego
emergence. Archetype and phantasy assign to the “real” mother or real breast its deified value –
the epitome implied by “good” and “bad” breast, or the Great Mother of the mother archetype.
The phantasy or archetypal counterpart to the actual person is the mythic creator and destroyer,
nurturer and devourer, and when conditions such as the threat of annihilation or the bliss of
perfect satisfaction are extreme enough, the phantasy/archetypal component overshadows the
actuality by swamping the ego and presenting as the radically-other, or gods and monsters. When
conditions are alien, threatening, or significant enough to bring the ego past its familiar horizon,
the archetypal background asserts itself, structuring apperception in mythic fashion,
accompanied by a sense of awe, beauty, terror, or an uncanny sense of greater presence. The
other way is that of oceanic feeling: the melting surrender, the self-other suspension experienced
as liberation, the affective and apperceptive qualities of bliss, ecstasy, and eternity.

In either case, though, of either de-centering, de-integrating shock or meditative

undifferentiation, the subjective apprehension takes in the background primary process at the

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root of phantasy, which is experienced by the ego as extra-ordinary. These extremes, as stated by
Rolland about oceanic feeling, are independent of any particular religious creed, belief,
organization, or hope; they are facts of subjective life (Rolland letter to Freud, Dec. 5, 1927; in
Parsons, 1999). Both Western and Eastern religions have recognized the grace and terror
intrinsic to the experience. Interestingly, the ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead 15 (Evans-Wentz
and Dawa-Samdup, 1968), refers to the “apparitions” of the void of “intermediate space,”
offering as a prayer the invocation that one “fear not the forms of the peaceful and wrathful who
are one's own thought forms”[italics mine] – an object-relational perspective in an ancient
mystical text dedicated to preparing the soul for a traumatic transition. These insights are
continuous across psychoanalytic and cultural boundaries and cultural traditions. The peaceful
and wrathful deities belong to the psyche, or perhaps the reverse.

The archetype is the tendency to certain forms of apperception and action constituted in the
instinctual facts of our bodies – and serves an analogous function to phantasy in the Kleinian
tradition. All the post-Freudians cited here agree on some form of inherited disposition expressed
on the figurative palette and on actions taken to employ it, through which the instincts are
represented in image and symbol. Among all these authors, symbols serve to mediate conflict,
facilitate symbolic capacity, dramatically or graphically depict complex psychic situations,
contain affects, bind personal and cultural relationships, and overcome the dilemmas of life.
Once managed in this way they are “known” in the structure of a mind with a repertoire of tools
which allow it to mediate extremes. Consciousness as knowing is not identical with awareness or
overcoming of repression, but a deeper instinct toward linkage (Bion, 1959, 1965). In Jung’s
thought, this capacity for constructive innovation mediated by symbolic manifestation and
subsequent realization issues from the transcendent function (Jung, CW6). And, in one of his few
statements directly about music, Jung makes music such a symbolic domain:
Music expresses, in some way, the movement of the feelings ... that cling to the
unconscious processes... music represents the movement, development, and
transformation of the motifs of the collective unconscious (Jung, 1973, p. 542 in
Skar, 2002, p.632).

15
Apropos of the auditory emphasis of this project, the Sanskrit title translates closely to “Liberation Through
Hearing in the Intermediate State”.

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Indirectly, this also points to a symphonic, synthetic endeavor in Jung’s approach to analysis,
which highlights the developmental, harmonizing tendency of the personality expressed in his
theory of individuation. Jung’s use of amplification of the patient’s associations places the
individual utterance and image, its associations and intrinsic conflicts, in both the broader picture
of the individual’s complexes, and in the greater context of social and mythological history.
Eigen (2004) rightly calls this Jung’s binocular view, evoking an area of resonance with that of
Bion’s, explored elsewhere in this volume. This amplificatory approach achieves something akin
to the exploration of the link between a musical improvisation and the song, history, and
immediate ensemble in which it is the emergence of a particular moment in a developing musical
reality.

For Jung, the psyche’s underlying creativity derives from the shifting configurations of
archetype, ego, and Self. It relies upon the transcendent function, whereby symbols are generated
to reconcile incompatible positions (Jung, CW6). These terms have become freighted, for those
in Freud’s lineage, with negative associations which derive from the historical split between Jung
and Freud and the shadows cast by Jung’s consideration of phenomena typically considered by
Freudians to be unworthy of psychoanalytic consideration. This latter position echoes Freud’s
proviso that a work of art must merit the effort by being reducible, through the application of
intellect, to a set of motivations understood under the rubric of neurosis (Freud, 1914). The
contributions from the other authors explored in this paper already begin to reconcile the
theoretical split between Freud and Jung, for they simultaneously extend Freud’s later ideas in
parallel with Jung’s defining ones, showing ways in which they resonate at a workable distance.
This resonance becomes particularly visible in the affinity between Fordham’s synthesis of
Jung’s developmental views on ego and archetype, and Klein’s developmental view of phantasy
as an “archaic, phylogenetically acquired mode” by which thought and perception are assigned
form. Each of these formulations serves to further Freud’s structural speculations, in which he
looked beyond the direct sensory experience of the infant to find the formal conditions of that
experience.

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Where’s the Sex?

We also have the opportunity to reclaim the erotic and sexual – the sort found in the sexual
relations within and between people - from its stultifying place as the chief currency in
pathology and the dreamwork as a whole. The mythic and archetypal dimensions of sexuality are
a topic for other volumes, but a few words are due, especially considering how little mention of
sexuality there is in this one. There is no room in Freud’s thinking for a benign, ordinary, or
transcendent ecstasy, for the rhythms and boundary-meltings of dancing and fucking, the ego-
dissolving mysticism and heat of merging and separation with another human. Nor the sanctity
of one’s intimate relationship with one’s own body and fantasy life. There is a purely practical
element to the problem of Freudian sexuality: regardless of its subtleties, by making it the
categorical rubric and organizing concept of this monumental theory, it lost a private life. It
becomes very difficult to talk about the many details of the private life of sex, and everything
about it is as suspect as any head of state, not to mention that of a state that has been annexed.
The subjective states, the communion between partners, passion, comfort, playfulness…the
variety of acts, positions, orifices and membranes to be negotiated between consenting partners –
these cannot be merely consigned to the atavistic category of perversion, nor neutralized in
mainstream erotic and academic human sexuality studies16. They are a big part of the repertoire
of human experience, both transcendent in their pleasure, pains, and power to shape relationships
and communities, and ordinary facets of life. They are also prime instances of the human
expressions of rhythm, dyad, ecstasy, boundary, with pathogenic and pathological elements and
expressions. To define putative adult genital sexuality as the exception to all the perversions is
akin to suggesting that there are degenerate and acceptable ways to play. One might say, echoing
Rycroft, that the way in which sexuality can find a healthy place in life, as in discourse, without
being exiled or inflated, is the challenge of integration, the ability to transition from one persona,
with its priorities, obsessions, and mandates, to another where the erotic is at home. There are
risks to bringing one’s work to bed.

16
When Meltzer and Harris-Williams (2008) write of the claustrum, narcissistic pathology, and anal masturbation, they are
exploring, clinically and theoretically, a particular constellation made of symbolic conjunctions between image, body boundary,
and character. The sexual remains one of the densest symbol-and-symptom generating dimensions of human life, but one that
also expresses the simple spirits of play in all their variety, and an innocence akin to that of Rycroft’s dream.

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The Postmodern, The Mercurial, and Resonance across the Gap
The postmodern condition is characterized by a style of consciousness that has
proceeded from a simple reflexivity which still held trust in, and felt grounded by, the
existence of “ultimates,” “absolutes” or “truths,” to…the realization (or is it
admission?) that our very means of knowledge and expression is trapped within the
limitations of human representation itself. (Hauke, 2000, p.204)

Postmodern views offer depth psychology the chance to restore its “Otherness,” its
spiritual and religious element which was always the ground from which it sprang but
which became lost through depth psychology clinging to, rather than continuing to
challenge, the modernist values within which it emerged. (Ibid., 209)

The unquestionable absolutes… are not the eternal, archetypal structures we once
taught them to be, but are rather temporal and linguistic by-products…We still must on
one level, believe in our god term and use it as if it were the ultimate explanatory
principle. But on a deeper level, we also know that it is not. And it is precisely this
deeper level of awareness that prevents our psychological ideologies from becoming
secular religions and differentiates professional debates from religious idolatry.
(Kugler, 1990)

Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva address the movement of language and meaning in relation to one
another, to the unconscious, desire and the body, and their roles in the constitution of the subject.
Their work dismantles any notion of a set of absolute laws or reductive processes transcendent to
subjectivity by which one may decode the unconscious. The movement of desire, the slippage
and difference between signifier and signified, and the tensile field between them, generate,
sustain, and negate meaning, like the fluctuating fields of force sustained between two magnets
or two particles which can never meet. This representational movement demands alternatives to a
psychoanalysis based on substitutes for repressed wishes, and provides another avenue into the
musical elements of subjectivity and representation.

Meaning for Lacan accrues along the “chain of signification” (Lacan, 2005, p,418), emphasizing
the linear sequence and circular links of desire rather than the neurotic compromise. The link
between desire and its signifiers is always incomplete and metonymical, a “sliding” movement
(ibid., p.419) which leaves desire perpetually unsatisfied. The partial metonymic correspondence
between desire and its objects leaves desire “on the rails…eternally extending toward the desire

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for something else” (ibid p.431). In this Lacan preserves the general structure of repression and
substitution laid out by Freud, while also modifying it. Lacan elevates desire above Freud’s
equation of it with biological need; he calls it “paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even
scandalous” (Lacan, 2005, p.579), amplifying Freud’s complementary insight regarding the
“plasticity of libido” (SE16, 345) by displacing a key aim of libido from pleasure onto the
signifying instinct. He maintains Freud’s treatment of “reality” as an unrepresentable absolute
before which representation always falls short or slides away (Lacan, 2005, p. 17). However, the
profusion of alternatives by which the signifier can represent the signified “makes the very
existence of fiction possible” (ibid, p.7). The perpetual motion of desire and the kaleidoscopic
repertoire of metonym and metaphor offer an infinity of idiosyncratic forms which can achieve
symbolic status and thereby constitute the subject (ibid.).

Lacan openly embraces the decentering and relativising principle which can only be inferred in
Freud by means of attention to his ambivalent themes. The constant metonymic and metaphoric
displacement of desire, the “frenzy miming the abyss of the infinite” (Lacan, Ecrits, 166-7), is
placed on display in Lacan’s own verbal play (Bowie, 1991, p.132). His is not a theory of
substitution, but rather of combinatorial possibilities of representation. Yet he slides down the
slippery, logocentric slope of attributing to language the chief role of demonstrating the qualities
of desire. Lacan thus moves onto a Mercurial terrain similar in this particular way to Derrida’s,
whose priority is to extend “the domain and play of signification infinitely” (Derrida, 1978, p.
280) and thereby de-center and disrupt reliance on truth, explanatory authority, and the
monolithic ego.

Derrida claims that the history of metaphysics, and with it the intellectual tradition which seeks a
stable, removed place from which to make its judgments, is itself a history of metaphor and
metonymy, false binaries that can sustain no stable center (ibid., 279). His compound construct
of differánce (ibid, 293) refers to the dual disruption of identity between signifier and signified,
which are perpetually out of time (deferral) and out of identity (difference). He gives the
example of creativity as being witness to childbirth, in which an “other,” the infant, inseparable
from yet not identical to the mother, moves from the expanding uterus through the birth canal
into its own space and time. Out of synch and progressively displaced from one another, they are

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now free to have a relationship, mediated by the displacements of their language from the pure
presence of pre-verbal life through gaps and differences of language and the symbolic. The
creative process and product, the mental space, and the relational world all arise from this
birthing and differentiating of meaning from the disruption of forms. With respect to the
Mercuriality of language, Derrida points to the constant transformation of “a central presence
which has never been itself, has always already been exiled from itself into its own substitute”
(ibid., 280). This perpetual transformation makes possible the de-centering insight that the free
play of language and image, no longer capable of fixed correspondence with the object in the
world, makes thinking about the key concepts of philosophy, religion, aesthetics, and psychology
possible in the first place. It is in dynamic, complex imaginal flux, resonance in the space-
between, that meaning is revealed.

Links to music, movement, and the containing and delivering metaphor of the uterus and birth
canal, are to be found throughout the work of these three thinkers, offering a bridge to that of
Bion, Winnicott, Loewald, and Jung. Yet Lacan reaches his own aporia too, as Freud did in his
logo-centrism; Lacan’s entire focus in defining the unconscious rests upon the sliding
correspondence of signifier and signified. His statement that “the unconscious is structured like a
language” (Lacan, 2005) circularly limits our understanding to what is accessible by means of
even a rigorous attention to the meanings woven into the signifying chains of language. Yet the
sliding relationship between signifier and signified, the temporality of the subject impelled
toward temporary identifications with unsatisfying things, and the infinite possibility of
configurations of the signifying chain, all offer another bridge away from language, to music. In
music, correspondence between contents and signifiers is incidental, while its meaning is
achieved through – rather than in spite of - the dynamic motion and emergence of its multiple
voices and patterns.

Derrida, focusing on the problems of language and philosophy rather than the mind per se,
displaces the biologically mediated wish by means of the intrinsic undecidability and
indeterminacy of conceptual systems. In exploring the difference between speech and writing, he
brings us closer to the music which imbues language-units with poetic value. In deconstructing
the “metaphysics of presence,” he cautions that the representation which is “present” in the

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moment is nevertheless dissociated from the absent object. He calls attention to the “trace,” or
the lacuna of instinct that lives in the abyss between absence and presence. This trace is a living
relic of the primordial correspondence preceding the dissociation of signifier and signified, like
the relic in Freud’s Pompeii analogy, plucked out of its living context and re-transcribed in
hardened rock. However, Derrida’s medium is neither hardened nor stratified, but a product of a
fluid drift; the metaphor ought to be that of the world before the flood, antediluvian, instead of
volcanic. In speech we have an immediate, sonic, and sensory presentation and presence, with
minimal time and distance between thought and its presentation. In writing we have, for Derrida,
a secondary symbolization of the immediate meaning to be found in the speech act, delayed and
subject to the drift of its own history once it has exited the birth canal of the writer. Such
secondary symbolization goes on to function in the writer’s total absence; thus the “trace” which
Derrida posits, which relies, as in Kristeva, on “play” (1978) to resolve the limits of separation.
Play is the tensile movement between the origin of a thought and the approximation achieved by
our vocabulary; the movement of play frames both the coherence and flux of symbols. The
symbol is neither arbitrary nor universal, nor is there a consistent code by which to translate
between one symbolic mode and another. Where Freud posits a latent thought and the necessity
of manifest substitutes, and attributes it to the repression of its libidinal aspect, Derrida finds this
essential difference in the mythopoetic challenge (Derrida, 1978; Levi-Strauss, 1964) to sustain
attention to the trace in its constant sliding between presence and absence, a task undertaken in
his deconstructive approach.

I suggest that this trace and its slide can be imagined as a resonance within a durable symbolic
structure. Here, Derrida articulates the challenge of figuration, central to the work of Jung and
Bion, to manifest a coherent and enduring imaginal structure able to function as a symbol
conducive to the richness and range of thought and experience, and their propagation into further
symbolic capacity. Like Kristeva, Bion, Freud, and Jung, all of whom use the metaphors of the
womb, vessel, and birth canal for generative unconscious space, Derrida too frames this
mythopoetic challenge as one of gestation and birth: “the as-yet unnameable which is

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proclaiming itself…as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing” (Derrida, 1978)17. This
portion of the challenge to present and represent is not about repression and substitution; more
basically it is about the coalescing of thought-forms in the shifting synaptic space between
frontiers. Thus it expresses the basic Mercurial challenge to create meaning by navigating
between and across limits, as presented in Chapter One: a challenge which is answered in Greek
myth by the god Hermes, who grounds both language and music.

The spoken word is the primary medium of the psychoanalyst, by which the analysand presents
and accounts for himself. Derrida, too, emphasizes the tantalizing presence of speech, in which
the breath, the physical resonance, the prosody and the differentiated meaning of the speaker
happen at the closest possible temporal and physical proximity to the moment of their
conception. Yet speech is evanescent. Its counterpart, writing – which psychoanalysis has, in its
literary analysis, approached “as if” it were a product of the same neurotic process as speech and
dream – leaves the mind and hand of the writer and drifts, increasingly detached from its
conception, into negation and absence. It is no longer bound to the ego which negotiated its
release, or midwifed its birth, ultimately functioning as a machine that neither needs nor
represents its creator (Derrida, 1977, 1978). It is not that language drifts away from a primordial
“being,” but rather that “being” need not be posited at all in order for one to see that the struggle
to represent something works within an intrinsic margin of movement. This margin is
represented in Derrida by “differánce” and the trace, principles of fluid and mercurial
organization. To these we add the qualification that while language and meaning decay and
dissemble in this divide, music lives and transforms within it, declaimed in full presence until its
resonant decay.

Music embraces the very dimensions of subjective life which are problematic for a
psychoanalysis built around language: motion, transition, the observer as agent, multiple voices,
and the mutability of meaning. With respect to Lacan, I suggest that music offers a non-linguistic
demonstration of the movement of desire through a different, more elastic chain. Language for
Lacan is a signifying chain describing the complex contour of desire, on whose moving surface

17
As well as reminiscent of Yeat’s dark beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born, which gave its name to the
final book of Nina Coltart, British analyst who championed psychoanalysis as a creative act of discovery.

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signifiers accrete. Music itself is a presentation of the moving contour of affect (Langer, 1953).
Although Lacan’s work remains logocentric, he suggests both an ironic understanding of how his
account of representation itself exemplifies how language eludes itself, and at least one insight in
which we can extrapolate the connection between the unconscious movement and dimensionality
of representation and the nature of music. In particular, Lacan recognizes two dimensional axes,
horizontal sequence and vertical concurrence, in the “rings of the necklace that is a ring in
another necklace made of rings” (Lacan, 1977, 153) which makes up the signifying chain of
language. The horizontal axis is forward movement, one signifier following another like the
notes and beats which contextualize one another in a single melody. The vertical axis marks
moments of harmonic intersection between two or melodic lines, a profusion of voices variably
coinciding and sliding out of phase. In stressing the arbitrary and the wayward in signification,
akin to the centrality of repression in Freud, Lacan suggests but does not state the extent of
meaning revealed in the dynamic motion of layered voices. He misses “the possibility that truth
in discourse manifests itself in those moments when the upholstery button of the letter pins down
both the linear and the vertical at once” (ibid.), as well as the possibility that this “truth” can be
found in the musical moment, independent of the letter.

Derrida’s “differánce” addresses radical gap in temporal and spatial correspondence between
signifier and signified, in which the “trace” of meaning is suspended like a fish that can only live
at depths providing an optimal range of fluid pressure. Plucked from its depths, it rises dead and
bereft of color. Again we have the paradox, harking back to Rycroft (979), of attempting to bring
to the analytic surface living specimens of another order which cannot survive the transition, or
which come through misshapen. Derrida points to the polarity of presence and absence – the
sliding away of the signified from the rigid pressure of the signifier. The “trace” of which he
writes is the coherent living idea suspended within the tensile field or medium spanning absence
and presence. In our terms and with reference to our topic, it is important to recognize that it is
never found at either of these virtual poles. The composite meaning of differánce is of difference
and deferral, the “not now and not this” of the signifier. Again in our terms, both temporal and
spatial, the trace may be understood as the moment of concatenation when voices move
elastically together from different places and starting points, never ceasing and never precisely

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repeating. The trace is conceivable musically as the unifying thread in a work of music, at all
moments distinct from all other moments and yet unified by virtue of context and continuity.

In linking Derrida’s work to music, I call attention to this decay or deconstruction, the coming
apart of the subjective structure of language. As either the evaporation of spoken words or the
abandoned drift of writing, it is part and parcel of all texts (ibid.). It is useful in our terms not as a
method of analysis but as the application of a specific form of attention to a particular difference:
that between one’s tendency to lean upon illusory certainties and the natural fluidity of the terms
of thought as they present themselves; between the choice of words to best approximate a
thought in a particular moment, and their drift into the world and subjectivity of others, such as
an analytic listener or audience. Within that framework the deconstructive trace is as essential to
analysis as to aesthetics. In the same light, a musical awareness of experience does not need to
translate speech into musical units, any more than the words mask or encode a particular wishful,
unspeakable thought. It is precisely this dualistic either/or which Derrida rejects, this notion of a
rigid opposition of competing discourses which supplant one another, or even the notion that the
two are equivalent modes which can be reconciled if one possesses the correct cipher. What is
recommended rather is a supraordinal awareness that concepts are transitional and phenomena
are both fleeting and continually overflowing available conceptual containers. As a
psychoanalytic device, this awareness complements and even grounds the evenly hovering
attention and reverie at the heart of our technique. Derrida can help us place Keats, Freud, and
Bion’s negative capability in a new context: we suspend irritable reaching after fact and reason,
not because they are tyrants, and not simply because we must allow analysis to have an
uninterrupted space in which to manifest, but because at the heart of our intellectual effort –
including deconstruction itself - are metaphysical presumptions about truth, causality, purpose,
and hierarchy that subvert the effort. We genuinely believe in our decoding techniques, or at
least in the likelihood that the signifier will lead us to the genuine article; what the symptoms
stands in for, rather than where it points, or what larger organizing activity assigns its place. The
answer is neither to go to the binary extreme of arbitrariness, nor to abandon effort in nihilism or
impotence; attention to musical flow and reverie need not represent castration, but rather
freedom to understand plurality, and to allow the experiential contour of meaning and affect to

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unfold. Such freedom admits both irony and an expanded perspective, beginning with auditory
values that have been slow, as Rycroft lamented, to join the repertoire.

This so called “post-Modern” perspective expresses a returning awareness of the mercuriality of

language, the psyche, and representation, and to the heterogeneity in modes of representation
necessary to reflect the complexity of the subject. Kristeva is unique here for her effort to
articulate both the repressed and repressive aspects of language, as well as an approach aimed at
restoring integration to this complex heterogeneity. In so doing, Kristeva may be said to
reconstruct the de-construction which Derrida finds endemic to language, and to give voice to
the non-verbal forms of the subject absent in Lacan. She addresses the complementary, coherent
modes offered by art which subvert the repression whose centrality is enforced by conventional,
authoritative discourse. She does this while preserving the essential theme of movement and
grounding in the rhythms and fluidity of the body.

Kristeva offers the essential insight that language is only one manifestation of the signifying
process. Others modalities, exemplified in art and poetry, are attuned to the basic semiotic forms
of the body. As analogs of phantasy, the latter are the formal foundation and precursors of
subjectivity and ideology (Kristeva, 1977, 71-2; Payne, 1993, p. 165). Kristeva distinguishes two
fundamental modes of the signifying process – the semiotic and the symbolic. The semiotic
refers not to a formal system of signs but to forms assumed by the instincts, declaring themselves
through the modes available through the body – the voice, cry, and gesture. Most importantly
with reference to music and the voice, semiotics appears in prosody, the variable proportions and
stresses in the rhythms of language, not in specific denotative meanings. She preserves the Greek
meaning of semiotic, referring to a mark, figuration, precursory sign, or trace (Payne, 1993).
However, she has rooted her usage in the natural figurative acts of the body corresponding to the
Freudian primary processes of dreamwork. Formal language is the province of the symbolic, the
structuring of the semiotic from “the social effect of the relation to the other, established through
the objective constraints of biological (including sexual), differences, and concrete, historical
family structures” (Kristeva, 1984).

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The semiotic aspect of sound expressed in the voice is the physical testimony of the subjective
state of the body, making corporeality explicit (Labelle, 2006). Yet the voice as heard and
expressed, even to the infant in utero or newly delivered, is irreducibly contextual – it takes place
in a space and is mediated through the mother’s body and the affect of the mother’s response.
Thus the symbolic in speech is the result of the precarious negotiation of the bodily voice
through the social and physical structures of the world and its relations. These are historically
and culturally mediated, structured around conventional norms and repressions, as well as those
not yet available, and which appear first through intuition.

Derrida uses the image of the birth canal for the tensile and traumatic delivery of representation
into the world. Kristeva goes further, using the womb as metaphor for the means by which the
semiotic and symbolic are synthesized into the full repertoire of representational modes. For this
she evokes the chora, referring to both the embryological membrane against which the fetus as
emerging “other” signals, and from which it receives signals from the mother’s body, and the
cosmological concept of the chora as container in Plato’s Timaeus. Plato begins by indicating a
passive “receptacle of Being,” but his cosmic language also accommodates reference to the space
where the fetus as a new existent begins to differentiate. We see here the roots of Freud’s
statement that “there is much more continuity between intrauterine life and earliest infancy than
the impressive caesura of birth would allow us to believe” (Freud, SE 20, 1926). The irony of
Freud’s statement is that he argues that it is the definitive primary narcissism of the infant and
the fetus alike, incapable of experiencing the mother as “other,” that makes the caesura of birth
less of an interruption than it seems. Yet, as we see in both Kristeva’s formulations and parallel
ones such as Bion’s caesura (1977), the figurative template of the container/contained cognitive
structure is none other than intrauterine life, where the differentiation which makes relationship
possible begins as a gestational fact and as a prefiguration of subjectivity. Kristeva poses this
figurative template as a dual and paradoxical structure. The mother’s containing body supports
the “semiotic chora,” the fetal bodily rhythm-space which grounds the emergence of the
individual, idiomatic style of sign and gesture, akin to Winnicott’s spontaneous gesture (1990). It
is not-mother, not-infant, but the pulsing in between that constitutes the relationship, and in turn
the differentiation of the infant’s own semiotic “voice”. Winnicott’s familiar “use of the object”
(1989) develops from the encounter between the fetal sensorium and movement, and between he

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boundaries of the maternal body and social and physical worlds. So too, for Kristeva, the
maternal body becomes the template for the encounter between the infantile semiotic and the
social, symbolic order. These are the conditions that negate and limit, and thus propel the
emergence and differentiation of, the infantile subject who discovers the “otherness” of both his
own experiences and the world, represented by the mother (Kristeva, 1984, p.28). The chora is
then the place where the subject is “both generated and negated, the place where his unity
succumbs before the process of charges and stases that produce him” (ibid.).

Payne states that Kristeva

“…seems determined to retain both Plato’s maternal image and his more abstract
formulation…when Kristeva writes about the body, unlike Lacan and Derrida, she
gives it the sense of having bones and flesh and hormones. For her the body both is
and is not external to language” (Payne, 1993).

Kristeva here outlines a template for the entire subjective repertoire, not simply for the pattern of
repressions, primal or otherwise. The voice assumes a prominent place as the immediate zone of
negotiation between the semiotic and the symbolic, where qualities of the individual idiom
compromise with the symbolic order that permits communication. She writes that “it is only in
their performance that the dynamic of drive charges bursts, pierces, deforms, reforms, and
transforms the boundaries the subject and society set for themselves” (ibid., 103). The subject
finds the most authentic performance of its intensities in the immediacy of its voice, which
emerge from the rhythm of orderly movement and stasis first encountered in the pulse. “Speech
thus enacts the subject as a continual negotiation between the symbolic, as that which defines
cultural meaning, and its usage” (Labelle, 2006). This “usage” is a declaration of the affective
truth of the “drive charges” (Kristeva, 1984, 103) through symbolic constructs, endowing the
symbolic, social meaning of its signifiers with evidence, in the here and now, that the speaker is
alive. Moreover, the prosody, tone, timbre, and rhythm of the voice, are considered by Kristeva
to bear into consciousness the affect that cannot find, for a variety of reasons, a symbolic vehicle.
What the analyst discovers by listening beneath the surface of the symbolic comes to him by a
means of the coherence of the body’s semiotic utterances, repressed or simply never yet
inaugurated into the explicit repertoire of the speaker. Such means and their experiential

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component are a native endowment seldom fully available – what Freud called a shrunken
residue available under certain conditions (Freud, 1930, SE21) due to the mediating symbolic
order which demands that it assume certain forms and not others. Thus they cannot be reduced to
the analyst’s roster of pathological factors and symbolic equivalences. Rather, they become part
of the endowment by which the analyst comes to know the patient, the patient comes to declare
and know himself, and the poet or musician reconnects with the semiotic which the rest of us
know only in echoes.

Kristeva’s formulation also offers a surprising bridge to Jung’s archetypes, especially insofar as
there is a musical dimension to them. Much of the alienation of the Freudian camp from the
archetypes is traceable to a lack of understanding of a key element of its definition. The
archetype is neither a concrete image, an ideal Platonic form, nor an empty Kantian category of
apprehension. As will be explored in the chapter on Jung, the archetype is the tendency to
certain forms of apperception and action constituted in the instinctual facts of our bodies; the
shape of thought, image, and experience, or psychic life, deriving from the facts of being human
and embodied. Jung catalogued a large, finite, specific roster of archetypes, largely devoid of
reference to sound. Kristeva, on the other hand, looks directly to the rhythms and motility of the
body, themselves empty but for their function of seeding the shape, timbre, and an individual
repertoire of qualia to emerge in the gestures and utterances of the person who emerges from the
womb. In her focus on rhythmic, ordered patterns of movement and stasis, Kristeva naturally
invites the example of music. The archetype of Jung’s most suitable, even necessary, for
understanding the musical dimension of mind is the archetype of number, which is the only
directly apprehensible archetype, by virtue of its grounding of number in both the numerical
symbols and in the sensible proportions of objects and events. Music, for this reason, may be
seen as a missing archetypal link, though expressed differently by decidedly non-Jungian
thinkers. It clearly bridges the natural structural properties and proportions of the body, from the
aural sensitivity to vibrational frequencies, voice, rhythm, tempo, interval, harmony, and
compositional structure, in the rhythms and tones of the body itself, on into our sensitivities and
tendencies with respect to relationship. Spoken words, too, may then be seen as a specific music
– the shaping of the vibratory endowment of the body into the particularly sophisticated and
information-rich song-forms we call speech. In this manner, too, we can find the bridge between

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language and music, by finding the common root which dissolves the verbal/non-verbal
dichotomy, and allows us not only to think of ideas metaphorically as musical, but to think of
ideas literally as songs, compositional themes and infinite variations, in solo or ensemble
voicings.

Derrida and Kristeva both dismantle certainty and fixity in our systems of expression. Each
emphasizes the necessary meeting of the modes of discourse belonging to the plural modes of
life – biological and social, logical and aesthetic. None of these binaries exists in isolation, as
monopoles. Having used dualities transitionally, in order to make provisional sense of
something, we are challenged to yield to the mercurial perspective that withdraws a transitional
construct’s claim to specific truth. That claim is neither correct nor incorrect, neither true nor
false. We find ourselves at the juncture where Freud found himself when faced with oceanic
feeling, where dualities and sharp demarcations dissolve into liquid states. As Freud conceded to
Rolland, his own fundamental concepts in that perspective were “of a purely descriptive nature
and don’t carry within themselves any valuation” (Freud, E., 1960, Letters, #246, pp.392-393).
Freud undervalued his constructs, for, according to Derrida, this transitionality is true of all
discourse, and our discourse stands challenged to survive the trauma of our recognizing it
(Derrida, 1978). Thus, when Freud nests the poles of psychological instinct, Eros and Thanatos,
in the natural principles of elaboration and passing away, he is again making a mythic device
concrete by appealing to divine, Olympian authority, which itself is a mythic device. Like the
nesting of psychic energy in scientific myths of chaos and order, build-up and discharge, entropy
and coherence, reality and illusion, Eros and Thanatos are mythic names for metaphysical
constructs never to be found as such in nature, except in some dynamic combination. According
to Derrida and Kristeva, the binary structure of these concepts unravels, demanding a
paradoxical position of either/or and neither/nor so that the slippery relationship can be
maintained between idea and world. The birth canal (Derrida, 1978) and the chorion (Kristeva,
1984) again remind us of the paradox that, as with Winnicott, there is no such thing as a baby
(Winnicott, 1965); the placenta and umbilical belong neither to the mother nor to the infant, but
mediate their relationship. That is, there is no mother, and no baby, without an intermediate zone.
The reality of each is determined by the play of space housed by a flexible intermediary. To the

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psychoanalyst, this play is carried out in the metaphorical zone of the psyche, whereby both the
psyche and its symbols are given their space and their reality (Winnicott, 1971).

The concept of the mercurial describes this essential mediation. Unacknowledged by Freud, it is
Hermes/Mercury who guides the souls of the dead to the underworld; Thanatos is a minor
alternate in a few variants of that mythology. Death as a mythic and thus psychological principle
is another boundary crossing in the continuum of life, not a polarity. Hermes/Mercury is, again,
“one of many shifts (polytropos)…bringer of dreams” (from Homer’s Hymn to Hermes); “god of
orators and wit, of literature and poets” (Burkert, 1985); and “the guide who brings things intact
but transformed between realms; promises safe passage for travelers; straddles and collapses all
dualities; multiplies meanings and forms of meanings rather than reducing them to fundamental
truths; negotiates commerce, compromise, and the currency which satisfy both parties but
capitulate to neither” (Kerenyi, 1980).

Hermes’ harnessing of music is an essential piece of this medial function, touching also on the
experiential states in which boundaries relax so that transaction can take place. The infant
Hermes fashioned his lyre from the hard shell of a tortoise – a hard boundary reworked into a
resonant chamber, tuned to make music. The music he played charmed Apollo into forgiving the
theft of his cattle; Apollo then gave Hermes cattle in exchange for the lyre. We have here the
polytropism of Hermes, his many forms, condensed into a single image. Not only do we have
music, theft and waywardness, commerce, and the ingenuity of the infant; we also have musical
enchantment (deluding or inducing by way of song), which relaxes boundaries and leaves power
open to negotiation. The enchantment of Apollo is the enchantment of reason, order, and
punishment into a state of receptivity and openness to the aesthetic.

There is a crucial link between music, death, language, the experiential state, and
Hermes/Mercury. As we know, Freud disavowed music, treating it as a purely sensual depiction
of affective states (Meltzer, 1983; Freud, 1914) which he could neither feel nor analyze. He
denied having any personal sense of oceanic feeling (letter to Rolland, in E. Freud, 1960); he
displaced death from the fertile paradox of Hermes to the lesser messenger of Thanatos. Freud
adopted the Nirvana principle as a metaphor for the cessation of excitations characterizing death,

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once more sidestepping the paradoxical context – namely, Nirvana as the metaphoric mystical
state in which the ego is released from the cycle of death and rebirth into a state of deathlessness.
Nirvana is not the passage from life into death, or simply the relinquishing of libidinal
attachment, that is, a movement from one pole to the other. Freud’s stance in these several
postures seems to express a wish at the heart of psychoanalysis to be free of the attachment to a
language that will not sit still, that intolerably will not gratify the demand for reductive certainty.
It feels like the death of reason to have to endure the slippage of one’s tools.

But Freud intuits his alternative by inviting the perspective of oceanic feeling. By our extension
here he also invited in the scandalous musician, poet, and even deconstructionist who attends to
the play of experience rather than arcane contortions of language, a play among those “richest
experiences” which Freud sought by the circuitous and contradictory route of sublimation. Freud
did locate this factor clinically, however, in evenly-hovering attention; by this means, and the
reverie and holding that Bion (1967) and Winnicott (1986) made of it, we find the negative
capability to allow the play of forms to present itself, rather than compelling and thereby
destroying it. All implicit forms emerge in these transitional spaces, from the play of children to
the truths of a patient, to the delirium of the analyst willing to play beyond the straight and
narrow (Molino, 2001) to the imagistic “thought-forms” of the between-lives Bardo Thodol,
which the soul endures on the way to Nirvana. This is death understood as neither biological
death, nor as any ordinary transition, but rather the passing of a stance or edition of the self out
of one set of illusory constructs into another.

Language Limits and Bion’s Caesura

Metaphors of gap and difference, as used by Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva, in one context
describe the limits of language. Between its boundaries lies a dynamism where meaning takes
place, with reference to no metaphysical “outside” or beyond; the difference is an abyss between
two entangled incompatibles, and the spanning of the abyss constitutes our modes of meaning
and communication. On the other hand, the gap suggests a background lying “behind,” a
contentless field amenable to the emergence of images which bear some relation to both the

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“world” outside and the intrapsychic world. Without the notion of gap or break, we have the
illusion that the correspondence between word and thing, and thus the truth of the word, can be
perfected by more complete and rigorous, less illusory representation. Correspondingly, without
the notion of the contentless background, the blank grid of possibilities, we have no way to
represent the intersection of functions that determines the qualities of experience and the
dimensionality of its space.

Our language has boundaries, then: both limits of language as such, and the specific limits of
metaphors, which serve a purpose and then yield to others. Freud based his dreamwork on “the
fiction of a primitive psychological apparatus” (Freud, 1900, SE5), which was his necessary
myth to express some of the basic transformations in the psyche’s repertoire. Still other myths
constitute other thinkers’ efforts to express other ranges of psychic life: my use of “repertoire,”
resonance, and movement expresses my reference to musically-derived metaphor in the creative
dimension of psychic life; Winnicott’s myths refer to its interactive play and paradox; Bion’s to
its geometry and infinity, among other things.

We find in the work of Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva an integration of language with play and
transitiveness, and of the body and the phenomenological dimensions of psychic life. Clearly,
their concern is not with the quirks of linguistics, nor is it with the repressions putatively carried
out by the fictional psychic apparatus (ibid.). These authors unpacked the Freudian model to
clarify the irreconcilability of representation and reality. They have continued moving into the
terrain opened by Freud, going past his fiction of the mental “apparatus.” Despite key
differences, the French thinkers and both Bion and Winnicott joined Jung in various ways in
extending the horizon of the subject beyond the sensory and instinctual history of the individual.
All of them have placed the vagaries and complexities of the individual psyche within a broader
horizon of conditions, among history, culture, and a matrix of space, time, life, death, and
transitive, provisional forms. Thus the wide terrain beyond the provisional myth of an
“apparatus:” both repression and creative, meaningful living depend upon this range. The
personal psyche is nested within something larger than the moment of its own problematic
excitations.

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The psyche has evolved to play in this ontological field of transition. This fact does not cast us
into nihilistic relativism, nor into the belief that the here and now is all we have. The deep
dimensionality of the unconscious must be approached, as Bollas states, “symphonically”
(Bollas, 2007) for its integration of themes and its tensely harmonized multiple voices, rhythms,
and modes, unfolding across time, and in a resonant space suited to that dynamic task. Within
this sea-flow of affect and possible form, our words indicate real, sensual things, and
indispensable abstractions which elicit and are embedded within sensual responses all their
own18. We have a body, with its forces and struggles, and with boundaries which mediate need
and transform it into something else. We have experiential boundaries, the thresholds between
need/pain and between self and other. We have conceptual and linguistic boundaries, describing
both the tensions between signifiers and signified, and the horizon that separates any whole
discourse and its paradigm from the phenomena which fall beyond it. But in order to keep the
whole project within the purview of the depth psychology of experiencing subjects, while
keeping in mind the central metaphor of the mercurial, I bring us back to the crossroads
intersections of those factors which concern dreaming and the making of meaning.

Those intersections mark out a conceptual synergy among Bion, Winnicott, Loewald, and Jung,
which delimits our final theme for the moment. Bion offers an abstract model based on
geometry. Geometry, as the description of spatial extension, specifies the possible configurations
of the basic psychoanalytic elements synthesized by alpha-function in the formation of
psychoanalytic objects. They run as follows: 1) extension in the domain of sense; 2) extension in
the domain of myth, and 3) extension in the domain of passion (Bion, 1963). The geometric
relationships of these dimensions determine the possible configurations of subjectivity. Similar
to Jung’s archetype of number, Bion justifies the use of mathematics here as a practical matter,
the need for “unsaturated” elements (ibid.) imperceptible in themselves. These are the matrices
of the perceptible qualities which saturate them and thereby yield objects whose patterns can be
intuited. Extension in the domains of sense and passion describe psychic progression through the
first dimension (bodily sensing of discrete events), to the second (passion as connection beyond
the body to a satisfying or frustrating object with corresponding mental representations, and to

18
Alfred North Whitehead (1978) wrote of the essential feeling aspect of conceptual activity.

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expectations of that object), and finally to the third (the mythic configuration of objects, their
web of integrated qualities, and their dynamic interactions in mental space/time).

Dreamwork arises as a synthesis of these elements. Bion maintains his fidelity to the Freudian
dreamwork in several guises, including the maternal containing function which he calls
“reverie.” In reverie the analyst’s stance toward the patient aims at allowing the analyst to
“dream” the session. This provides the stable and non-intrusive container in which to promote
the patient’s capacity to transform and synthesize thoughts and a mind that can think them (Bion,
1992, 216; Bion, 1967, 112; Sandler, 2005, 643). Bion’s goal is to show this synthetic and
mediatory role of the dream. It is, however, entirely distinct from the interpretive role of the
analyst in Freud’s reductive schema of dreamwork – namely, to help lift the repressions of latent
thoughts and thereby make them conscious. For Bion, this role is not the making-conscious of
latent thoughts, enabling the patient to know or arrive at “the truth” (Bion, 1977, p.41). Rather it
is to help the patient “wake up” or become conscious by supporting his innate but limited and
vulnerable capacity to dream (Bion, 1967). This dreaming is not substitution and compromise
but the extraction of particular patterns from the infinity of possibilities. This extraction is a
condensation or precipitation of thinkable and communicable thoughts from the cloud of what
has not yet formed, inchoate elements. But this not-yet-formed cannot be presumed to have been
censored; it is no more repressed than the fetus is repressed before delivery. As did Kristeva by
means of the “chora” (1984), Bion calls upon the same metaphoric value in the imagery of
gestation and birth. Hence Bion takes from Freud’s comment on the “impressive caesura of
birth” (Freud, 1926, SE 20) the metaphor of the caesura. This denotes the dynamic membrane
between realms that allows pre-conception - the archaic potentiality for forms of thought – to
meet with and endure a realization, frustration, or turbulence, and extract from them both a
thought and the capacity to think. Bion’s caesura frames the challenge to achieve continuity at
precisely the precarious moment of intersection between one form and another.

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Chapter Four - Resonant Space for Dreaming
______________________________________________________________________________

The substitute satisfactions, as offered by art, are illusions in contrast with reality, but they are
none the less psychically effective, thanks to the role which phantasy has assumed in mental life.
(Freud, 1930, SE21, p.68)

Libido can never be apprehended except in a definite form; that is to say, it is identical with
fantasy-images. And we can only release it from the grip of the unconscious by bringing up the
corresponding fantasy-images. (Jung, CW 7, par. 345.)

The choice that matters to the psychoanalyst is one that lies between procedures designed to
evade frustration and those designed to modify it. That is the critical decision. (Bion, 1962, p.
29).

Introduction and Review

In Freud’s later thinking on phantasy, he begins to treat illusion as more than wish-fulfillment,
and to address its effectiveness as an agent of change and structure. Freud’s phrasing is
ambiguous: “the role which phantasy has assumed” seems also to refer to the recent
developments in the concept of phantasy in the discourse about mental life. Psychic reality is
now a domain which deserves at least a qualified use of the term “reality.”

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We can see a parallel process between the differentiation of a psychic space in which symbolic
life emerges, and the theory which expands to acknowledge it. Psychoanalysis grew from a
theory of wishful forces and their substitutions to one about illusion as the vessel and workshop
of truth. This makes it a reflexive discipline. It is a meta-mythology which explains the growth of
mythology, in which the tension of primal forces expands into a psychosomatic field, and in
which the space and time of the psyche can differentiate, perpetuate, and dream reflectively upon
its own achievement of subjectivity. The evolution of Freudian and post-Freudian thought
demonstrates this parallel trend in theory and the phenomena which it makes perceptible.
Through the work of these representative thinkers, we can see that both theory and the mythic
processes it theorizes express aspects of dream-life which operates by means other than
repression (Freud, 1937c, SE23, p.236).

Oceanic feeling represents an exemplary turning point, at which Freud reached out to reconcile a
domain of subjectivity disowned as ineffable. Ultimately, he tried to hold intellect in abeyance so
that a broader concept of phantasy could emerge in that space. Oceanic feeling holds no
ascendancy over other late-period Freudian concerns, except that it provided the historical
intersection at which this paradigmatic expansion took place. By opening up psychoanalytic
access to experiential states, non-verbal forms, and the elasticity of ego structures, oceanic
feeling offers room for us to consider music as another such ineffable domain which speaks its
own language. It is also the intersection where theorists whose affinities are too often
unrecognized meet and sometimes converge. Despite differences in language and emphasis,
these keystone topics mark out territory on which the Freudian lineage intersects once again with
Jung. In that territory we find the basis, in both schools of thought and remarkably similar in
many details, of a primal imaginal dimension of the psyche that transcends both neurosis and the
personal history of the subject.

Rycroft uses the phrase “innocence of dreams” (Rycroft, 1979) to characterize this primal layer.
Dream life is not innocent in a moral sense; it is certainly not devoid of the agonies, ecstasies,
and extremes of instinctual life. It is, however, first of all and figuratively speaking, innocent of

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the basic deceptions of repression, which occur at a later organizational level of re-presentation.
Dream life is firstly presentational, depicting the flow of the psyche as it moves through the
moment (ibid., and Jung, CW6, para. 842), a characterization essential to music (Langer, 1953).
Dreams display the aggravating trait of always being unavailable for direct, unmediated
apprehension except in the moment of their presentation. They are absent in the consulting room,
except in the reverie which adapts the dreaming faculties to the waking interaction. Secondly,
this dreamwork of spontaneous imagination is an intersection of bodily modes and forms and
therefore synthesizes a spectrum of the instincts. The instincts as patterns of energy belonging to
the polymorphousness of the sensory modes must be dreamed into the synthesis of subjective
form. Hence there emerge all of the following concepts: a potential space for growth;
transitional objects as vehicles of change (Winnicott, 1971); a transcendent function for
differentiation and synthesis of opposed forces (Jung, CW6); an alpha function for the synthesis
of discrete sensory turbulence into thinkable elements (Bion, 1962); and myth as the elaboration,
in three psychoanalytic dimensions, of the axiomatic, archetypal structural configuration of the
instincts as they present in dream, image, and idea (Jung, CW9i; Bion, 1992). Each concept
elaborates and responds to themes emerging and also repressed within Freud’s work.

Preparing Dreamlife for Music

To restate my objectives: this is not an effort to study music psychoanalytically, nor is it an effort
to replace one form of hegemony – aesthetic, positivistic, or clinical - with another. Rather, in the
spirit of Rycroft’s keynote statement (1979), it is an effort to find what a psychoanalysis capable
of recognizing the repressed or unformulated musical values would sound like. A dedicated
group of contemporary thinkers, exemplified by Gilbert Rose (2004) and those involved in the
Music and Mind Project, have been working to bring music within the psychoanalytic sphere.
However, these musician/analysts focus almost exclusively on classical music, which imposes a
set of critical limitations on the endeavor, as I will show. One analyst, Steven Knoblauch, brings
the experience and sensibilities of jazz to the theoretical and clinical terrain, and like his work
my own offers the benefit of a careful look at the present interplay of underlying structure,

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spontaneous conception, and a whole range of non-verbal communication essential to musicians
and the analytic dyad.

I draw from the most compatible conceptual vessels extant for addressing music: Hartmann’s
boundaries (1991), Jung’s transcendent function and the complexes (CW2, CW 6), Bion’s
caesura (1977), and Winnicott’s potential space (1971). The entire range of post-Freudian
thought represented here addresses the terrain in which Freud was least articulate: namely, the
imaginal life of phantasy that is neither substitute for nor the wishful counterpoint to reality, but
is itself a “hard fact” (Guntrip, 1968, p.223), the assertion of the effective force (Freud, 1930,
SE21, p.68) of the psyche by which it constitutes and declares its own existence. The auditory
and musical offer us phantasy in the realm of movement, time, and vibration, a palpable sonic
repertoire of the imagination inseparable from our physicality. It is irreducible to the metaphors
used by Freud to characterize the representational substitutes conjured by writers and visual
artists.

Kleinian Space, Image, and Phantasy

For Jung, image is psyche (CW6). For Klein, phantasy is the imaginal presentation of instinct to
the psyche (Klein, 1946, 1952, 1975; Hinshelwood, 1991; Isaacs, 1952). She emphasizes the
ways in which the whole psyche struggles for coherence against the life and death instincts. The
instincts innately generate phantasy, and phantasy is the first level of negotiation between the
complexities of self and other, inside and out, container and contained (Bion, 1959, 1962). Each
object representation involves a distinct attribution to a subject who stands in meaningful relation
to either an object or another subject. This complexity exists firstly within the psyche, as part and
parcel of the phantasy presentation of instinct. The complex aesthetics of mental life is not about
pleasure or beauty but about wholeness and the conveyance of feeling and meaning. If negotiated
properly, it leads to stable and generative object relationships and integrated symbolic capacities.

The topic of psychic space is not dealt with in much specificity by Klein herself, except as the
phantasy engagements of actual bodily spaces – inside, outside, the surfaces and innards that are

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desired, envied, or hated, or which the infant truly wishes to know and thereby incorporate. Her
model may be seen as an essential elaboration of a key development in the later Freud, in which
he begins to frame inhabitants of the inner world as “psychically effective” (Freud, 1930, SE21,
p.68). It is the inhabitants of the inner world, their relations to one another and to the subject, and
their vitality, which characterizes her work. Klein gives a new level of attention to structured
configurations of “animated” (Eigen, 1993, 268) mental objects, “psychic presences” (Grotstein,
2000, xix), and internalized, alien subjectivities encased in images of objects (ibid; Klein, 1929).
Though their qualities and effectiveness are god-like epitomes within her framework, she too
quickly weds them to real objects, to the varieties of the breast, and therefore anchors mythic
presences to the physical mooring of bodily parts and functions (Eigen, 1993, p.268). The
emotional valence of these presences, however – the degree to which phantasy objects conduct
and transmute the values of feeling and meaning throughout the inner world, and emotionally
structure relations to the outer world - defines a particular Kleinian horizon. This horizon does
not delimit space as such, but rather highlights an intrapsychic space of effective images and
their variable ability to permeate and correspond with the external world, or the structure of the
perception of reality and one’s relation to it. Bion, Winnicott, and Jung’s developments, to be
taken up shortly, extend the implications of Klein and Freud’s phantasy, balancing the relation of
intrapsychic and external reality. This transmuting function, as affect and image propagate across
psychic boundaries, highlights the musical dimension of phantasy heard as patterns emerging
within bodily resonance, as I will explore them in the next chapter.

Boundary, Potential Space, and Caesura

As an effective structural principle, phantasy is dimensional – it defines spaces and establishes
more or less elastic boundaries for the containment of the dreamwork. Boundary refers both to
the dividing line of an area and, figuratively, to the limit of a subject or sphere of activity. A
boundary demarcates the threshold of two or more zones or fields, and their critical conditions,
with differentials of value on respective sides; it is also a tool of discourse, distinguishing
functions, meanings, and qualities. Wherever a differentiation can be said to exist, it is
tautological that there is a boundary. Thus boundary applies comprehensively to material reality,

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to the products and processes of the brain, to the qualities of subjectivity, and to the concepts
used to describe all of these.

The boundaries belonging to the psyche and to representation are not fixed geometries – they
shift as do all boundaries pertaining to the living organism. Hartmann’s concept of the boundary
(1991, 1993) is a particularly relevant definition. Hartmann focuses on the thickness and thinness
of boundaries in order to illustrate their crucial mercuriality: their simultaneous demarcation and
structuring of psychological functions, and the ways and degrees to which they effect
transaction between functions and zones. Hartmann’s concept of boundary is that of a bi-
directional or bi-modal construct, mediating between zones of different psychological function.
It accounts, along a continuum of rigidity and fluidity, for defensive resistances to affect,
expression, and imagination, as well as for their ability to flow and intermingle in creative
acts. This fluid-rigid continuum is neither healthy nor pathological; it becomes so only in certain
ratios and states, depending on the conditions and demands upon the individual psyche.

For Hartmann the dreamwork, in its various aspects, is a continuous unconscious component of
both waking and dreaming life. It links the creative activities of life and spontaneous creativity of
the psyche with the conditions which support mental development (Hartmann, 1998). In addition
to structural demarcation, it denotes the barrier and meeting point between domains, a
transmuting threshold. All these are characteristics of the transformative, elastic space of Bion’s
caesura, and the potency and possibility (Hernandez and Giannakoulas, 2001) of Winnicott’s
potential space. Hartmann’s concept of boundaries allows us to think, on the small scale, about
the differential between functions of such attitudes, feelings, and thoughts, as we might when
crossing a regional or national boundary, or speaking with someone from a different culture.
Likewise it resonates with the analogies of the dream censor, bouncer, and customs agent, and
the ion channels along the neural length and synapses between nerve cells (Bion, 1977), as well
as the selective permeability of membranes (Grotstein 2007). In each of these, the crucial
function involves the discrimination between substances allowed in and/or out. This selectivity
and “intelligent” (ibid.) permeability involves the specialization of structures by which qualities
are sensed and their substances admitted or rejected. The fluid and intelligent exchange of
meaning across multiple boundaries can be credited with the capacity for nuance, for sustained

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attention and endurance, for complex gradations of feeling and aesthetic meaning. An example is
the many small transactions which combine into the phase change of the action potential by
which a nerve cell transmits an impulse across one synapse to the next. This accomplishes a fluid
translation between chemical and electrical actions both within and between cells, and from both
of these actions to the phase change of subjectivity through the coordinated action of whole
aggregates of neurons. Lacking this coherence, we find the failure to integrate functions resulting
in neurological disorder and psychopathology. Musically, the success of integration results in the
coordination of dissonance, dynamic extremes, and uncertainty into a unified, thematic musical
whole rather than cacophony.

Bion and Winnicott both use metaphors of containment and gestation. Container and contained
are reversible; the infant internalizes the mother within whom it is conceived and dreamed into
readiness for birth, and she contains the infant, mediated by a membrane that cannot be said to
belong to either and which is shed once it has served its purpose. This models the way in which
subjectivity itself depends on the destruction and discarding of vessels so that symbolic and
relational processes can continue on higher levels of organization (Bion, 1977; Loewald, 2000).
Among other parallels, this transitive and transcendent nature of symbolization – the passing of
conceptions through a figurative membrane into consciousness - also describes the permeating
resonance which coheres into music.

Bion’s “caesura” (1977) is the figurative space for the emergence of thought forms and also of
the mind capable of thinking them; Winnicott’s potential space is a space for the play of
possibility. Both are implicitly following the same lines as Kristeva did in using Plato’s “chora”
(Kristeva, 1984). Their spaces both join and separate mother and infant, and are internalized by
the infant as the intrapsychic region in which to create new mental events. Potential space
highlights the experiential, affective details of the relationship, as well as the both/and paradox
central to Winnicott’s thinking. His formulation brings together into one rich metaphor the
concepts of space, boundary, paradox, negation, omnipotence, play, illusion, and disillusionment
which span the various psychoanalytic paradigms:

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 It is not inside by any use of the word…nor is it outside, that is to say, it is not part of the
repudiated world, the not-me which the individual has decided to recognize…as truly
external, which is outside magical control. (Winnicott, 1971, p.41).

He continues:

Confidence in the mother makes an intermediate playground here, where the idea of
magic originates, since the baby does to some extent experience omnipotence…The
playground is a potential space between the mother and baby and joining mother and
baby. (Ibid, p.47).

Confidence denotes the infant subject’s experience of a flexible and reliable containing
relationship on which trust and truth depend. The spatiality described by a joining yet separating
relationship, owned by neither but sustained by both, creates the possibility of a subjective state
of being, the confidence and spontaneous sense of possibility that makes of this figurative
geometric space an “intermediate playground.” Again, the in-between with the both-and: the
infant, playing in this space supported by the mother, actually imagines, experiences, and
manifests from his own faculties and fingers a scenario which stops at the end of play but can be
resumed or started over. In the process, both play and the objects of play are magically
experienced as having been called-into-being, though they always pass away. The infant is
neither omnipotent, nor thoroughly helpless. He is imagining and manifesting possibilities that
he comes to regard as his own, but he is frustrated by the persistence and intractability of some
objects always just outside of his control. In this way, he learns about his own powers and limits
as they develop, and the real characteristics of the material and object world.

Gratification and frustration are part of the mechanics of this scenario. Yet subjectivity,
understood as the relation of the ego to its own agency, varied states, and experiences, itself
differentiates out from a state not of chaos but of inchoateness and the absence of reflection. First
it is limited to polarities, among hallucinatory fulfillments and helpless despair, the subject not
yet awake which may one day sense its own agency and parameters (Loewald, 1988). The
mother then serves as both the mediator for the environment, for the facts and materials of life,

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and for the holding and modeling of the potential space in which creative illusion takes place. In
her containing space, the seething cauldron of the id becomes a generative chamber in which the
infant’s natural movements and play uncover the facts and possibilities of the world (ibid.). This
movement also reveals the initial moments of aggression, not as expressions of a death drive but
as spontaneous motor expressions of the infant’s being. It is through such movement that the
infant will bang into the world, with skin, lips, hands, arms and legs and, later, biting teeth, and
learn what yields and what does not, what remains or withdraws, and what effect he has and has
not, thereby beginning to learn both the nature of the world and his own repertoire. He is now
learning the “use of objects” (1989, 217-235).

Winnicott’s true self is expressed in the spontaneous gesture (Winnicott, 1990) that expresses the
inherent, unimpeded uniqueness of the individual’s own pattern; the false self, expressed in
need-based and reactive object relating, learns to adapt to a capricious, intractable, withholding,
neglectful, fragile, or impinging object-world. The infant from whom Mother recoils in response
to the spontaneous gesture is one who learns to comply and self-abnegate so as not to alienate.
The holding space of the mother in this way constitutes for the infant the model for either a
potential space or a space in which instinct is forced into an excess of compromise and
compliance – hence, the threshold where Winnicott’s theory takes off from Freud’s, recasting
instinct and repression as fundamentally relational phenomena.

Bion’s radical revision of the Freudian and Kleinian metapsychologies complements Winnicott’s
in several ways. Bion’s suggestion of a “truth instinct” (1992) decenters the instincts which,
according to Freud, are chaotic energies in a seething cauldron (Freud, 1915e), and which,
according to Klein, are centered on the death drive (Grotstein, 2007; Billow, 2003). Bion’s truth
instinct is part and parcel of his conception of O and alpha function. His handling of “reality”
avoids the obvious trappings of philosophy, while he employs it as one of several key
conceptual tools to define psycho-analysis. He makes the focus on coherence expressed in truth
and thinking an aim of the instincts. Indeed, he treats analysis so framed as a practical
formulation by which the analyst can remember his role, as in Freud: to “help the patient

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transform that part of an emotional experience of which he is unconscious into an emotional
experience of which he is conscious”(Bion, 1965, pp.32-3). In calling reality “O,” Bion has it
represent infinite space, Kant’s unknowable noumenon or thing-in-itself, as well as the id. These
have in common irrepresentability; they are the infinite reality which can be known only
partially through intuition and the narrow bandwidth of the senses. Reality will never be
knowable, as it is not a content, nor something to be solved; rather, it is the infinity that can only
be known by being collapsed into particular formulations, through particular receptive organs
and membranes. The psyche grows by intuitively and symbolically bringing its encounters in O
into the sphere where they can serve as tools for thinking (Bion, 1962, 1965). Importantly like
Jung’s archetype, O is not a metaphysical concept, but a physical and psychological one,
denoting the enveloping reality of which the subject can only apprehend and intuit this or that
finite portion and pattern; the zone where physical reality intersects and transforms into mind
(Bion, 1965).

Temporality

O is the unrepresentable dimension which seems to belong to mysticism and philosophy, but as it
pertains to the psyche (Bion, 1965, 1992; Grotstein, 2007). It includes the unconscious
turbulences not simply of libidinal drives but also of the infinity and otherness of all that
challenges and exceeds the resources of the psyche at any moment. This continual task brings
about anxiety in the form of catastrophic dread. In making the unconscious conscious the
analyst is charged with helping the patient turn the impinging storm of possibilities into a
capacity to think. At that turn thinking is not a function of formal secondary-process reasoning
but of coherent synthesis, bringing the inchoate and infinite into the reach and repertoire of the
subject – a coherent collaboration between primary and secondary processes. For Bion,
“becoming O” or fostering the patient’s transformation in O involves negative capability, the
suspension of memories and desires (Bion, 1970) attached to facts, hypotheses, and reductive
explanations, not belonging to the current encounter, which pre-empt the intuition and synthesis
of insight. The analyst must allow himself to dream the session (Bion, 1959, 1977), before he can
hypothesize about it. His reverie models for the patient the containment and intuitive ordering

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that dreams psychic reality from O, rather than an “irritable reaching after fact and reason”
(Keats, 1959, p.260).

This dreaming is a containment (Grotstein, 2007) in which profound synthesis takes place. It sets
the boundaries of an evolving structure that can work with the infinity of O without foreclosing
on it. This entails a selectively permeable membrane or “contact barrier” (Bion, 1962b) which
allows conscious and unconscious to inform without overwhelming each other, so that each can
function in its domain and dreaming can go on undisturbed. The instinct for truth is served by the
alpha-function operational in dreaming, which supplies alpha elements (ibid.) for the processing
of turbulences in O. Thus “thinking” comes into existence as a transitive and participial verb, the
vehicle of duration, continuity, and futurity embodied in Freud’s Eros. Thinking inaugurates the
binding of irruptions among instinct and/or O into agency and subjectivity. This shift from
“thoughts without a thinker” (Bion, 1965) to the thinking of a thinker lays bare the richness of
Bion’s meanings. In it, we have identity and subjectivity, continuity, intuition, and above all the
truth instinct that manifests as the drive toward coherence, truth, the Yeatsian center holding,
which subtends any particular drives. We strive to dream something whole from the fragmentary
encounters with manifold reality or O. Bion and Winnicott together sketch the birth of psychic
time, a continuity of mental play which holds up under complexity and duress.

Freud’s treatment of time’s ruptures in deferred revision partially traces the thread of wish in the
fractures of repression, between unrepresentable origins and secondary symptoms. But Freud
could not articulate the time laid bare in music. Musical time consists in the symphonic
organization and jazz spontaneity of the themes and voices carried in the inextinguishable
pulsion of the drives. It is found in the resilience of boundaries which tune and synchronize
resonances into the coherence of music. Therefore we see that continuity ought not to be
mistaken for linearity or the absence of eddies and turbulence. Continuity is not the adaptation of
the psyche to “reality,” to a causal objective world and its clocks. Musical time guides the thread
of wish through the fractures and peregrinations imposed by life’s turbulences, reestablishing its
contours. We discover again and again the Ariadne’s thread of wish that traces our time and
delineates our space. Transformation in O (Bion, 1965), and “going on being” (Winnicott, 1971),

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which the mother and analyst, in their reverie, make possible for their charge, are the capacities
to endure, hold together, and be subjectively present in the crossfire of the moment’s complex
intensities and the reverberations of past events. Together these functions frame the time and
space in which to “ride” the instincts rather than be thrown by them and thereby fractured
(Winnicott, 1986d, p.104; 1986e, p.25).

Primal Form, The Uterine Soundscape, and Container/Contained

A remarkable set of parallels holds between Bion’s thinking and that of Loewald, Winnicott, and
Jung. This parallelism is easier to trace with the mercurial principle in mind, spanning all of the
following: boundaries, space and time, differentiation and unity, the continuity of the primal
within the structure of the sophisticated, and the translation of meaning across thresholds. Bion’s
paper “Caesura” (1977) addresses the synthetic space of dreaming and analysis; in it he
synthesizes a containing space, the nature of reverie, and an embryological perspective on the
emergence of both physical and psychic form. He suggests that the place of origins, of
primordial forms of thought preceding the emergence of the ego, is in fact traceable to life in the
uterus, asking whether there might be

vestiges in the human being which would suggest a survival in the human mind,
analogous to that in the human body, of evidence in the field of optics that once there
were optic pits, or in the field of hearing that once there were auditory pits…is there any
part of the human mind which still betrays signs of an embryological intuition, either
visual or auditory? (Bion, 1977, p.42).

This intra-uterine trace would connect the first differentiations of the embryo beyond the caesura
of birth, by way of an Ariadne thread, to the present moment in which O must be given some
specific form, starting with either an intuition or a defense against it. Like Jung, Bion addressed
the parallel evolution of the individual and collective psyches. His treatment of the intrauterine
origins of psyche presents the embryo with a world consisting of its awakening genetic
endowment and the singular culture of the mother’s body. He treats the human capacity for
thinking, in the face of turbulences which formed the species, as itself infantile and undergoing

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continuous and traumatic evolution through the successive reiteration of its primordial forms
(Bion, 1977).

Bion does not locate the birth of the subject, as Freud does, in the primal repression of libidinal
wish, from which the personal psyche embarks on its digressions. He locates it instead in the
coalescing structures of the senses which welcome the embryo into the catastrophe (Greek =
sudden turn or overturning) of its encounter with reality. His metaphor is explicitly gestational;
that is, his theory of thinking posits that a preconception, an archaic thought-form, meets with a
realization or frustration issuing from reality, to yield a conception capable of acting as a symbol
in further thinking (Bion, 1962a, 1963). The transformation in O always entails the
crystallization of specific forms out of infinite and inchoate possibility, an inherently traumatic
process. He seeks out the moment when the embryo awakens as a passenger within the process
of turbulent growth and expansion. It awakens in an envelope of intermediary tissues that form
the caesura both binding and distinguishing it and the mother. He asks a reasonable mystical
question, turning Freud’s statement about the caesura of birth on its ear: if these initial moments
are the critical junctures at which the essential structures of the body are molded, then why place
the formative junctures of the mind in post-natal life? It is not because, according to Freud, fetus
and newborn are psychologically alike in that both inhabit an objectless world of primary
narcissism. It is rather that sophisticated structures are elaborations of initial ones, and that this
holds for intuition and dreaming as much as for the budding of fingers, eyes, ears, and their
corresponding neural systems. Bion adds the uterine soundscape, the world and culture of sound,
both of the mother’s body and of the world conducting through her tissue, which is the constant
companion of the fetus. The mediatory construct of the caesura is modeled on life-rhythms and
resonances long before there is either anything to see or any semantic context. It is the fetus’s
preparation for understanding, predicated on the ambience of the womb, which, before and above
all else, admits sound and tactile vibration. The soundscape consists of the resonance of
mother’s body, words, sentences and tones of voice, environmental sounds, and actual music, all
set against the rhythm section of her pulse and breath, which themselves are linked to the
maternal blood chemistry passing selectively on to the infant. This scene describes a profound
biological and acoustic communion.

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Bion’s theory dissolves the duality of mind and body almost entirely. The first bodily
experiences, he surmises, are those taking place within this uterine soundscape, during which
time the infant is “englobed” (Kristeva, 1984) by the mother, receiving his nourishment,
containment, and all information about the outside world through the intermediary membranes of
placenta, umbilicus, uterus, and the resonant maternal body. The achievement of physical
separation from the mother involves the infant’s internalization of functions that used to take
place under the mother’s aegis, when he was inside her. Now the infant must digest his own food
and evacuate his own waste, still assisted by the mother, but through his own agency and
boundaries – mouth, hands, GI tract, anus. But Bion extends digestion to serve as a metaphor for
the mental task of making coherent and nourishing thoughts out of raw turbulence, and thus

as a model for demonstrating and comprehending the processes involved in thought...

certain patients [being] influenced by the belief that they digest thoughts and that the
consequences of doing so are similar to the digestion of food. (1962, p. 62)

A few pages earlier he writes:

The mental component, as distinct from the somatic, requires a process analogous to
digestion (1962, p. 35); [and still earlier:] The effect on the personality of such
deprivation [of truth] is analogous to the effect of physical starvation on the physique.
(1962, p. 56)

Truth in Bion, as in Winnicott and Jung, is a function of contact and transformation at boundaries
and across psychic frontiers; hence, we can use the same ample boundary metaphor to link the
musical and the alimentary metaphors of mind. The transformations of raw excitation necessary
for health and growth take place first with the help of the mother as proxy and model of
containment, ushering in the infant’s connection to the world and its constitution. The infant will
soon take over his own survival task of mediating the impacts of the world and turning its matter
into the matter of his own body. This process of differentiation repeats original forms and traces
at higher levels of organization, in new configurations of container/contained. The overarching
structure of container/contained, repeating on multiple levels and across multiple functions, runs
throughout Bion’s work. The bodily cavities, membranes, and openings serve to structure
experience, not merely to provide for organic gratifications. First comes the differentiation of

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maternal and fetal flesh within the maternal body, followed by the differentiation of the infant’s
flesh and the imprint of its initial encounters upon the differentiating psyche; then follow the
internalization of all the maternal functions, yet always through the mediation of a space and
faculties by which to take in and digest the world, its emotions creating food for thought rather
than toxic objects to be evacuated. Bion19 illuminates the acoustic function that transcends the
caesura of birth, enveloping both infant and mother alike. This connective function is the
empathic and sonic prefiguration of the connection to the world that begins within the mother
and becomes differentiated into language and music. Each is an elaboration of the affective life
that spurs the intrauterine mind into being.

Bion arrives at the same point, in different terms, as Loewald, who treats the initial complex of
mother and infant as a primal density (Loewald, 2000, pp. 11, 12), an irreducible and entangled
dyadic field, which progressively differentiates primal forms into expressions on higher
organizational levels.

If one views the problem from the vantage point of the organization of psychic reality, the
question whether objects are or are not “originally connected” with instincts is
nonsensical. (Loewald, 1971/2000, p.129)

He suggests that the psychic and somatic are organizational levels of the same living substance.
Thus, the id is the psychic agency of instinctual organization, not a source of chaotic and
undirected energy. It is the archaic level of structure and adaptation, both rooted in the
phylogenetic disposition and transcendently directed toward the accommodation of factors
beyond itself – the particulars of the body and the infinities of the world it encounters. Their
turbulences must be reconciled into elaborations of the psyche’s own pattern, through the
“interpenetrating dialectics” (Mitchell, 1995; Loewald, 2000) of complementary agencies which
can translate (Latin, translatus = carry across) between one another. This scenario is compared
by Loewald to the transformation of ghosts into ancestors who, once admitted into the sphere of
the ego, can edify it. It is analogous to Bion’s alpha function, which he often posits as a digestive
and metabolic process of making coherent tools for thinking so that thoughts can nourish the
mind and satisfy the truth instinct. Otherwise they become persecutory and bizarre objects, to be

19
Others falling outside the scope of this project, such as Didier Anzieu and Edith Lecourt, have made important
contributions in the area of skin and buccal cavity.

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walled off and evacuated (Bion, 1962). Loewald arrives at this formulation through Heidegger
(1962), who, though writing about ontology and not psychology, suggested the irreducible
contextuality of human existence within shifting relational space and a future-oriented “thown-
ness” in time, a grounding in a relational and temporal history through which authenticity
becomes possible.

Bion, Loewald, and Jung jettisoned a reductive basis for the psyche, preferring instead a
dialectical relationship of archetypal or archaic, phylogenetic structural templates and encounters
with the world that spur differentiation of body and mind. The archaic level precedes the ego and
underlies all its particular forms, expressed as archetype (Jung), myth, unsaturated symbol and
preconception (Bion) and the archaic psyche (Loewald). The personal psyche is contingent on
them just as the range of our human physiology is contingent upon the phylogenetic forms,
which emerge and differentiate at each successive developmental moment. Bion addresses the
catastrophic nature of O, which always exceeds our capacities and whose affective component is
dread; Jung addresses the intuition of the archetypal, as opposed to any of its familiar forms, as
wholly other and god-like in power, affectively experienced as numinous and similarly tinged
with dread; Loewald explores the archaic other which haunts the psyche as ghost until integrated
by the ego as ancestor (Loewald, 2000). Freud joins them in his account of the uncanny (SE17),
similarly deriving from the experience of something wholly other, primordial, and greater, and
originating from the depths of one’s human constitution and thus beyond the experiential ken of
the ego.

A crucial difference between Freud, on the one hand, and Bion, Loewald, and Jung on the other,
is the extent of their elaboration of a dynamic spatiality within the psyche, modeled by the work
of the analyst. Freud called the ego an “organization characterized by a very remarkable trend
toward unification, towards synthesis” (Freud, SE20, p.196), a “frontier creature” (SE19, p.56),
yet also an unfortunate intermediary sandwiched between the world, the id, and superego,
serving the needs of compromise and defense. The ego as intermediary and a principle of
organization has much demanded of it. We see in Freud’s characterization the seed of the rich
mercurial condensation elaborated in various ways by other authors. Rather than an agency or
organ, the ego in their handling is an agent of synthesis that allows further differentiation; it

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allows the coordination of contrasts, multiple voices, time, and change characteristic of the
auditory categories of theme, mode, rhythm, and key, the objects of Rycroft’s keynote statement.
Freud knew the ego to be a frontier creature, but treated it in a manner reflecting the priorities of
a conquistador – through analysis, the ego will annex20 what it beholds, or collapse under the
weight of its management burden. Others unfolded the rich dimensionality and elasticity of the
ego-concept more fully.

The Archaic and the Not-Yet-Formulated

Bion poses the analyst’s task as that of “becoming O” (1965) as far as possible, tuning his
intuition to the flow of unformulated events in session so that he might have hunches that bear a
meaningful relation to the truth. As an intuitive phenomenon, this task highlights the
indeterminacy and fragile temporality of experience; the suspension of memory, desire and
understanding (Bion, 1970) protects the emergent intuition from being defensively pre-empted
by anything ready-made, precipitously imported from another time. A jazz musician who
habitually resorts to practiced “licks,” however clever and appropriate, forestalls creating or
dilutes a new musical event. What happens within the analyst, not unlike what happens inside the
individual dreamer or musician, is that within the envelope of the meaningful moment, the song
already underway, tenuous and filled with tension, challenges one’s ability to sustain and further
its form. The patient, Bion writes, “may express a fear of the future which has many of the
characteristics of a past which one thinks he could not possibly remember; nor can he remember
the future because it has not yet happened” (Bion, 1977, p.43). This describes a soap bubble in
which some insight may or may not emerge depending on how it is midwifed from the
“caesura,” the pregnant space of the analytic moment. The challenge to extract something viable
exists on a knife-edge (Winnicott 1986b), “on the fragile threshold, as if stranded on account of
an impossible demarcation” (Kristeva, 1982). Prefabricated, dogmatic, or rote interpretation
forecloses on this process, substituting an intellectual souvenir, at best, for a transformative
experience. Freud’s evenly hovering attention (1913, SE12) was predicated on a basic
understanding of this necessity.

20
“where id is, ego shall be”, or “Psycho-analysis is an instrument to enable to ego to achieve a progressive
conquest of the id” (SE19:56)

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Complex Space: Bion and Jung
The formation of stable, thinkable thoughts and the capacity to think them depends on a certain
quality and kind of space. Bion points to the corresponding psychic structure of the analyst
invested in his negative capability, in which he assumes a variety of divided and elastic
perspectives. Referring to the “hunch” of the analyst, which precedes knowing, Bion says that
feeling is a preliminary stage in the same process that yields an idea, and so must be given equal
status (Bion, 1977, p.44). The skill of the analyst is to match his hunch with some formulation
that will ease it into actuality, where it can be shared. This “inevitably involves the use of
transitive ideas or ideas in transit” (ibid.). To offer a formulation of some coherence and truth
value to the patient, for Bion requires a “non-pathological splitting,” a spontaneous assemblage
of flexible psychic boundaries which preserve and prepare the “not-yet-ready” in intuitive form,
so that it can be eased into realization without evaporating or dissolving into turbulence.

This therapeutic splitting offers another spatial metaphor illustrating the analyst’s need to “dream
the session” (Bion, 1959, 1977), to preserve the bubble of reverie so that conceptions can be born
from a turbulent encounter and its tentative intuitions. A skillful and agile analyst will have to
divide his personality so as to coordinate intuitions whose relations to one another and to the
truth are not yet clear. Bion presents the caesura as a “series of skins” (Bion, 1977, p.47),
modeling in the analytic dyad the boundaries between conscious and unconscious. Such
midwifery enacts a splitting of the ego to accommodate the expanding and differentiating
geometry of a new intuition – itself the fruit of a collaboration of faculties that is just beginning
to occur at the boundary of consciousness.

This non-pathological splitting intersects with Jung’s conception of psychic structure. Jung’s
focus on complexes as the stuff of psychic geography, and on the role of the transcendent
function, refers to the boundaries between clusters of meaning and affect, separated and arranged
according to their affinities, compatibilities, and points of discord. “Complex” expresses the
psychic organization into primarily unconscious patterns of thoughts and affects. These display
varying degrees of interpenetration and isolation with each other and with the central complex of
consciousness, self-awareness, and action, namely the ego (CW6, para 700). Jung described
emotions as being organized into “feeling-toned groups of representations” (CW 2, para. 329,

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352). Thus we can think of Jung’s and Bion’s structures of complementary splits and divisions as
“tuning” the psyche-soma for coherent transformations of disparate “feeling-tones” into
continuities of harmonic, rhythmic experience and symbol. These influence memories and ideas
such that they cluster together based on affective similarities (CW 3, para. 80) in a manner akin
to primary process in Freudian theory, seen by Bion, Jung, and Loewald alike as an inherently
structured unconscious. The analyst’s deployment of this capacity in reverie is not a conscious
technique, but the demonstration of his own agility around the thresholds of consciousness,
which he knows, as a matter of technique, how not to disturb. Jung expresses this role of the
analyst in very different terms. Drawing, controversially, upon the alchemical symbolism of the
hierosgamos, or sacred marriage (CW16), the analyst assumes the role of the container, or vas.
Each submits to a profound mutual process which projections are exchanged, and intuited and
contained by the analyst sufficiently secure and intact to endure a sequence of fusions and
separations with the patient. While both are changed, the analyst’s intactness and containing
attention during the encounter with amplified, mediating symbols nurtures the analysand’s
emergence, his consciousness and character enriched from the assimilation of unconscious
pattern and content.

Throughout life, for Jung personal experiences and phantasy are organized around innate
archetypes. The archetypes form a matrix belonging to the genetic endowment of the species
expressed in tendencies for ideas, emotions, and behavior, which in turn shape the complex
details of the personal life. The complex is central to Jung’s model and its application to
aesthetics, because it directly expresses the connectedness of personal uniqueness and universal
affinities. The complex, like other analytic terms, can be understood in either the pathological
sense in which Freud used it, as a neurotic configuration of responses to instinctual dilemmas
(Oedipus complex), or in its normative sense as an idiomatic and unconscious pattern of
individual differences – the individual’s endowment of sensitivities, their themes, and the
manner in which they appear to organize the manifest issues and themes of an individual’s life.

The complex is key with respect to both the structure of the unconscious and the nature of
pathology. Jung’s model of pathology depends more on the degree and quality of differences and

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distances of complexes from one another and from the ego, than on the repression of
instinctually conflicted contents. The more dissociated or conflictual the complexes are with
respect to one another, the more they operate as unintegrated ego states unto themselves, hence
increasing pathology by unbalancing and dissociating the coherence of psychic structure (CW8
para. 253). Creativity and normal, healthy living also depend on the autonomous nature of the
complexes. However, they are contingent upon both a relatively fluid and productive interaction
between their multiple dispositions and their partnership with the executive agency of the ego.
Samuels (1985, pp 47-51) points out that the theory of complexes accurately dismantles the
notion of personality and identity as monolithic entities. In conditions of health and creativity, all
are subject to and participate in the holism of a central organizing principle known as Self. This
psychic geography suggests the structural coherence underlying the Freudian primary process – a
coherence that belongs not only to the contents of the unconscious but also to the psychic space
in which they are organized. In health and normal creativity, they are constructs of flexible,
negotiable, semi-autonomous psychic regions, Otherwise, they generate opposition and rigidity,
and thus dysfunctional and seemingly autonomous opposition to the ego’s main approach to the
world. The analyst’s role as expressed in Bion’s caesura, like the functioning Jungian ego, is a
skilled and integrated capacity to marshal a coordinated ensemble of complementary ego
perspectives to manage the tenuous or unreconciled negotiation between unconscious agencies or
faculties – in other words, getting their boundaries to meet and cooperate. Their boundaries are
thus continuous and contiguous, as the continuity of experience is part and parcel of the meeting
and negotiation of boundaries in psychic space.

The Resolution of Imbalance and Conflict

For Jung the transcendent function expresses the way in which a symbol “facilitates a transition
from one psychological attitude to another” (Samuels, 2003, p.150). Jung differentiates his
concept of symbol from Freud’s along these lines: Freud’s “symbol” never moves beyond
functioning as a sign, a stand-in for something instinctual that is repressed, barred from
consciousness, and given a substitute. The transcendent function works in Jung’s symbol to
facilitate the apprehension of something not yet or otherwise known and articulable, but whose
meaning is capable of being intuited, as a product of the reconciliation of opposites.

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For Bion and Jung, in different terms, both treat symbolic thought as dependent upon the
representation of turbulent encounters that always partly exceed our capacities; it is the creation
of particular symbolic vehicles for apprehending infinities. The totality of the unarticulated range
of psychic possibility, to be brought into particular intuitions and symbols, is, for Bion, O, and
for Jung, the Self. Whereas Bion writes of O as ultimate reality as it concerns the psyche, Jung’s
Self is the ultimate reality of the psyche, its superordinate structure and its potentiality,
enveloping yet standing in a dynamic and shifting relationship to the ego. The ego as a
perspectival faculty always negotiates particular boundaries, always along this frontier or that. It
can manifest the Self only through particulars, from the resources of sense impressions, intuition,
and intellect. Like Bion’s O, the Self encompasses everything that exceeds ego-particulars and
its signifiers: the id, instinct, the recesses of memory, and the combinatorial possibilities of
thought and action not yet actualized. Thus like Bion’s O, which is not encountered but which,
rather, we traumatically become, the Self also represents the potentials for personal development
and differentiation, or what Jung refers to as individuation. The individuation of Self and the
transformation in O can both be seen as cousins to Winnicott’s concept of potential space and
true self, experienced in its individual encounters, yielding futurity, continuity of being, and
authenticity, or otherwise compliance, repetition, maladaptation, and pathology.

Jung’s “conflict,” like Bion’s and Winnicott’s, is not associated with repression. It is not between
wish and proscription; it issues from the gradient (Jung CW 7, par. 76) of different psychic
valences on either side of the membrane between one or more complexes and the ego; it emerges
from an opposite polarity inviting a reconciliation, or an abyss inviting a bridge (Gordon, 1993).
We note that in this perspective nearly the identical formulation of the transcendent attitude and
ego structure as that which Bion suggests (1977, p.47) is enacted by the analyst who
therapeutically splits in order to bridge the unreconciled, not-yet-ready foreshadowings which he
intuits in the analysand.

Bion, Winnicott, and Jung emphasize the anxiety of the unformulated and unyielding rather than
the forbidden. Jung never repudiated the role of repression, but placed it within the context of
particular neurotic phenomena which he always maintained were well-served by psychoanalysis
(CW4, CW17). Many symbols, however, including the symbolic value of symptoms, are

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preliminary ways of addressing a significant change in one’s psychological state. The conflict to
which they speak is therefore usually “actual” (German aktuell) or alive in the present and
leaning toward solution. Symptoms may also be an adaptive adjustment serving the needs of
individuation, and are thus not to be treated as substitutes for repressed contents but as
suggestions of the emergence of something new, “that governs the whole attitude, putting an end
to the division and forcing the energy of the opposites into a common channel [whereby] the
standstill is overcome and life can flow on with renewed power towards new goals” (Jung, CW6,
para. 827).

The aesthetic and poetic value of the transcendent function is considerable. In the same year,
1920, in which Yeats in “The Second Coming” imagined a still forming symbolic power that
would overcome critical imbalance - “And what rough Beast, its hour come round at last, /
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” (W. B. Yeats, 1920) - Jung defined (CW6, para. 828)
his transcendent function as the inherent psychological ability to overcome destructive
dominance by one-sided conscious factors. It uses symbols from the unconscious as bridges to
maintain not only psychic equilibrium but also to proceed down the path of individuation. No
ideal of balance or individuation is ever reached in fact. As “transcendent,” this function ensures
that symbolic acts always point toward their own horizon and a future symbolic synthesis, and
accordingly always involve transition across boundaries. Jung invokes Yeats’ poem to illustrate
the self-corrective tendency, enantiodromia, of any extreme to invite its opposite (CW6, CW9i)
and thereby demand reconciliation in a new symbolic form. The musical values which I offer for
consideration in this essay harmonize boundaries into complex structures capable of “sounding”
together. That is one way of describing resonance, of course. It is also a way of referring to the
sequences and concatenations of actual voices, themes, rhythms, dynamics, and timbres
contrasting and coalescing into a whole experience. Experience construed in this resonant
manner can then can be taken either as an aesthetic, experiential whole, or have its transparent
structure laid bare for analytical listening. Or, it can be listened to transcendently, as a
symphonic synthesis of transparent form and a fluid, evolving musical entity. Harris-Williams
(2009, p.154) quotes poet John Donne:

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“I shall be made thy Music; as I come
I tune the Instrument here at the door” (from “Hymn to God in my sickness”)

Harris-Williams invokes Donne to illustrate the psychic space and process in which “body and
soul are tuned in line with O and transformed into its music” (ibid). Ostensibly referring to
Bion’s transformation in O, this apt association links Donne, Bion, the musical dimension
(unforeseen to Jung) of the transcendent function and the harmonizing and resolution of
character in the process of individuation, and, via “tuning”, a musical/acoustic analogy for the
turning of turbulence into divine music and the mind into an instrument of truth. This
transcendence arises within encounter, of which the human encounter in the analytic session is
an exemplary form, to the extent that we tune our attention to its mechanics, its knife-edge, its
dangers of fragmentation, and its sublime construction. In this way, the analyst can come to
know the patient, and help the patient know himself, as a coherent and evolving identity amidst
his inexorable rhythms, flows, and transformations.

The “binocular” perspective advocated by Bion enables us both to be present for and attuned to
the creation and apprehension of something truly musical, like a transformative analytic
experience.

Revising Scientific Myth and Metaphor in Preparation for Music

“Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything” (H. Poincaré,
1963)

In an earlier chapter, we came close to dealing with Freud’s scientific model as not only a partner
to the mythology which he employed but also, to some extent, an instance of the living myth
shared by moderns in their various relations to art and science.

Rycroft points out several artists and scientists whose revolutionary contributions to our
understanding of the world and the mind were unavailable to Freud (Rycroft, 1979). An

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expanded list, which consists of Joyce, Proust, Borges, Picasso, Dali, Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr,
Hawking, Stravinsky, and Coltrane, represents the articulation of ways of representing and
formulating reality, space, time, and mind that define the difference between two eras. Massive
developments in physics, biology, linguistics, and aesthetic modalities not yet available in
Freud’s lifetime offer not simply new facts but new organizing principles for understanding both
the world and the mind. Accordingly our repertoire of metaphors, for the building of a
psychoanalytic myth and model, has grown correspondingly.

With Rycroft’s key points in mind – about an auditory psychoanalysis and its keys, modes, and
rhythms, and about the dangers of translating one mode of being into a language suited for
another – I suggest that in order to understand and preserve the insights of psychoanalysis we
must take stock as best we can of the ongoing changes in our views of both the natural world and
the perceiving psyche. Certain philosophers of science, and certain contemporary physicists
beginning with Wolfgang Pauli, have reflected explicitly on the history of their own disciplines
with respect to the human patterns demonstrated in the genesis and apprehension of meaning.
Therefore it is incumbent upon us to illuminate the mythic aspect of scientific models, serving
them as a containing envelope and vehicle of meaning for emergence in process from a field of
unknowns.

A contemporary reworking of psychoanalytic mythology will need to recognize that like Freud
we use scientific hypotheses and principles as metaphors or mythemes for what we do not yet
know how to otherwise say. There is no id, and it is not a cauldron; but there is something id-
like, and it is showing some surprising aspects. In addition, we should acknowledge that, like
myths which yield viable theories and principles over a span of time, the scientific paradigms
thereby constructed reach the limits of their explanatory power at a point of crisis and paradigm
shift (Kuhn, 1971). At that juncture the provisionally valid theories and the anomalous facts are
subsumed and recontextualized, their meaning and scope relativised, under a both broader and
more firmly grounded paradigm. Thus, both the mythic and scientific levels of psychoanalysis at
base are provisional. Freud could only have expected his new scientific enterprise to undergo
revolutionary growth and revision; and even his nascent mythology of subjectivity, subject to the

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transformations of dreamwork, would likely undergo its own changes as its central insights grew
to take on new observations. In a mature incarnation of the paradigm, both founding insights and
dilemmas, and their provisional solutions, would resurface as indispensible elements of
contemporary theory – the process, the original mystery and its flavor - the trace of scientific
desire - will not have been lost to history.

Reified metaphor runs deeply through the origins and development of psychoanalysis. Freud was
clearly aware of its provisional nature, and made his most positivistic statements with a good
deal of irony. His translation of his observations of psychological life into mechanical 19th
century terms consisted of “imaginings, transpositions, and guesses.” Of these, he says
alternately “[they do] not hang together, and perhaps never will,” and then that “everything fell
into place, the cogs meshed, a machine which in a moment would run of itself” (Freud, 1954,
pp.118, 120, 126, 129). To Rolland, he stated that his key terms were “figures of speech, without
valuation” (Freud, letter to Rolland, #246, in E. Freud, 1960). Yet they are far from devoid of
valuation if we allow that mental life and the brain are bound to biological matter and energy,
into a realm of reality, psyche, irreducible to any such elements.

What is without absolute valuation is the paradigm, or prevailing myth; what has expanded is our
conception of matter and energy; what has been lost is a sense of psyche, not identical to mind,
nor adequately explainable in terms of the biological matter which conducts it. Freud’s model
was initially based on mechanical energy in a closed system. It followed Helmholtz’s principles
of thermodynamics, focused on entropy, regulation, and discharge, which could only carry his
intuition so far. The idea of a closed system, bounded by the surface of the body, and run like a
factory of neurotic dreams, brings both Freud and us to an aporia, a point of impasse. Evidence
of a parallel limit occurs in Freud’s speculations on the medium by which mother and infant
communicate without words. He attributed it to ESP (Freud, 1933a, SE 22), unable to imagine
the resonant field generated by the sublimely sensory attunement of infant and mother. He thus
employed an intersubjective, organizational understanding of empathy that would form the basis
of the next generation, notably Winnicott, Bion, and Kohut. By the end of Freud’s life it had
already become established that the temporal and temporal configurations of the components of a
system, its current conditions, cannot suffice to explain its nature or its history; for every

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approach by which a system can be known, there are others that are pre-empted. That
knowledge formed a basic premise of the relativistic and quantum sciences that revolutionized
physics without falsifying the Newtonian paradigm, which was now understood to apply only to
systems at certain scales and contexts of nature. The psychic system and the structure of
subjectivity would likewise be revolutionized, its 19th century mechanical metaphors supplanted
by ones appropriate to both more ancient and contemporary ones of process, relativity and
uncertainty.

Matter and energy are understood differently now than at the turn of the 20th century. Relativity
and quantum physics give us the gravitational bending of space and time – the medium of our
interactions -- by means of sheer presence. The over-arching constant in the physical world, the
speed of light, is subordinate to the curvature of space by mass, and the configurations of
massive objects; its own path is determined by the plastic structure of the medium of space-time.
Quantum physics allow us to think of the connection of distant elements within a field of
entanglement, and the precipitation of specific realities from an indeterminate cloud of
possibilities through the very acts of observation and choice, making observation a participatory
act; there is no truly objective perspective. Emergence theory allows us to understand that key
qualities of a complex system are the fruit of the dynamic self-organization of the system in ways
that cannot be explained by any of its parts, nor predicted from the conditions at any moment.
Contemporary understanding of the hologram and the fractal allow us to understand that
complex patterns are encoded within the whole at various scales and levels of organization.
Particle physics and relativity join Eastern meditation practice and their findings about the nature
of mind in teaching us that the mass and solidity of “real” objects are illusory constructs of the
organization of energy; energy itself is a signature vibration within the dynamic vacuum, which,
under certain circumstances, behaves like mass. Mass itself is mostly empty space made
temporarily concrete by the organizational properties of its particle fields and bonds. We are
space, mass and energy, with the attributes of psyche. This is no longer mysticism, nor New Age;
and this perspective too, will yield to still clearer insights.

The objects and energies of the ordinary material world on the normal observational scale cannot
serve as models for the solidity and causality of the mental world, except provisionally. Not only

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are they different domains that are imperfectly translatable, but also the construction of the
physical world is itself a scientific myth: a story about one stage of development, one level of
organization, seen from one or another perspective, or in one limited context. We live in both
worlds, the momentarily apparent one of solid objects and causally linked events, and the
inferred, steadily examined or easily ignored one of uncertainty, flow, and process through a
conducive space. Yet these, too, are provisional, their actual reach and explanatory power for
physics and psychology similarly unsettled.

In particular, the wave-particle duality after many decades still confounds and instructs as a
simple demonstration of the dual nature of physical existence and the effect of an intervening
medium on what may be observed. It illustrates two different modes of apprehending the world,
and a larger world than that illustrated by either. One is the world of particles, in which
condensations of resonant energy in particular locations are thought of as objects. They are
intercepted while in motion, measured, and ascertained from their boundary conditions to have a
specific set of properties, from which one can infer something about their nature and history. But
the mode of apprehending a particle, in psychoanalysis, or in a high-school physics lab, is to get
it to collide with something – a double slit and screen, or an analyst and contact barrier (Bion,
1962b) allowing a word or intuition to impact and create a flash, as in mathematician Henri
Poincare’s quote beginning this chapter, which also inaugurates Bion’s Cogitations (1992). Its
other nature, perceptible with certain types of attention, is the wave-motion that expresses the
transitive connection and potentiality between everything. This is the mystery without which we
have the illusion of objects as stable facts, possessing their own properties. We, and the world
our minds traverse, are both/either measurable, discrete moments of impact and moving and/or
standing waves of process, This duality depends upon our ability to have a binocular approach to
reality (Bion, 1962a, p.53), a dual-track (Grotstein, 1986), an openness to the complementarity of
process and discrete event, which corresponds to the duality of unconscious and conscious
modes of apperception that concern the analyst.

All of these dimensions in developing modern thought make Rycroft’s dictum—the desirability
of testing an auditory paradigm for analysis—particularly germane. What happens in the
auditory, musical world is a matter of constant resonant vibration encountering media of varying

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properties, including the attention and intention of player and audience. The synchronized
motion of the performers can be unified and their disparities harmonized in a common ensemble
zone - a central organizing attention, which we might call a group ego. There, one musician can
solo against the support of the others, or all can contribute diverging voices working in orchestra.
In music the mind makes art of the inexorable material vibration of the world, and structures it
according to one’s physicality, modes of thought, and emotion. Musical “objects” and particles
which stand out – this rhythm, that note or theme, this or that chord – are, as Bion has borrowed
from Hume and Poincare, “selected facts” (Bion, 1962a), moments of emphasis plucked from the
flow by the attention of the observer/participant, and forming patterns of apperception that
constitute the musical theme. The physical medium of instrumentation is chosen for its ability to
accept structured movement at its boundaries and pass it forward and out, transformed, to take
part in an intersubjective event enjoining everything in the environment. The eardrum is itself a
resonant boundary, among the many other resonant bodily chambers and boundaries. Whether
through many players and instruments or only one, music achieves and asserts its meaning by its
motion in time and space, though its vibrations dissipate entropically, and its emotional impact
may be defensively lost by an unreceptive listener.

The right time for Rycroft’s organizing points has definitely come, in large part because
psychoanalysis, catching up with two generations of advance in its own field alongside major
leaps in science and related theory, is ready to explore them. Rycroft recognizes the relevance of
an organized auditory model of mental life in spite of Freud’s abstention from any involvement
with music. With few exceptions, we still lack a psychoanalytic vocabulary for dimensions of
psychological life that such a model would offer, along with any comprehensive vocabulary for
the plasticity of time and space in the psyche, a property which calls out for integration with
decades of scientific and cultural diversification. In music, we have an art, and a mode of
thinking and relating, based entirely on the organization of resonances emanating from different
densities and tempi, at relative configurations in space and time. Freud’s scientific frame treated
the time of reality as the invariant clockwork time of physical causality, against which the time
of primary process is a wishful convolution to which we can only imperfectly strive to adapt.
The deference to the brute, oblivious mechanical (“objective”) time of extra-psychic reality, as
explored by Lear and Loewald (2000), made of the psyche as imagined by Freud a system of

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deviations, assigned the connotation “subjective”, with time, memory, and agency all treated as
casualties of consequent distortions of wishes and our unconscious pursuit of them. In music,
however, the deviations of time and vibration are navigated, repaired, and woven in multiple
layers that construct a whole experience which engages both body and mind. This synthetic
function of music exists at the core of the classic myths of Hermes and Eros, not to mention
Apollo and Dionysos, which informed Freud’s and Jung’s work. The scientific principles which
intersect with this mythic enterprise are staples of scientific life, known with full available rigor,
permeating the culture and language of the subsequent decades. They demonstrate that the very
principles taken for granted as common sense and reality are simply descriptions of a limited
angle of perspective on phenomena. That Freud himself sensed factors which inherently impel
the expansion of his own limited terms and their models we have already noted, alongside the
vast implications for expansion of the spirit-matter conjunction which marks Jung’s broadly
misunderstood and caricatured recovery of psychological insights from pre-psychological
Gnostic and alchemical myths. The Mercurial factor at work in these myths is only one aspect
which has yielded fruit for further psychological observation and theory, as noted in Chapter
One. The properties of music already are woven into the fabric of myths around that factor.
Rycroft’s timely – thirty-four year old - challenge is overdue for a response.

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Chapter Five Musical Metapsychology
__________________________________________________________

Introduction

______________________________________________________________________________

Performances became almost completely unsaturated contexts in which the ensemble

became one being with many arms and legs and voices. I came to know how to listen, not
only to (other musicians)…but to my own inner voices and to the overall context. It was a
meaningful exploration of my personal dream-life, and his, and a way of coming to know
myself on multiple levels…this became a touchstone for helping me develop healthy
relationships both within and outside of musical contexts. In other words, music as a
process of psychotherapeutic self-exploration (Lee Underwood, 2007, musician/author,
personal correspondence)

This chapter presents various points of convergence between music and psychoanalysis. Among the
numerous approaches to this topic, I will focus on those related to the figuration and integration of
musical forms. These run parallel to the psychoanalytic processes by which affect is given form and
rhythm, integrated into complementary voices, and dreamed audibly into symbolic wholes

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reflecting the effort toward continuity and coherence of psychic life in the face of complexity and
turbulence.

I will be focusing on jazz and improvisation, examining pieces generally considered to be

artistically superb and paradigmatic of two complementary approaches to jazz theory and practice.
This will distinguish my approach from nearly all the extant psychoanalytic literature on music.
While I do not have space here adequate to justify the claim, it is nonetheless necessary to note that
in this literature the most salient aspects of psychoanalysis, as an approach to thinking, acting, and
dreaming the events of mental life, are undermined by a dominant reliance on through-composed
classical music. This practice implicitly has relegated improvised music to a culturally and
aesthetically inferior, or at least marginal form, perhaps tainted with the brush of wish-fulfillment,
self-indulgence, primary process. Of course, this practice may simply reflect the preference and
familiarity among the majority of writers for classical music. Nevertheless, with all questions of
aesthetic or intellectual merit to one side, my working hypothesis is simply that music from a
written score can sustain little comparison with the spontaneity of dreaming and psychoanalytic
conversation in session. Inevitably this poor match puts musical examples into the same category
which Freud approached apologetically (Freud, 1914): artist and artwork treated as patient and
symptom. In fact, the inclusion of jazz and improvisation fleshes out the soundstage, leaving ample
room for discussion of how musical dreaming occurs out loud, in the presence of receptive others,
and for the concordance of that experience with the analytic encounter.

Approaching a Musical Horizon

My choice to focus upon music is underwritten by two facts, one historical and the other
psychological. First, at least since the eighteenth century music has occupied a pivotal position
among the sister arts - the art to whose condition, in Verlaine, Schopenhauer, and Pater, the visual
and verbal arts aspire. Freud’s silence before music (Freud, SE 13, para. 212) leads us to linger a
moment over his reluctance to either honor its pivotal status, or become curious about what he
might have been missing. Music marks a limit of Freud’s horizon; in the blunt dismissal which I
cited in my first chapter, he stated that he could neither appreciate music nor analyze it, and so

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could say nothing about it (Freud, SE 13, para. 212). Unlike other modes of cultural expression, he
would barely touch it. Additionally, his claim that the visual arts shared with dreams the incapacity
to represent the logical relations that make sentences intelligible (Freud, 1900, SE4, p.312) helps
define this problem in Davis’ (2007) terms – that a paradigm serves to render unintelligible that
which one doesn’t want to know about. Not dreams, not art, per se, but that portion that will not
yield to the power and conventions of a single, totalizing instrument. Dreams and music do not
think the way the rational waking man does, they will not sit still, they speak in their own tongue, in
subversive and seductive ways, and they yield in part, at best, like the salamander’s tail, to capture
by intellectual analysis.

Freud’s dilemma confronts us with a boundary problem, what Rycroft in a different context called
the problem of translating phenomena between modes of discourse (Rycroft 1962, 1979). Freud
described the task of interpretation as the “translation [of dreams] into the language of waking life”
(Freud, CW 5:150). But this task depends on the capacity of the dream image to signify some
otherwise unrepresentable content, and that of the analyst to capture his quarry alive and bring it
intact to the surface. Freud both did not “get” music and also could not decipher the unconscious
proper to music and bring its contents back to waking life (ibid.). In this light, all Freudian
interpretation has been modeled on the un-doing of the dreamwork (Freud, SE15, p.170), the
breaking down of its metaphors into the libidinal wishes for which they stand, and subject to the
limits of this strategy. As music for Freud was merely a sensual depiction of contentless states
(Freud, 1930; Meltzer, 1983; p. 15), leaving nothing in his nomological net, he inferred that in
music there was nothing to un-do.

The translation of music into words and vice versa is of course notoriously incomplete. But by
referring to the “intelligence” of words and the “feeling” of music, we are metonymically selecting
only representative attributes of each domain, and we are at risk of mistaking actual “language” and
“music” for their metaphoric properties. Without mistaking language for a lack of emotion or music
for sheer dumb affect, we can see that each articulates the recessive qualities in the other – such as
when we describe speech as tuneful and mellifluous and music as a dialogue. They are never
categorical opposites, but complementary dimensions of a single presentational whole. Together,
they constitute “a more encompassing, higher level category” (Monson, 1996), a synthesis of

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qualitative and structural properties, such as always exist in actual creative products of the living
psyche-soma.

5.c Clearing Space

_____________________________________________________________________________

Bion was concerned with establishing a language and horizon for psychoanalytic phenomena that
would make analysis distinct from any adjacent discipline. In that discipline thinking and dreaming
are not names for something else; the analyst is not doing with the patient some version of what
another practitioner does in his discipline. The work and paradigms of the analyst, surgeon, or artist,
like ordinary dreaming, are contingent on the “vertex” (Bion, 1965) or the selective angle of
approach toward “O,” the infinity which envelops the particulars of any event. Bion painstakingly
relocates aspects of Freud and Klein’s theories in precise terms, as “unsaturated” (Bion, 1970, 32,
41, 69) as possible by meanings and associations from other disciplines, with mathematics serving
as the exemplar of this attribute.

The motive for this radical effort can be illustrated by means of a literary example in the same way
that Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex served Freud. Bion claimed that Freud discovered not the Oedipus
complex but instead, through Sophocles’ play, psychoanalysis (Bion, 1992). Bion’s reading of the
origin of psychoanalysis identifies a myth which guided Freud’s intuition about the basic patterns of
subjectivity and relation in his patients. Each reference point with which Bion modifies
psychoanalytic theory - geometry, logic, and myth – he used both as an a priori category and as a
horizon of discourse. Together these zones – psychoanalysis, geometry, logic, and myth - are taken
as “unsaturated” terms (Bion, 1970, 32, 41, 69), none of which is derived from the analyst’s
association to something already known or assumed. Nor are they reducible to another order of
nature; that is, as far as the psychoanalytic relationship is concerned, the psyche is not an expression
of biological and sexual imperatives, nor is a patient’s utterance a symptom of disease.

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An analysand’s utterance, heard by the analyst who has suspended memory, understanding, or
desire in service of a responsive intuition, is sui generis, and amounts to Poincare’s flash between
two dark nights. Like the cryptic, pregnant but unmoored utterances of Bion analysand Samuel
Beckett’s Endgame characters from their isolated outposts or vertices on his stripped stage, the
analytic moment must be allowed to resonate, and be given specificity by means of the
analyst’s/audience’s negative capability to organize the inchoate (Bion, 1977). Unlike Oedipus,
whose moral is a vein of inexhaustible ore, Beckett’s characters undermine the hedged bet of
negative capability – that it will all fall into place – the place where a battalion of analytic tools are
waiting - if the analyst is patient enough. Instead, Bion’s work progresses from an emphasis K,
denoting knowledge and insight, to F, faith, an opening of mind toward a stance which meets the
destructive and entropic psychic forces with an infinitely expanding and accommodating space for
registration of whatever emotional impact may come. If anything genuine is to emerge at all – not
merely something a given technique or tool is tuned to register and decrypt – it is by virtue of F,
which knows that prior meanings must not pre-empt intuition of the new. The analytic silence, for
Bion, builds upon the Freudian evenly-hovering attention, but with new emphasis; namely, that the
affective reality to which words might attest is itself the resonance of a non-verbal self, which is
vulnerable to being undone or lost by an impetuous of facile dependence upon words. The story
that emerges within this fertile and tensely poised caesura, made pliant by the analyst’s faith, is the
unsaturated myth, accruing its meaning as it coalesces, which delivers intuition to insight. It
confounds the scientist wielding a scope, scalpel, or theory. “Faith keeps opening as destruction
keeps destroying: one infinity opening vis a vis the other” (Eigen, 1998).

In viewing Beckett’s work, we are like Bion’s analyst, straining his negative capability to wait and
see past the wish for something familiar. We allow intuitions of truth to rise from small shifts of the
unfamiliar in a bare house at the ocean, hearing the characters’ tones breaking the silence,
witnessing their repetitions, their statements of wish, reminiscence, and reproach, each of which is
connected to the others by a tenuous thread that sometimes catches the light, then disappears. Each
moment’s meaning is caught in the process of forming and presenting itself. The plays and their
characters are unsaturated complexes of elements hinting through the fog at possibilities, rather than
repressed wishes asserting themselves in compromised form. If we insist on knowing what they are

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about, or thinking that we know – for example, that Hamm must be Hamlet, that the setting is post-
nuclear, etc. – we breach the analytic injunction against memory, understanding, or desire, and
hallucinate our meanings upon an event - like a dream interpreted too quickly - that has not yet
manifested its own.

Bion takes core Freudian and Kleinian constructs as mythic configurations of mental life seen from
the psychoanalytic vertex. Thus, the analyst is not some retread of the objective scientist but a
subject bound to a horizon of observation, interaction, and experience, working to intuit
psychoanalytic reality from the events of the session. At times wrongly dismissed as a mystic, Bion
like Jung, posits this approach as pragmatic psychoanalytic science: the patient’s primary data
emerge in his efforts to represent experience, and the analyst’s intuition apprehends that
representation, mediated only by the containing space of his reverie. These are patterns of psychic
facts (Jung, CW6, CW9i), or selected facts (Bion, 1962a), whose meaning is always in process of
emerging and transforming. All expectations and skills except those which support and organize
intuition must be suspended in the interests of the reality of the patient. To this extent, Bion also
cautions the analyst against idealizing and overusing his artfulness, which “may be a disadvantage
insofar as the artist’s capacity may enable him to provide, as Plato feared, a substitute for the truth”
(Bion, 1970, p.2). A parallel to this is Winnicott’s discussion of omnipotent illusion on the part of
the infant for whom “the experience of a good breastfeed is tantamount to producing the milk”
(DiBenedetto, 2005; Winnicott, 1971). This is an essential part of the infant’s development of
creativity, but the analyst must avoid the grandiose illusion that he is either creator or possessor of
the milk, the cause and indispensible agent of the analysand’s reality.

Psychoanalytic aesthetics following Bion’s example neither simply tells us about the psychic
process behind art nor expands psychoanalysis to accommodate art. It expands the psychoanalytic
horizon fundamentally. Its concerns go back to the generation of space and transformative process
ab ovo, the genesis of a way of being and feeling. For Bion complex symbolization, out of the
widest possible range and intensity of experience, is fundamental to both art and science, and the

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developmental task of achieving subjectivity is the work of gaining that fundamental capacity. Thus
Bion succinctly asserts that what the psychoanalyst can help the patient do – formulate the infinity
of his emotional experience in useful symbolic structures and intuitions - “belongs to the domain of
the Aesthetic” (Bion, 1965, 37-38, emphasis added). What links art and science, he says, is their
mutual aim of truth. They rely equally on symbolic systems which allow the apprehension of stable
distinctions and correspondences between constant conjunctions21 (Bion, 1962a, 1965) and new
facts and intuitions. This linkage is equally true for the achievement of thought, dreaming, and the
making of art, each in its own context. The vertex, in his terms, is that angle of perspective which
the analyst must allow into his perception for the truth and meaning of emotional experience to be
perceived, rather than be rejected as abhorrent, false, disillusioning or a distraction from the
enjoyment of our insights.

Psychoanalytic Aesthetics as Transition into Music

Investigate the caesura, not the analyst; not the analysand, not the unconscious; not the conscious;
not sanity; not insanity. But the caesura, the link, the synapse, the (counter-trans)-ference, the
transitive-intransitive mood. (Bion, 1977, p.56)

The above objects of investigation are psychic music. Bion joins Winnicott and Jung in directing
our attention not to objects, or the words used to describe them, but to the transition from one
condition to another - a transition which can proceed to take psychic shape or collapse on the
knife’s edge (Winnicott, 1986b) or on the fragile threshold of an impossible demarcation (Kristeva,
1982). To symbolize is to form a bridge (Gordon, 1993) over the abyss between one state and
another, and to traverse the gradient between incompatible meanings. To dream is to give context
and narrative contour to the turbulences of affective life. To create poetry is to conjure and celebrate
the contour of experience and affect which bridges the selected facts – words, signifiers and
signified – which are themselves only signs for partial intuitions of O, by restoring to them their
intrinsic music. Caesura subordinates words to the whole aesthetic contour, the fabric of affect

21
Unconscious assumptions of meaningful or causal connections between selected facts and their associated
emotion and representation which serve individual or group emotional needs (Bion, 1962a, 1965)

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(Green, 1999b) not to mention impact and resonance, of experience, establishing also the caesura
between poet and reader, musician and musician, musician and audience, or analysand and analyst.

The aesthetic and analytic encounters are both about bridges between people. Something deeply
interactive takes place, regardless of the fact that the musician and the analysand are doing most of
the speaking. Music offers presence in a manner unique among the arts, some models of music
more than others. Analytically and musically, the object of experience is present and emergent in
the room. It is l an audible piece of dreamwork declaring and enhancing both the conditions of the
present moment (Rycroft, 1979; Jung, CW6) and the contour of the thread of wish binding
beginning and emergent climax into a single event, with the moment as hub or axis. Dream
contextualizes emotion (Hartmann 1998), bridging unconscious with emergent consciousness.
Musical thought, likewise, is anchored in the pulsing body, but from the vertex of a conducive
consciousness, sculpting a temporal suspension bridge of affect, over the abyss of the indeterminate
moment, with access and egress to psychic territory on either side.

Between music, analysis, and dream the parallels continue. Along such lines we have established
several alternatives to Freudian assumptions, following Freud’s own variations. Music does not
simply serve the pleasure principle. Neither formulations like “sensuous depiction of states” nor
gratifying illusion suffice; dream, art and analysis are places for the reconciliation of turbulences
into coherent and meaningful experiences that nourish consciousness. Dream, music-making, and
analysis are heightened moments of presence, each an intense now in which our ability to be present
is challenged to be present. Music, like Hamlet’s description of dreams, knits up the raveled sleeve
of care. Each contextualizes (Hartmann, 1998) and reconstitutes the contours of the fabric of affect
(Green, 1999b) in which are woven the patterns of thought, image, and other psychic contents. To
extend the metaphor, the mended sleeve now sheathes the whole contour of the psyche-soma, a
flexible skin which neither impinges nor tears.

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And further too: the psyche-soma now extends beyond the skin and internal boundaries into the
spatial and temporal surroundings – relationship, culture, and history. Freud speculated that the
bond between mother and pre-verbal infant is “extra-sensory,” unable better to express the
constitution of the fabric of desire and empathy that binds them. Stern points out the “double-edged
sword of language, which … drives a wedge between two simultaneous forms of interpersonal
experience…causes a split in the experience of the self…(and) moves relatedness onto the
impersonal, abstract level intrinsic to language and away from the personal immediate level” (Stern,
1985, pp 162-3). Knoblauch (2005) connects Stern’s insight to Lacan’s regarding the symbol’s
murder of the thing, and the corresponding externalization of desire into objects which categorically
fail to satisfy. Freud and Lacan both focus on the impossibility of adequately representing desire,
and the resulting split in the psyche. Knoblauch points out Lacan’s focus, in particular, on the
deadening and devitalizing effect upon experience as it is memorialized in narrative, “arbitrarily
removed from the flow of continuous experience” (ibid.). By contrast, Stern and Knoblauch both
emphasize the simultaneity of the bodily and linguistic modes of experience, evident in countless
non-verbal cues available to the analyst who can attend to them. The dissociation exists in a
development of language which drifts too far or is split too rigidly from the flow of life in desire
and bodily experience. The task of the analyst is to apply a binaural sensitivity to both verbal
objects and non-verbal processes, in order to locate the continuous flow of experience in all its
variety.

Our focus has fallen upon what happens in the moment of conception, in the resonant space
established by analyst and analysand; however, all the artistic forms except improvised music
ironically share a chief hermeneutic and scientific obstacle belonging to dreams. All are testimonies
about a mental event that occurred in a different time and place. It is in either the account of the
dreamer, in retrospect, filtered by layers of secondary elaboration, or in the “finished work,”
committed to canvas or page. No one has ever witnessed someone else’s dream, including the
private dreaming behind every artwork. But many have interpreted and revisited the records of
dreams – and the dreamings of art - once they have been prepared for “publication” (Bion, 1992).
Music, by contrast, is presentationally immediate (Whitehead, 1978; Langer, 1953). But even
classical and pop forms with a degree of openness and spontaneity depend largely on rigid

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structures worked out long before the moment of performance, rendering conception and
performance categorically, functionally, and temporally distinct. Jazz alone among Western forms
emphasizes composition in the moment of performance, within a conducive context consisting of a
space, conventions and rituals of play, and more or less plastic musical frameworks (songs, chord
progressions, suggestive instructions, or the injunction to simply play, etc). Jazz through its many,
often highly conflictual conventions demonstrates a surprising affinity with the analytic task as Bion
and Winnicott define it. It constitutes a co-created waking dreamwork/play in which all the
faculties, primary and secondary processes, and our full physicality are engaged in the creative
enactment of intuition. It is sonic dreamwork made transparent.

Music, Resonance, and Poly-Valent Semantics

The manifestations of sound in language and music may be seen as poles of a continuum, extending
between the intrapsychic and the interpersonal, self and other, reason and passion, or science and
aesthetics. These are dynamically interdependent polarities, not antitheses, and where one is found
so too is the other. The alternative is dissociation or deadness. The ubiquity of sound can be found
in the universality of resonance, the physical continuity of the voice, and the relation between the
tactile and the auditory. Things vibrate.

That fact marshals several dimensions of relationship and communication. Acoustic phenomena can
remind us concretely of the ways in which energy in all its forms is transferred from one region to
another, and transformed from one state to another. Sound is elementary to the informational and
sensory needs of the physical person. From a developmental perspective, we find this in the acoustic
connection of the fetus in utero to the outside world through the medium of the mother’s body, his
own “englobed” (Kristeva, 1984) within hers; later such connection inheres in the tone of the
mother’s voice, the musical assembly of vocal sounds from which discrete social language
differentiates itself. Langer, on whose work Rycroft hinged his reevaluation of creativity, states that
music, as a language unto itself, offers syntax and a complex semantic dimension based entirely on
its complex organization, not reducible to any fixed units within it. Individual tones and beats bear
no meaning as such, but only as elements with valence for meaning. They carry an infinite capacity

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for organization into aggregates, sequences, and complex pattern-streams of motion, constituting a
medium that transcends semantics (Mancia, 1993, p.148).

Mancia’s analysis of musical semantics is helpful here. Following Langer (1953), Mancia highlights
the “polyvalent semanticness” of music. An infinity of possible sounds are woven into specific
forms not by virtue of the qualities of any note or beat on its own, but rather from its “complex
syntactic context” (Mancia, 1993). To a far greater extent than words, musical elements are
unsaturated symbols that take on and surrender meaning and qualitative value depending entirely
upon their fluid organization. Musical organization in turn is based upon a syntax that grounds tones
and rhythms in acoustical physics and the number archetype which accounts for the near-infinite
configurations of affectively meaningful musical elements - the grounding of music’s possible
affectively charged imagistic forms (Jung, CW9i; Von Franz, 1974). This syntax permits a
perpetual re-transcription of meaning based on the direction of successive notes and beats, a
direction that reveals semantic possibilities of both preceding passages and possible avenues of
development. In this manner, music presents configurations of thought and affect in its immediate
and unfolding form. Its meaning is not derived from phrases, modes, or tonalities serving as
signifiers corresponding to signifieds. Music does not ask to be translated. Where desire, for Lacan,
presents the unfixable slipperiness of the drive, irreducible to any signifier, music is the resonance
that propagates in the space of slippage. It is a spatial and temporal phenomenon, one that lives in
the spaces of the representational absence and negation constituting much of the linguistic, post-
modern revision of psychoanalysis. Music is the registration of this resonant tension; Lacan knew of
the dimensionality, the space and the time, of this domain of representation, represented graphically
as axes of horizontal sequence and vertical polyphony (Lacan, 2005; Payne, 1993). Time, space,
and slippage are also depicted as the sliding of the signifier under the phallic “bar,” the obstacle
between desire and its expression, which always disrupts the relationship between signifier and
signified (Lacan, 2005).

Any degree of intersection of psychoanalysis with jazz makes use of this insight. We tend to
mistake the conventions of music and music interpretation for its meaning. We rely excessively on
familiarity, regularity, and recognition of formal principles, and sheer preference for types of

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harmony, rhythm, timbre, etc. Yet music, psychoanalytically at least, must not be seen as the
performance or manufacture of sonic objects to be consumed, but as the skilled presentation of a
form of thinking-in-sound capable of conveying and evoking response on multiple levels. Music,
like dreaming and playing, synthesizes turbulence and difference into a transcendent whole which
reconciles them, and in which the perpetual movement into and out of this tension is itself
pleasurable. Musical pleasure is not about specific affects, but the successful negotiation of
complexes of affect to yield a variegated experience. Our aesthetic pleasure, transparently
illustrated in music, involves a dance with and cyclic reconciliation of chaos (Peckham, 2006) in the
multiple domains and dimensions which music traverses.

Mancia asserts that this multi-dimensionality and freedom from linguistic rigidity make it a stronger
metaphorical medium than language itself (Mancia, 1993). These qualities account for the special
status of the two works I examine further along, John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and Miles
Davis’s “Kind of Blue.” These exemplary works strip musical structure of all predetermined,
saturated features, except those which ground the authentic voice of each player and of the
ensemble (the latter construed as the complex voice of a single player). The ensemble is a
transcendent intersubjective entity akin to Ogden’s analytic third (1994) co-created by the
simultaneous fluid surrender and differentiated acuity and skill of each member. The ensemble also
resembles Jung’s analysis of the depiction, in the alchemical tableau of the Rosarium
Philosophorum (Jung, CW16), of the stages of boundary fusion and differentiation which make up
the transference and its transformations. The improvisers in these works make transformative use of
the fluid, supportive space of the ensemble as a musical convention conducive to the creative
melting and redrawing of personal and musical boundaries. Each remains unpledged to any prior
structure or convention except a modulated swing rhythm and a simple sequence of scales; each
note in each scale is a window onto all-but-infinite possibilities, a radical example in jazz of the
“polyvalence” of musical utterances by which to collapse O into a specific musical phrase (Bion,
1977). Expressing the archaic but structured id of Loewald (2000) and Rycroft (1979), this open
musical structure ends up being not chaotic but affecting, self-organizing and coherent, in no way
simply seeking or gratifying a wish for pleasure or discharge. It spans the outer reaches of formal
organization, giving rise to emergent form conceived only by the composer playing at this moment.
I will return to these musical examples shortly.

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Eros across Boundaries
Love or music – which power can uplift man to the sublimest heights? It is a large question;
yet it seems to me that one should answer it in this way: Love cannot give an idea of music;
music can give an idea of love. But why separate them? They are two wings of the soul
(Hector Berlioz, 2002).

We have absolutely no reason to worry about lack of positive and affirmative philosophy. It’s
built in us. The phrasing, the sound of the music attest to this fact. We are naturally endowed
with it…all of us would have perished long ago if this were not so. We are born with this
feeling that just comes out no matter what conditions exist. Any music which could grow and
propagate itself as our music has, must have a hell of an affirmative belief inherent in it.
(Coltrane, 1962, in Simkins, 1989, p.159)

We’ve addressed the epochal transition from classical 19th-century physics, part of Freud’s
formation, to quantum and relativistic physics. Now we are in a position to examine such insights as
the above, by Coltrane and Berlioz, and the insights expressed within the music of Davis and
Coltrane. That is, our reading of the post-Freudian succession confronts us with an expansion not
only in outlook but also in the paradigms to which Freud looked in anchoring some of his
metaphors. These expansions are mirrored in particular musical evolutions. They demonstrate how
“music can give an idea of love”. Although Berlioz perhaps never imagined the possibilities of jazz,
there is a family resemblance between Symphonie Fantastique and A Love Supreme, a relation of
spirit and intensity yielding kindred music.

Music and acoustic metaphor amplify the notion of psychic boundaries. One sees this amplification
more narrowly in the ideas of Hartmann, where we can envision the role played by mental
boundaries in structuring the ego such that it is organized and tuned to transmit and transmute
patterns of affective resonance throughout the psyche-soma and its environment. A musical
amplification of Hartmann’s mental boundaries, complemented by Bion’s caesura, Kristeva’s chora,
and Winnicott’s potential space, extends psychoanalytic metaphors of mechanical and topographical
constructs so that we can imagine how natural musical thinking is, both within and about the
psyche.

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The transmuting, or dissemination (Bollas, 1989), of affective and sensory impact occurs across
thresholds rather than mere boundaries. A violin string is not a barrier or indicator of place; it is an
active principle, a trigger, a talisman. Metaphorical lines of division between functional zones of the
psyche do not simply demarcate and exclude contents. Nor do they only selectively permit
attenuated or altered contents to pass across something like a cell membrane. Rather, the boundary
is to be understood as a threshold, as in the mercurial analogy, and as a resonant membrane, a point
of contact, of transduction and transmuting of energy into elaborated forms that network the
multiple agencies of the psyche-soma. The zones it demarcates are both concretely and
metaphorically three-and-four-dimensional resonant spaces. Beyond physical thresholds, though, lie
intersubjective and transpersonal ones. Coltrane refers to the affirmation of an inherent creative
principle that transcends circumstantial and historical limitations, and allows people to reunite with
each other and with their roots, to reconstitute bonds no matter what the turbulences. Coltrane’s
insight, surprisingly, is consistent with the phylogenetic structure and potential of the psyche as
seen by Jung, Klein, Bion, Winnicott, et al. Love, the fabric of affect, the thread of wish, the
archetypal basis of psyche, body, and relationship are the organizational and developmental
potentialities at the ground of our being. To appeal to this wellspring offers not only the whole
treasure of affect, idea, and image, but also the source of gravity that binds the individual to the
higher order of nature and culture so that he can create and communicate. It is how we can
understand and reach each other when the shattering turbulences of life threaten to annihilate the
ego. Whether we call this God, Eros, O, higher-order, ontological ground of being, id, The Ineffable
Subject (Grotstein, 2001) or something else, it nevertheless has been found by all post-Freudians
and Freud himself, in qualified ways, to be that which transcends and envelopes the processes and
forms available to consciousness.

As we are writing from Freud into the post-Freudian, this bears elaboration: the tragedy of the
neurotic model is not that it paints a false picture of humanity, but that it inflates an account of the
tragic human dimension into a shroud for all that we do and are, spanning the parapraxis, the dream,
and the history of a race. Freud’s unease and fascination over creativity bespeaks consternation and
difficulty in conceiving of how anything can be created at all, or can hang together at all, not the
least of which would be a more-or-less integrated and developing individual capable of creating
something more than precious reflections. We are well advised, as accepted even by Jung, putative

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nemesis of Freud and Freudians, to seek and practice analysis where we are neurotic, to know and
learn to traverse the labyrinth of the conflicts and self-deceptions which constitute a considerable
depth and tragic dimension of subjectivity. But the tragic view and the tragic element of life are
nested within a life whose Erotic, driven, self-declamatory nature is also to world-build, and to sing,
and do research too, all of which are presentations of the building, progressing, and thirst for
knowledge of the individual during the trajectory of life. This is no more than a call to engage and
understand the project of Eros in one’s own soul-making A seminal thinker who cannot hear music
cannot account for a psyche that is as musical and erotic at its core as it is tragic, conflicted, and
neurotic, yielding one penetrating but tragically one-sided weltanschauung.

Presentational Immediacy and the Isomorphism of Music and Affect

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it
before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the
listener feels, and that’s too bad. (John Coltrane, interviewed by Nat Hentoff, notes for CD
set "Interplay," 2007)

Bion and Winnicott’s elaborations of Freudian theory posit the development of psyche from the
symbolic containment of affect, from which mental space unfolds as a container for symbolic
contents. Beyond this, Susanne Langer suggests the eminently musical nature of those contents,
which are “of a different order” (1953). She invokes thinkers across several fields, such as C.P.E
Bach, Schopenhauer, and Wagner, who treat music as a natural representation, not simply
evocation, of the emotions. Addis focuses on three elements of Langer’s theory, the first being that
there is an isomorphism between music and the emotions. Isomorphism here refers not to a
correspondence of contents, but to an equivalence of structure:

The tonal structures we call music bear a close logical similarity to the forms of human
feeling – forms of growth and attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution,
speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm, or subtle activation and dreamy lapses – not joy and
sorrow perhaps, but the poignancy of either and both – the greatness and brevity and eternal
passing of everything vitally felt. Such is the pattern or logical form of sentience; and the
pattern of music is that same form worked out in pure, measured sound and silence (Langer,
1953, 27).

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Langer addresses music’s role as a “tonal analogue of emotive life” (ibid.). Addis points out the
difficulty in conceptualizing what the logical or formal equivalence of music to emotions precisely
is. However, it is likely that part of the apparent circularity of her statement – i.e., music and
emotions are isomorphic because they are analogous, and they are analogous because they can be
described in the same terms – is due to the habit of translation between modes of discourse like that
found in psychoanalytic or critical interpretation. When we try to say what a representation
“means,” we assume that its meaning can be known only by being transformed into another kind of
discourse – from whichever sensual mode into whichever linguistic frame of reference. Content-
based interpretation of symbolism relies on the presumption of a symbolic equation of some kind –
either in the substitution of an image of a breast, or the substitution of some more remotely
connected symbol for the emotion that marks the absence of the breast (Bion, 1970, p.10). It is also
based on the presumption that verbal interpretation is the only way to bring together primary and
secondary process, to give emotional life coherence and structure, and make us aware of our flows
and transformations; to allow us to experience and read our own minds. Again, music falls outside
of this schema, and works by different criteria, not because it is without content, but because it does
not ask to be translated. It evokes directly, and transparently reveals flow and transformation, as do
none of the usual media addressed by psychoanalysis. It both mirrors the form of bodily rhythm and
resonance, and “conducts” emotion in the listener through the sensual impact of that tangible,
physical perturbation. It resonates, through the media of air, flesh, and sensory apparatus, but does
not require the mediation of a translating agency22. Rather, there is a correspondence between the
bodily, neurological rhythms of tension and resonance and the virtual analog of this rhythm in the
patterns of the music, revisiting the rhythms of attunement to world and context that are present in
the earliest moments of life (Rose, 2005; Panksepp, 1999).

Loewald emphasizes the musical qualities of maternal sounds that serve as “accentuating
ingredients in a unitary experience” (Loewald, 2000, p.187). He elaborates a key point, with
considerable relevance to the problem of translating sensory experience into language and hence
consciousness. This factor undermines the process implicated in Freud’s conception of repression

22
This is not to say that there is no hermeneutic brought by the listener’s experience and expectation, for the benefit
or detriment of musical openness, nor that musical technique and focus on idiom are irrelevant; quite the contrary.
Culture is inevitable, too, another example of the frontier to be explored, literally and figuratively. The issue is the
status of music qua music, and as image presented and experienced.

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and neurosis: the beginning of language is a differentiation of, rather than repression of or evolution
beyond, the unitary, resonant, rhythmic sound-field which represents the infant’s sensory and
affective experience of the maternal bond (Mitchell, 1995, 188). For Loewald, too, it is not a matter
of translating but of differentiating this sound field, incorporating it into, and then sustaining, more
complex levels of organization. Loewald’s focus on speech and sound reiterates, rather than a
radical split between modes, his sense of a continuity in development which consists of the
differentiation of archaic forms which persist through successive phases, more or less well
integrated,

Like the number archetype among archetypes in Jung’s conception, music is perhaps the only direct
presentation of the ineffable we have available to share. Langer calls music an “unconsummated
symbol” (Langer, 1976, 238), in a definition quite similar to that of Bion’s unsaturated symbol
(Bion, 1963, p.9). Musical forms declare and illuminate, but make no assertions about the emotions.
They do, however, indicate subtle gradations and nuances of feeling that language simply cannot
convey. These are grounded in an archaic endowment of the species for structuring and responding
to the world and our interpersonal connections in this musical way.

For reasons not grounded in any other particular paradigm, our call and response with the world is
encoded in rhythms, tonalities, harmonies, timbres, in cycles and patterns which reach people
irrespective of cultural preparation, though “world music” may sound alien at first, even while it
captivates. The instincts and the physique, the physicality of the organism, are inseparable in
human, dolphin, elephant, parrot, prairie dog. We already know that elephants, parrots, and dolphins
possess awareness of self; parrots, capable of abstract verbal and non-verbal thought, and irony;
prairie dogs create neologisms that spread quickly through the collective; all these are species
dependent upon complex social relationships. These are expressions of instinctual endowments, as
are the timbres, gestures, and vocabularies native and available to each species. Our music, and
perhaps by the same token our most rarified symbolism and language, are the birdsong of the
planet’s arguably most self-aware and mentally complex creature. They are declarative of the
idioms, images, and qualia of our species, the frequency range and tempi fitting our physicality, and
are therefore archetypal. Upon this stratum, both ontological and chthonic, lie such phenomena as

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philosophy, psychology, dreaming, and parapraxis, and the tragedies and complexities they testify
to.

Langer also posits a transpersonal or collective basis for music. While suggesting that the
composer’s intentions and awareness of his personal emotional nuances are essential to the
composition, the infinite potential for structure, melody, harmony, rhythm, and dynamics makes it
possible to discover and convey “utter ideas of human sensibility” (Langer, 1953, p.28). In this, she
suggests an archetypal musical dimension of the collective psyche, to the extent that there is a
collective, emotional constitution to humanity, and a corresponding affinity in and for musical
forms. In the parent-child dyad, we find resonance with Winnicott’s and Bion’s ideas in the
concordance between the “virtual” tension-release pattern of a musical form and the actual tension-
release patterns originating in the earliest interpersonal holding contexts of infancy (Rose, 2005),
where the “utter ideas of human sensibility” (Langer, 1953, p.28) are prepared for expression in life.

The Space-Time of Music

Rycroft pointed out several artists and scientists whose paradigm-changing work was unavailable to
Freud. I suggest that the impact of Einstein and Bohr on the world-mythology available to science,
and Joyce and Picasso on literature and visual art, is matched or exceeded by the revolution in
music represented by jazz artists such as Parker, Davis, and Coltrane. Jazz is unique among Western
music, in its marriage of compositional structure and the presentational immediacy (Langer, 1953)
directly enacted in improvisation.

Music must first of all start with the experience of song, the roots of enchantment, if it is to connect
with the visceral affect of experience, as opposed to its philosophy. Musical consciousness is built
on the rhythm and sonorousness of the uterine soundscape – mother’s heartbeat and breath, and the
sounds of the world which penetrate from without. It then expands into the simple songs, heard in
mother’s tones, which “enchant” and induce expectancy and continuity from turbulence.
Winnicott’s work is crucial to this overall effort in building a psychoanalytic musical model, for he

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pointedly addresses the transitional dimension that is the very essence of music. A simple song – for
instance, a lullaby (Winnicott, 1987) - is an object which takes time to unfold and thus brings
continuity, ritual, anticipation and release, grounding emotional experience in a manner that
supports going-on-being. It binds mother and infant, reassuring each that the ties of love, the shared
matrix of being and the conduit for satisfactions, survive the traumas of absence, passing-away, and
rupture. A song is a transitional object; it is an enchanting conduit of coherence, change, and
resolution which can be called up in memory or in the emerging infantile voice to serve in mother’s
absence; it serves as an aural dream when sung, heard, or imagined, and eases release from the
mode of wakefulness into that of night and dreams.

Symphonic Psyche
It can help to think of the psyche symphonically (Bollas, 2007). With attention to the placement of
instruments and voices with respect to each other, to the conductor, stage, and audience, the
dynamic spatiality of the resonant-threshold concept becomes clearer. The “space” of the orchestra
or ensemble is partly a function of the contiguity and separation of instruments, which define a
space simply by there relative location – this here, that there. Yet there is more to the orchestral
space than the coordinates of its points of origin – its instrumentalists and sections. Music is “poly-
valent” (Mancia, 1993), signifying multiple points of entry and interaction. Not the least of these is
the fact that each musician and instrument, each a contiguous “node” in a network, contributes a
complex sequence of waveforms to the whole. Each player produces his sound from multiple
meeting points – mouth to reed, fingers to keys, hand to stick to drum – those points always opening
onto the vibratory space of the instrumental body and the body of the musician. Each in turn opens
onto the resonant air and floor shared with adjacent players. Each waveform – the tone of this
trombone, that drum, that clarinet - joins the complex of all such waveforms, resonating outward
with different degrees of directionality and at different speeds. This complex waveform itself
defines complex space of a higher order than that defined by the layout of the orchestra. This
waveform space is the fruit of multiple resonating thresholds producing a dynamically shifting
waveform.

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Music involves not only a complex space and unfolding temporal arrangement, but is also an
emergent phenomenon arising from the coordinated action of multiple agencies. The orchestra
follows a conductor who does not himself produce sound, but organizes and synchronizes, having a
holistic view of the pattern in the score, and conducting its emergence into a coherent product of
this complex activity. The jazz or improvisational band follows a leader – either an individual or a
collective consensus – who/which decides which priorities, if any, would be conducive to the
emergence of spontaneous patterns from composed ones. In a seminal work of “intuitive music”,
Aus Den Sieben Tagen, avant garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, an important figure to many
experimental jazz musicians, gave no musical direction but only procedural instructions to the
ensemble. These included: “everyone plays the same tone, then lead the tone where ever your
thoughts lead you, do not leave it, stay with it, always return to the same place”; “live completely
alone for four days without food in complete silence, without much movement sleep as little as
necessary think as little as possible after four days, late at night, without conversation beforehand
play single sounds without thinking which you are playing”. As much as Stockhausen is devoted to
mystical and transcendent concepts, his aim was to manifest the musical image, the music, of states
of consciousness distinguished by suspension of intellect: "I don't want some spiritistic sitting—I
want music! I don't mean something mystical, but rather everything completely direct, from
concrete experience" (Stockhausen, quoted in Ritzel 1970, 15)

Improvisational forms are all, in varying ways, elaborations of an originary source – the composer’s
intentions, the chord progressions of the song, the culture and history of the piece, the tradition and
ritual of the style, a notion about the state of mind/body/soul at the time of creation. These
“originary sources” are elaborated according to organizational principles, some cultural, some
conventional, some invented, determining the customs and structures of music – types of scales and
modes, time signatures, rhythmic patterns, harmonic patterns. Each recapitulates the pulse, breath,
and interpersonal containing relation that ushered us all into the world of rhythm and resonance. We
have points of departure for music, platforms for the infinite variations of improvisation, at every
level of our being. These range from the personal recognition of culturally available tunes, motifs,
and progressions, through the most theoretically sophisticated and formally challenging academic
constructions, down to the preparedness of our cells and musculo-skeletal system to express and
respond to the resonance and rhythm which always pervades our environment. The thinkers who

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speak of the primordial organization of instinct and the inherent structure of phantasy need look no
further than the missing auditory paradigm for evidence of the continuity of experiential structure
afforded us on either side of the impressive caesura of birth, throughout life. The words the analyst
relies upon swim or sink in this water.

Unsaturated Meaning, Emerging in Time

______________________________________________________________________________

There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at. And
always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see
what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we
are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to
do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror. (John Coltrane, 1965, cited by
Schermer, V., All About Jazz, 2007)

John Coltrane’s words tell of his quest for truth through the non-verbal medium of improvisation.
His linkage of love, disciplined openness, and subjective truth resonates with Bion and Winnicott’s
ways of formulating the creation of meaning, and a psyche capable of it, in a performance space for
dreaming and playing. Coltrane’s most ambitious music, notably the suite “A Love Supreme,” also
addresses Rolland’s rejoinder to Freud about religious feeling. That is, Coltrane grounds faith –
another key concern of Bion’s – in a global connection which reconciles differentiations, and which
is itself a religious feeling devoid of ideational content, and thus resists reductive verbal analysis.

Coltrane’s advice to “clean the mirror…to see what we have discovered in its pure state” echoes
Bion’s suspension of memory, understanding, and desire (1970) so as to promote the emergence of
unsaturated symbols. His stance is consistent as well with Jung’s process of individuation through
evolution of the dynamic between ego and Self, and Bion’s transformation in O. Both express the
devotion to the question, missing from much psychology after childhood development, of how and
what we become. Coltrane’s testimony describes the dynamic between the transpersonal act of
giving oneself over to undiscovered possibility; sincere, responsible openness to experience and to
the transitive state between ego and others (an I/Thou stance, to invoke Martin Buber) and the
progressive discovery of – and consolidation of - who one is, who one is becoming. To attempt a
paraphrase of this delicate business: truth is disclosed through a tense dialectical relationship with

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the techniques and conceptual vehicles of truth, and truth of the individual is disclosed through the
tensile dynamics of relationship, experience, character, affect, image and word. Any science of
individual psychology must travel many of the same roads as those traversed by the artists,
musicians, poets, and mystics. The very concepts and techniques that one refines, in the pursuit of
whatever sort of truth, must be mercurial, evanescent and evolutionary at once, able to dissolve or
recede, relinquishing intuition to insight and declaration, rather subjecting it to its continued claims
of ownership and authority.

In both jazz and analysis this mercurial dialectic is an irreducibly transpersonal, intersubjective
phenomenon. The relationship between the members of the Coltrane Quartet, and then again
between them and the audience whose attention sustains another pole of the field can be imagined
as a joint dream-space. In it, the musicians’ audible dreaming is invited and witnessed by an
audience whose rapt absorption nurtures and holds the creative process. In turn, the music induces
and sustains their reverie. This event happens spontaneously, and its two poles of attention—
performance and reception--function simultaneously. The performance is not a prepared lecture
delivered from a committee of four musicians to a receptive audience. The musicians know the
harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic structures thoroughly enough that the thresholds between each
musician, and between the composed and improvised aspects of the music, create a flexible
envelope, extending to envelop an attentive audience and induce, or seduce, their attention. The
audience in turn does not need to know these technical details, but their affect, pulse, and receptive
sensorium “know” on an immediate level what is being presented.

What makes jazz interaction exemplary among musical contexts, in our exploration of a musical
depth psychology, is its encompassing dynamic of openness, spontaneity, and structure. The players
are not simply well-rehearsed and compatible; they have not simply arrived at a consensus
concerning the interpretation of a composer’s notations; they are not just virtuosos. They also
collectively “dream” new structures of affect and idea never before played, which paradoxically
create, maintain and elaborate the musical event’s structure. Moreover, they do so by achieving
ensemble function, their boundaries both growing stronger – so that McCoy Tyner’s thundering and
complex piano supports and challenges Coltrane’s solo – and also finding release. All four members
bespeak a single musical psyche, synthesizing and sustaining a collective dream from turbulences

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spanning the full dynamic range of affect and dissonance. They do not defer to a composed text
conceived by someone else at some earlier time, nor to any particular audience expectations. Any
aesthetic debate regarding the relative merits of classical music and jazz, or between composed and
improvised forms, is another line of discourse; I re-iterate this because the comparison can easily be
read as one concerned with merit and superiority, another competition of elitist hegemonies. Our
jazz example marks the intersection between the emergence of a dreamed and performed event in a
potential space, and the enactment of an underlying, ritual form conceived so that it can be dreamed
into something new. I would argue that no other parallel than this kind, between a fine jazz
improvisation and the analytic encounter as Bion and Winnicott have described it, works with the
same degree of adequacy and richness, whether within musical terms or across the sister arts.

5.j Improvisation, Composition, and Reconciliation

Improvisation, it is a mystery. You can write a book about it, but by the end no one still knows
what it is. When I improvise and I am in good form, I’m like somebody half sleeping… Great
improvisers are like priests; they are thinking only of their god. (Stephane Grapelli, cited in
Nachmanovitch, 1990)

There is something energizing and challenging about being one to one with the audience and
creating a piece of work that has both the freshness of the fleeting moment and – when
everything is working – the structural tautness and symmetry of the living organism. It can be
a remarkable and often moving experience in direct communication…. It concerns how
intuitive music rises within us, how it may be blocked, derailed, or obscured by certain
unavoidable facts of life, and how… we are finally liberated to speak or sing, write or paint,
with our own authentic voice. (Nachmanovitch, 1990)

These citations frame improvisation as a domain in which music intersects with the emotions and
motives of religion and expressive theory. They respond to contact with a source, “their god”
(Grapelli, in Nachmanovitch, 1990) and a muse, where origins and futures are linked, as are
“structure and spontaneity, discipline and freedom,” and where we “fall in love with an instrument
and an art (Nachmanovitch, 1990).” It pays at this point to frame certain parallels of our own
between improvisation and psychological processes.

On one level, the moment of musical creation expresses the analytic encounter and its
transformation of O into thinkable thoughts and a thinker to think them. In its ordinary way it is a
moment of provisional breakthrough akin to the Buddhist experience of satori, kensho, or

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Nirvana—that is, it transparently illustrates the metapsychological principles of Eros and
sublimation which represented Freud’s passage out of the theoretical strictures of neurosis. On
another level, it is a sonic call into the archetypal “psychoid” (Jung, CW8) domain where the
psyche and the physical world interpenetrate. Finally, it exemplifies Winnicott’s play, supplying the
soundtrack to going-on-being and the contours of affect, which are given coherence by the
achievement of continuity-amidst-turbulence. At least two of Freud’s topics come to life within the
framework of such parallels: wishing, and freeing contents. The thread of wish would be one
metaphor for the stream of being that requires a developing psyche capable of swimming in it,
neither passive in its currents nor anchored in the riverbed. In that light, Freud’s focus on freeing
unconscious content finds reconciliation with Bion and Winnicott’s focus on freeing psychic
process. In either way of putting it, we liberate and shepherd the flow by which we give form to
innate possibilities, both by understanding the flow and by addressing that which blocks it.

Improvisation may be understood as a spontaneous and novel act that reconciles intuition, the
impulse to present and represent, with an existing structure or framework. Ordinary speech is
improvisational, taking common grammar and vocabulary as the structure and vehicle to say
something, bringing it from unconscious origin into conscious communication. Free association,
play, and the analyst’s interpretation are no different than improvisation in principle, changing only
the emphasis and context. A patient with a symptom has difficulty uttering something, or making
something conscious from the conflict and entropy of unconscious factors. The analyst helps
establish a space and a relationship conducive to the improvisation of authentic statements useful
for coherent thinking and living. He communicates his interpretations, which are his intuitions of
the patient’s situation filtered through his dream-capacity to structure as-yet-unformulated thoughts,
so as to support the patient’s ability to do his own dreaming, that is, to transform in O rather than be
annihilated by its infinity.

Although the medium of analysis is primarily spoken language, we can make the parallel between
the development of improvisation in speech and music. Music begins with the turbulence of contact
between two or more thresholds. A sound is produced. Given tuning and technique – and no living
membrane is entirely slack – the sound will have an element of tone. If the contact points separate

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rather than lie passively, the sound will propagate. If the contact is not random, but reflects some
structured physical movement and agency, the subsequent tones will assume a rhythm of some sort.
If this agency carries the will to respond and continue, the tone and rhythm will engender itself or
self-organize; or else a faculty belonging to this proto-musician will seek to stop the noise because
it does not want to be seduced into this pattern or its feeling. One accepts or resists being
“enchanted,” sung-into, charmed by song, drawn into the pied piper’s procession. The difference
between the naïve musician and the sophisticated improviser is one of technique and intent. The
intention to allow the music to continue, and the technique to continue and differentiate it, place the
verbal ego in a spectator-participant relationship to an unfolding process that will not end until it is
interrupted or completed. One class of interruption is the pathology-engendering sort that resists
articulation due to a repressed content. Sometimes the interruption occurs because one fears of
being enchanted or seduced out of one’s familiar state – one wishes to remain asleep, or not to
dream at all.

In any variant of analysis, it is difficult for the patient to say certain things, to do anything other
than skim the surface, or reflect the weather of the moment. One can be deadened, damped-down,
without overtones, unable to contact one’s own pulse or pedal point. Or, in psychotic states, the
thread of wish is unreachable or exploded, and words and their referents and attributions are
reduced to shrapnel. Bion’s alpha-function (1962a) is the making of thinkable elements out of raw
turbulences. In describing beta-function and the bizarre object, he compared the uncontextualized
word, a raw “thing,” to a pure tone devoid of enveloping undertones and overtones (Bion, 1992,
p.63). This naked tone, devoid of its harmonic envelope, like an atomic nucleus without its electron
cloud, lacks poly-valence (Mancia, 1993), obscure in its identity as an affective element and thus in
its combinatorial possibilities for the psyche. Unable to harmonize, it can only penetrate or obtrude,
disrupting and irradiating the dream-life.

The space and time of the session are themselves a hall of echoes and inducements to feel, think,
and be23. To match words to feelings is to find the tones, notes, and rhythm of the psyche. One’s
own effort at accommodating to the ritual of analysis will find some kind of expression, through and
against the nature of one’s own psychic medium. Dream life is a cooperative activity of the whole

23
To borrow a phrase from the title of Matte-Blanco’s book.

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psyche-soma, a negotiation at multiple thresholds spanning the whole person and his context. It
encounters both the turbulences of the moment and the traces of thoughts and experiences never
digested before, pushing their way into consciousness as symptoms, forebodings, or intuitions.
Thus, the goal of analysis is, with Bion, to collapse the infinite probabilities of this “O” into
speakable and thinkable thoughts, declaring an account of the truth of the moment rather than
reiterating something heard before. Yet the phrases and patterns heard throughout life cannot be
ignored or jettisoned – the jazz musician has “licks,” collections of phrases which serve either as a
repertoire of substitutes for spontaneity, or as a vocabulary of “selected facts” which can undergo
revision and recontextualization in today’s improvisation. Thus, when saxophonist Dexter Gordon
suddenly quotes Russian classical composer Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances in the midst of a bebop
solo, he may not have planned to do so, but has rather stumbled onto this memory of a musical idea
whose relevance for the present context can only be discovered by dreaming it into the flow of the
moment, citing it then relinquishing it. Something unbidden from the past emerged through
Gordon’s mouth and fingers, and as an improviser, it is incumbent on him to reconcile it with his
own thoughts, much as an expository speaker turns a non-sequitur into an illuminating association
or tangent. In analysis, the “ghosts” of unassimilated thoughts must become, as Loewald states,
“ancestors” (Loewald, 1988), reconciled as if by magic with the personality but on a higher,
contemporary, level of organization (ibid, p. 80-81). It is as though a patient’s ritual, unreconciled
complaint takes root one day in a given context, and now both he and the analyst “get it,” sensing its
place in the fabric of thought and affect where it was previously a loose stitch. This dynamic
plasticity of the psyche, enabling its continuous and progressive re-transcription and
contextualization of past events into forms of greater possibility, is supported by contemporary
neurological research (Solms and Turnbull, 2003; Ansermet and Fairfield, 2007).

We are thus brought once more to the special status of jazz in this sustained comparison. Two rich
volumes, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music (Feder, S., Karmel, R., Pollock, G., et al, 1990)
contain only two mentions of jazz, one of them Kohut’s dismissal of it for its supposed artistic
inferiority (Kohut, in Feder, et al, 1990). Improvisation is barely mentioned, and these otherwise
insightful articles simply do not deal with the in-the-moment musical thought processes laid bare in

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jazz or Indian classical music, for example, instead favoring topics related to classical music and the
compositions of deceased composers.

The dots on a page with which the classical performer must work record decisions made by a
composer long gone. Yet many of the great composers were known for their prowess in giving
improvisational recitals, apart from the hours of improvisation that went into the compositional
process. With the exception of jazz and occasional classical pianist Keith Jarrett’s solo
improvisations, performed in Carnegie Hall and the like worldwide, the playing-life of the
composer is something entirely absent in the classical concert-hall practice of the last century. It
was not always so; anecdotes abound in both verbal and written testimonials from performers and
concert-goers about the brilliant improvisatory lives of the composers. But, in the words of Eric
Dolphy, these were all gone in the air. The explorations of themes carried out by Liszt or Beethoven
are not on record and so might as well have not occurred, except to make us wonder how they
informed the decisions that ended up in the scores we have today. Sadly, the actual life of classical
music is thus misrepresented. Classical musicians experimented and improvised frequently, making
the daily musical life of Beethoven and Liszt more like those of a jazzer than a contemporary
classical musician. Many fully skilled professional musicians cannot, or cannot comfortably, play
notes that are not written on the page or memorized verbatim (Nachmanovitch, 1990), although they
may realize and interpret in a more or less nuanced way – akin to a speaker who can only ever
speak someone else’s script, no matter how beautifully. A close family friend, a first-call player of
every woodwind instrument in every context from big-band to symphonic to commercial jingles,
and the musical voice of Sesame Street characters, recently confided to me that he could never
improvise more than superficially in spite of a long career full of jazz performances – he cited an
excess of early childhood technical study, and a paucity of musical “play.” He learned to artfully
and efficiently, even virtuosically render written parts, but not to declare his own musical thoughts.

An analyst, deeply sensitive to art and aesthetics, once scoffed that I seemed to believe analysis was
“some sort of jazz performance.” The response missed the point: the performance was not about the
piece played for an audience, but rather the dynamic between two people trying to create something

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edifying from their interaction, for the benefit of one and from the wisdom and agility of the other.
The analyst’s job cannot be that of archivist and revivalist, but rather midwife and/or witness to the
present moment in which the patient struggles to find the emergent form of his thoughts and hence
his authenticity. This emergent form, given the space to play, dream, and elaborate, continually
traces the thread of wish through inarticulate memory into the present, following a trajectory that
prefigures the future. While it is clear that the musician-audience and analyst-analysand
relationships are not equivalent, each having a different balance of symmetry/asymmetry, there are
important parallels, not the least of which are the intersubjective attunement; the relaxation and
redrawing of thresholds so that complex resonances can achieve the status of whole musical images;
and the ability in each case for a harmonization of musical and affective contours. The ways in
which the relationships diverge invite further analysis; my purpose at this juncture is to sketch out
their convergence.

Evoking the Lost Object: Music, Magic, Transience, and Permanence

When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone, in the air, you can never capture it again.
(Eric Dolphy, 1964, spoken at end of a final recording session)

Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear
the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence without losing his reverence, though
abyss open under abyss. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2003)

Before moving into a more specifically musical context, I propose to look briefly at another
function, largely beyond the scope of this paper, but consistent with our aim of linking the
presentational immediacy of music with the joint study of affect, temporality, and meaning. This is
the function of mourning. Freud introduced it in “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud, 1917, SE14)
as the need to relinquish the libido cathected in the past object so that it can be redistributed into
present and future endeavors. However, as pointed out by Rose (2004), he modified this
significantly in his 1929 letter to Ludwig Binswanger. There Freud writes of the death of his
daughter and the impossibility of an adequate substitute for the psychic place she occupied.
Moreover, Freud states that “this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love
which we do not want to relinquish” (Quoted in E.L Freud, 1960; letter #239, p.386). Freud again

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acknowledged the reality of the inhabitants of the unconscious, as well as the limits of the economic
model; libido is not simply a currency, interchangeable and quantitative, but is invested in objects
whom love makes permanent. The thread of wish here is a thread binding the whole psychic
structure and its relationships to what Klein would refer to as whole objects (Klein, 1955) loved for
their own sake, rather than as objects of gratification. This thread, this expression of Eros, maintains
the integrity of the psyche as it straddles the past which it cannot and should not relinquish together
with the transitive present which assures our going-on-being (Winnicott, 1971).

Certainly, all the arts have commemorated personal and mythic love. However, the poem and the
song are conventions with special cultural value, as odes, elegies, hymns, and old fashioned love
songs of celebration and heartbreak. There is something about music which more than declaims and
offers tribute to love and its object of love, its hopes, anger, and grief. There are two such functions
which come to psyche: one is the presentational immediacy (Whitehead, 1978) in which musical
form is isomorphic to the contour of our affective life (Langer, 1953), and thus is the best vehicle
for announcing, in body, mind, and soul, the unshakeable presence of love’s affects. Yet it has a
further power, perhaps unique among the arts, of being summoned and extinguished by sheer will
and intention. We “evoke,” give voice to, the transcendent affects so as to “enchant” – to seduce by
song – ourselves, our object of love, and the audience whom we invite into this erotic romance or
protest. The whole of a piece of music, or even a chorus or passage, comes to memorialize whole
sequences of life – not facts or sensory flashes, but events desired, enjoined, lived-through and lost
in time yet preserved in personal myth, invested with passion and the reward of continuity between
then and now. And this music can be called upon by the musician, summoned from the ether in
reverie, by voice, or on the nearest available piano. This evocative act offers the pleasures of
coherence and endurance, but also of the imaginal ability to revive the lost object by enchanting,
playing, dreaming it out of its place in the ether, to remain until one chooses to stop singing. For
example, a song marking a first romantic encounter, decades in the past, may no longer be loved by
today’s subject; but the memory of this song not only brings the full palette of sensory and affective
memory of the treasured event into relief; it also reconnects today’s subject with the younger man
who once adored both the girl and the song. The music itself sets in bold relief the pleasure of
reviving an intense memory which edifies and enriches the present, rather than deferring it; it also

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enriches the subjective experience of reuniting different manifestations of self, a deep-field view of
the subject at various stages of his going-on-being. This richer linking is the family connection
between oneself now and oneself then – a religious experience in the etymological sense that one is
reconnected, with intense affect, to a point of origin in one’s development. Music is thus a tool of
mourning, but not by way of the absorption and redistribution of libido, but by way of the
reconstitution and reconnection of selves otherwise lost to one another in the complex drift of life.
In highlighting and strengthening the “thread of wish” and its anchor points, music brings the
contour of past and dreamt-of affects into the context of the present, where it fertilizes emotional
richness and the insight into one’s own subjective history.

What to Say about the Ineffable

An important part of this discussion is the very limit on what I might attempt to say about music and
psychoanalysis. I have already established the basic importance of suspending the hegemony of
concepts and language. It would be foolish, then, to try to set up a theory of the equivalence of
music, dream, and analysis; or to force the kind of systematic translation between modes that was
both the raison d’être and fatal shortfall of Freud's method. A musical performance is not an
analytic session, nor vice versa. Rather, both are sophisticated and complementary elaborations of
principles expressing the possibilities of self-presentation, representation, and
transformation. Additionally, it is not simply the problem of translation between modes that informs
this caution. It is also the idea, with Monson and Seeger (1977), that the terms “language” and
“music” each have a metonymic relationship, as parts to the whole of representation – language
representing particularity, order, and secondary process, and music representing affect, flow, and
primary process. However, as organizational domains of psychic life, language and music are
neither metonym nor synecdoche. Rather, they form a complex of naturally coexisting and
complementary signifiers and ineffables, whose relationship reflects levels of structure other than
the linguistic. In other words, "language" in vivo is already infused with the properties of music,
until prepared, desiccated, and analyzed, at which point the music falls away. Wittgenstein (1974)
offers the analogy of a fisherman attempting to determine the nature of the life in a lake by means of
a net of a fixed-size mesh. He may be rigorous, but all life forms smaller than the mesh fall away,
yielding a science of limited to objects one was prepared to find. From the linguistic and

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psychoanalytic perspective, the fluid non-verbal world drains away, leaving an abyss mirroring the
gap between signifier and object, with desire and its peregrinations left to be inferred by means of a
set of basic assumptions of fixed size. New nets are expensive. A paradigm built on wayward
signifiers and alienated modes mistakenly attributes its hermeneutic problem to the mind per se;
music helps rectify this, by making explicit and tangible the structure, among other virtues, of
process, flow, and resonance. Our discursive, academic modes come down more on one side, that of
formally discursive language. So this paper compensates that bias, framing discourse about a
discourse that must make room for the non-discursive in order to serve psychology better. What,
then, can be said of music, dream, and analysis that does not fall into the very trap which has either
excluded or explained away music and the aesthetic?

First is the whole range of the ineffable. This domain is no more mystical than the structure of
water, which is not without structure but merely fluid, structured as differently compared to ice or
vapor as stone is to magma or sand - which is to say, that both are phases in the organization of the
same substance. The ineffable, then, is all that flows through the net of language, leaving only
particulars behind; it encompasses archetype, inchoate impulse, and the stream of body-feeling
which words, as markers, do not quite encompass. Both as metaphor and as biological fact, fluidity
and the oceanic permeate us, infusing and surrounding our discrete structures, along with every
membrane and synapse. Cellular organisms evolved to contain the ocean’s properties so that they
might live both within and distinct from the ocean, or separate from it on dry land, carrying its
ocean within it (Carson, 1991). The gestational metaphors of Bion, Winnicott, and Kristeva answer
Freud's question about the centrality of the oceanic and the sonic to the infant, and the adult who
discovers his archaic endowments within himself and his relationships. The acoustic world is there
at the beginning, differentiating into the rhythmic and semantic forms which reach the infant while
he still lives in uterine fluid. Like the fluidity which makes possible the cooperation of discrete
physical structures, the psyche carries the trace of the non-verbal world within it in all the functions
which perpetually depend upon them. This is why, given that music and the auditory are
primordial, our affinities for music emerge and persist throughout life. Music is so pervasive in our
lives, from the beating of our hearts to the varied technologies designed to produce, preserve, and
transmit it, that we cannot underestimate either the extent of Freud's omission or that of the
psychoanalytic disregard and diminution of the non-verbal.

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Second, Addis presents music as the integration of possible states of consciousness. This declares a
key development of Langer's tenets, and similarly dovetails with those of Jung, Bion, Winnicott,
Loewald, and Rycroft. The pervasive presence of music serves as a mirror of the subject's relation
to his own affective life – what can and cannot be integrated into experience. Its alienation may be
seen as mirrored in an over-reliance on reductive explanation, reducing all experience to verbal or
quantitative formulations presumed to execute the reality principle and thereby protecting against
anxiety about one’s own intuition. In this light we may see Freud's rejection of music and reduction
of art as expressions of defensive isolation (Mendelsohn, 2006, personal communication). It
suggests that the manner of becoming conscious is highly determinative of what can and cannot be
integrated into experience. Defensive isolation of the musical robs one of the contents that live in
musical organization. This mirroring relation of music and consciousness, as presented by Addis
(1999), is not the one-to-one relation of an observing subject to the emotion of the moment. Nor is it
the equivalence of a musical element and a thought, feeling, or image. It rather mirrors the temporal
organization – one might say the history and arc of the complexes of affect, image, and idea --
which constitutes the structure of the personality, the continuity of experience, and the evolution of
personality as articulated by Bion’s transformation in O (1965) and Jung’s individuation (CW6). It
expresses the archaic organization of primary process consistent with Jung's complexes, built
around a lattice of archetypal structure; Loewald's archaic id which is itself an ego (2000); and
Freud's nuclei of crystallization as the attractors of repressed instinct away from consciousness
(1926, SE20). All these constructs address how distinct subjective qualities are built up into tensile
relationships which determine the possibility of interplay with each other, and with respect to a
threshold of consciousness. Extrapolating from Addis’s model, we might say that music’s
transparency and immediacy both mirror the dynamic organization of the affects and lift the veil
between conscious and unconscious, such that the resolution of tension at their shifting threshold
becomes appreciable to consciousness as audible structure – theme, rhythm, mode, tonality,
polyphony, etc. This audibility is not mitigated by repression, as a retaining barrier between
conscious and unconscious, but by the finer dynamic gradations and temporal evanescence by
which music mirrors the nuance of affect and its mercuriality, its perpetual recontextualization and
transition into something else. Dreaming, in Hartmann’s (1995) terms, is the contextualization of
affect, a marriage and synthesis at boundaries between zones of consciousness. One might say that

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the crystallization of affect and its images, permitting limited or no re-contextualization, is akin to
Bion’s patient who cannot dream and thus cannot wake up. The archetypal, implicit, and immanent
can be witnessed alongside, or the light of, the emergent – perhaps in no better context than
improvisational music. In such terms, perhaps, we can frame the most direct response to Rycroft’s
cardinal appeal for a psychoanalysis founded on auditory rather than visual and linguistic principles,
one in which the harmonizing of multiple themes, streams, and affective and temporal values is
precisely that dream-life at the many-chambered heart of our psychoanalytic weltanschauung.

Jazz and the Evolution from Saturation to Openness

Music…provides…the most natural solvent of artificial boundaries between the self and
others (Zuckerkandl, 1973)

Coltrane was moving out of jazz into something else. And certainly Miles Davis was doing
the same thing. (Interview, Jan Garbarek)

The focus upon jazz serves a set of specific and important purposes: as an illustration of the
interplay of underlying form and spontaneous, emergent presentation; as a field of non-verbal
discourse and interplay, whose development challenges and evades the authority of the
psychoanalytic canon; as a vivid demonstration of a kind of dreaming and playing which shows the
tension between consciousness and the unconscious in ways both novel to psychoanalysis and
highly consistent with many of its best, most radical notions, such as those of Bion and Winnicott;
and as a demonstration of the fertility of the non-verbal dimension of mind at the boundaries
between sensory domains and representational, interpersonal life.

In what follows, my brief presentation of musical examples is not meant to be either psychoanalytic
or musicological. The former would risk the spurious translation of music into the verbal terms of
psychoanalysis; the latter is beyond my scope as an amateur jazz musician and unsuited to my focus
in any case. Rather, in the Hermetic spirit, I prefer to address certain parallels between the
phenomena and modes of jazz, and essential features of the psychoanalytic process.

Jazz has its roots in the confluence of several musical traditions – West African rhythms and call-

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and-response; the work songs of African slaves; European harmonies; British and American folk
tunes, spirituals and religious hymns; and North American popular songs (Cooke, 1999). Black
musicians studied western classical instruments and incorporated a variety of these traditions into
music intended increasingly for the entertainment of a paying crowd, for dancing, or for
background. As the idiom grew into the swing era, it built upon a tension between folk forms,
popular and show tunes, and the increased space for exchanges among improvised statements by
soloists within the ensemble. The harmonic and rhythmic structures stayed fairly simple and
regular, adhering to the written melody and chord structure, with modest provision for spontaneity
and variation. Within these structures, musicians of extraordinary fluency and imagination – such as
Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, and Louis Armstrong, among others - created both
epochal ensemble performances and brief improvisational variations within tight compositional
structures (Gioia, 1997).

Swing was followed in a manner “more evolutionary than revolutionary” (Martin, 2007) by bebop.
The tempi, chord structures, adherence to written melody, and entertainment-focus of prior jazz
forms were experienced as limiting to players wishing to explore further creative and technical
possibilities (Berendt, 1975). Bebop preserved but extended the swing rhythms which lend
characteristic tension and dynamism to jazz. Most dramatic was the loosening adherence to the
melodies of the popular songs still used as the framework of Bebop, and the multiplication,
extension, and substitution of their chords. Musicians no longer interested in simply rendering songs
as written but rather exploring them creatively would substitute new chords for the composed ones,
either slightly or dramatically altered. They would also multiply the number and pace of chord
changes, adding harmonic variations beneath the melody line, adding further complexity and
improvisational challenge to already-accelerated tempi. While still referring to the melody of the
original song, the soloist acquired an expanded palette of notes to choose from for his
improvisations, as well as the technical challenge to “speak” fluently throughout rapidly changing
contexts at fast tempos. The accompanying musicians became equally involved in improvising any
number of variations to stimulate and challenge the solo voice. The modified chords add ambiguity
and “polyvalence” (Mancia, 1993) so that new sequences of notes can range further from the tonal
center, spiced with increasing, tension-building dissonance, and still sound appropriate rather than

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arbitrary.

At the same time, while maintaining the swing and steady pulse of the music, the “rhythm section”
is also adding complexity and surprise by shifting accents and responding to, extending, or
recapitulating the phrasing of the soloist and others. The basic verse-chorus-verse structure, key
signature, and numerous conventions concerning the order and duration of solos, as well as
signaling transitions and climaxes, maintains a ritual frame of reference. This allows musicians of
sufficient technique and familiarity with the genre and a large common repertoire to play together
spontaneously. All of this is achieved in Bebop at enhanced tempi and with a sense of artful
acrobatics, bringing to mind the musical equivalent of the technical and aesthetic challenge of
Kristeva’s “impossible demarcation” (1982) and Winnicott’s “knife-edge” (1986b). Bebop
represented a movement from familiar and comfortable forms to a skirting of the abyss at which
turbulences that could plunge the music into chaos are instead spontaneously resolved by the co-
operation of a seemingly omnipotent group who command the space, boundaries, and medium of
jazz convention. This coherence depends upon a sense of rhythm both infinitely flexible and utterly
secure.

By the same token, the possibility of such play falls apart when pulse and breath become unsteady
and do not find their way back, like the acrobat who stumbles and becomes once again merely an
object of gravity, not its juggler – a point which also holds fundamental clinical importance
(Knoblauch, 2001, 2005). That possibility placed greater demands on the drummer and bassist, who
previously to Bebop simply provided steady and repetitive anchor points. They now had to be equal
to the soloist whose explorations in musical” O” depended upon synchrony between the internal
time coherence, such as “drummer in his pocket” belonging to Charlie Parker, according to Max
Roach (Martin, 1997), and the actual rhythm section. “Swing” and spontaneity collapse if the flow
of intuition and elasticity give way, a fact which highlights the risk to creativity posed by excess of
rigidity, authority, or impingement. Another knife-edge becomes evident here, much as it does in
analysis: the partners enter into a tensile relationship of differences and complementarity, tasked to
co-create from their mutual idiosyncrasy, attentiveness, and ego-strength the space in which this

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authentic play can be achieved.

We might say that the “drummer in the pocket” in psychoanalytic contexts is an ego or
superordinate subject who enables the “speaking” soloist to explore all combinatorial possibilities
of rhythm, harmony, and melody without losing the “thread of wish” and its living tides, the song
forms that make up the human repertoire, and the unifying pulse. The soloist benefits from a good
rhythm section; but a great soloist has an infallible “groove” that rhythmically binds his
explorations, no matter how complex or asymmetrical. In analysis, by way of analogy, the analyst is
a rhythm section, who respects the fact that the speaking subject/soloist has his own drummer, who
is not to be disturbed but rather supported in his peregrinations and rhythmic variations. The analyst
models for the patient the intrapsychic functions capable of emerging on their own terms; the
professional rhythm section players know that their attuned accompaniment is the necessary
complement for the soloist, who has an intact internal sense of time and plays over the bar line,
without undermining the intersubjective, polyphonic whole of an ensemble and its communal song .

Swing posed certain limitations and frustrations to those who “discovered” Bebop, most notably
Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. In turn, Bebop’s repetitive cycles of determinative structures –
complex chord progressions played quickly in pre-determined cycles - inspired musicians steeped in
Bebop, such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane, to make evolutionary modifications. It is these next
modifications, toward a style generically called “modal,” which demonstrate the movement toward
“unsaturated” forms which parallel the analytic aesthetics of Bion.

In 1959, the Miles Davis Sextet recorded “Kind of Blue.” This recording clearly marks a watershed
in several ways. Twentieth-century classical musicians, such as Webern and Schoenberg, had
already experimented with compositional techniques based on sequences of notes bearing no
relation to any preordained key, but rather organized in relation to one another, in which all tones
were of equal value. Ornette Coleman in the same year, 1959, developed a “harmolodic” theory of
group improvisation, in which all instruments in the band were given equal status, melodies

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disregarded key signatures, and all players were invited to choose notes based on their intuitive
sense of pitch and time rather than their expert adherence to chord structure. In this way, the music
followed no conceptual authority other than the sense of correctness felt by the players, who were
presumed to know their fundamentals well enough to dispense with them. “Kind of Blue,” however,
followed a very different aesthetic sense, and a compositional and improvisational path attributed
by Miles to the parts written for him by Gil Evans for the recording of Porgy and Bess a few years
before:

He [Evans] wrote only a scale for me. No chords. And that gives you a lot more freedom and
space to hear things. When you go this way…away from the conventional string of
chords….you can go on forever…you can do more with the melody line. There will be fewer
chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them. (Cited in Khan, 2000)

Davis goes on to point out that classical composers have written that way for some time, but that
jazz musicians seldom have. The opportunity for jazz was different, though. The classical
dodecaphonic technique and aesthetic were conceptual experiments for the composer, and rejected
any affinity with traditional melody, the sensuous bodily connection to the acoustics of the music,
or anything associated with its Romantic antecedents. The focus of tone-row technique was
methodological rigor, with limited range of freedom for improvisation or the individual voice of the
musician. With jazz, however, it meant a different approach to freedom, through a new, simpler,
and more direct approach to a melody no longer bound to the tricky labyrinth of complex chord
changes. This approach combined simplicity with an open field for the soloist, one in which each
note of the scale forming the skeleton of the piece was itself a central tone in the various “modes” of
that scale, and hence an entirely new window onto potential note and phrase choices for the
improviser. The utterances of the soloist were no longer wedded to the tyranny of complex chord
changes and the gymnastics of their execution. He was now free to choose from a nearly infinite
palette based on the possible connections to be made with each note of the scale.

Other jazz composers would dispense with further musical convention, in the effort to achieve even
greater freedom. Whether they succeeded is another matter entirely. “Kind of Blue” and its
aesthetic, and subsequent examples such as “A Love Supreme” by the John Coltrane Quartet,
illustrate a particular marriage of disciplined form and affective, aesthetic freedom which serves as

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a musical cousin of Bion and Winnicott’s analytic aesthetics.

Where Davis eschewed shows of technique and played in an emotionally nuanced and
thoughtfully modulated style, Coltrane was known for piercingly expressive solos, asymmetrical
in form and incorporating cascading torrents of notes known for a time as “sheets of sound.”
Coltrane sought to create the illusion of masses of tones and chords emanating from the
saxophone’s single note lines. After participating in “Kind of Blue,” Coltrane began to eschew
complicated compositions, like Davis aiming instead for compositions based on only a few
scales, but which left unlimited room for harmonic and rhythmic exploration. His way with this
unsaturated approach was ecstatic and Dionysian, spanning a broad dynamic range and
expressing extremes of tender, ecstatic, and violent emotion. One of his recordings prior to “A
Love Supreme,” made two years after “Kind of Blue,” adapted “My Favorite Things” for group
improvisation, a touchstone until the end of his life. This treatment became a study in ambiguity,
marrying nuance and intensity. Eliminating most of the composition’s chords, he turned this
cheerful song into a platform for extended improvisation. He begins with the familiar melody,
but played over only shifting voicings of the E minor and E major chords. The E-tone formed a
pedal point and a central mode, an underlying tonality running like a drone throughout the stream
of theme and improvisation - a persistent line of reference for divergence and reconciliation. This
persistent thread moved in and out of harmony the further the explorations went, yet bound the
far-ranging whole to a common center. The rhythm of the piece was the uncommon one, in
modern jazz, of 6/8, anchored by drummer Elvin Jones so as to maintain the comfortable feel of
a fast waltz. Yet it was divided by constantly shifting accents and complex polyrhythms which
strained against the hypnotic pulse always tangible beneath the rhythmic torrents. The effect is
that of an ecstatic tension, neither cacophonous nor ever comfortably resolved – something
simultaneously virtuosic, intense, meditative, and deeply affecting. The effect, common to late
Coltrane works, is that of a profound force swelling, incandescing, and retreating within an
infinitely elastic container, yielding from its basic musical elements a kaleidoscope of imagery
and musical idea.

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Three years later Coltrane and his quartet recorded “A Love Supreme.” It is his non-
denominational, ideationally dogma-free hymn of thanks to the creative principle in four
movements, titled Acknowledgment, Resolution, Pursuance, and Psalm. Its initial four-note
phrase is first declaimed by the bass over a wash of cymbal and bell-like piano notes, as the
cymbals cohere into a highly syncopated yet relaxed drum part. The saxophone enters, hinting at
the signature phrase, moving into flourishes and then referring back to that iconic phrase. With
the drums growing polyrhythmic and the piano circling around a pedal tone, Coltrane begins to
play a four-note extension of the main theme, a minor third and then a fourth above the tonic; he
then runs through it in a succession of modes, traversing the whole modal expanse of the piece’s
central tone. It is briefly chanted by voice, then taken up by Jimmy Garrison’s bass, which
repeats and varies it, then releases its tension. There is a moment of repose before Coltrane offers
yet a further signature phrase of greater variation, improvising on it briefly before relinquishing
it to the piano of McCoy Tyner. Tyner plays a solo consisting of syncopated chords, rich in
suspended fourths that are built upon, and hint at, but never resolve into the central tonality of
the piece. The pedal point tone, one might say the central affective value and image, remains on
the periphery of consciousness, but is carried and contrasted throughout a shifting and
unpredictable series of harmonic extensions. This gives the effect of a pattern being rewoven in
an infinite and unresolved forward movement (Lee Underwood, personal communication),
disappearing briefly in a tumult of ambiguous tonality and re-emerging as a moon from behind a
moving cloudscape. Nothing is “reduced” into an artificial resolution or obvious endpoint, which
might let the listener know where moon, cloud, and ground “really” are in relation to one
another. The transformations are neither schematic cyclic patterns ending in some conventional
manner, nor affectively wrought distortions brought back into order by an authoritative voice,
mechanism, or technique. They move through their phases, and pass away.

I recommend that the reader attempt a start-to-finish audition of this piece, less than 35 minutes, in
order to experience its effect. It is significant that, along with “Kind of Blue,” it is listed in popular
polls of music lovers – not jazz lovers, but a general audience – as among the “greatest” records of
the twentieth century, and that both are touchstones and paradigmatic pieces for the next forty years
of sophisticated jazz and progressively-oriented rock musicians. Its way of introducing what can

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superficially be called “theme and variation” was unprecedented. It is neither a “free improvisation”
of a pot-luck of players blowing freely, nor is it composed according to any conventional jazz or
classical form. It is a group exploration along simple, shared guidelines, inviting articulate speakers
to give voice to the fullest possible range of affect and “acoustic image” (Jung, CW9i; Kugler,
1983). Foundational sound values and tone relationships are thrown into the unfettered tides of
affect, into the O not simply of the individual player but of the improvising ensemble acting as a
single, agile ego, to be endowed with meaning and symbolic value. It is a group free-association in
which archetypal sonic structures are explored in a transparent manner analogous to the analysand
caught up in a moment of synchrony, clarity, and fluency. Intuitions of O are given acoustic form
resonant with numinous affect. This occurs by virtue of a group participation mystique (Levi-Bruhl,
1928; Jung, CW9i) which at the same time issues statements of extraordinary consciousness and
differentiation. They are not, except for the ritual three-and-four-note phrases, playing anything
previously played. Nor are they relying on their ability to deconstruct and comment on chord
progressions. Rather, they are pushing the limits of their shared vocabulary to contribute, in each
performance, to an act of truth both unique and utterly authentic to the players whose intuitions may
be said to be, in those moments, the dreaming of one master ego with eight arms and four or more
distinct voices at its disposal, coalescing into one. “A Love Supreme” is thus an example of the
extension of boundaries into an intersubjective field, a musical third akin to Ogden’s analytic third,
whose collective dreaming is rendered audible to the dreamer(s) who dream the dream, and the
dreamer(s) who observe the dream (Grotstein, 2000).

Further Thoughts: Polyphony, Dreamwork, and Presentational Immediacy

_____________________________________________________________________________

The complex of functions expressed in polyphony, polyrhythm, and the harmonic palette of many
voices sounding together offer a transparent view into the condensation, displacement, and
symbolization of Freud’s dreamwork (Addis, 1993), as well as alternatives to them. The
condensation of associative threads, and the displacement into substitutes, in Freudian dreamwork
are hallmarks of the boundary between conscious and unconscious. However, in the presentational
immediacy of music these complex structures can be experienced directly, both in their composite
form as a vertical mass of stratified tones moving horizontally in and out of unity, and as the distinct

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and complementary voices constituting these strata. The latter are the literal instrumental voices and
their patterns, as well as the harmonic richness of overtones interpenetrating with their neighbors.

Classical music has been a favored context for illustrating this principle, as its scores are schematic
representations of the composition of musical elements, including the acoustic identities of solo
instruments and whole orchestras into complete “sym-phonic” works. Yet the psychoanalytic
literature’s paucity of reference to the immediacy of jazz and its space for group and individual
variation makes it difficult to appreciate the relatively unprogrammed musical window opened by
jazz onto the present, gestural moment of thinking, feeling, and dreaming, as opposed to that of
composition and its interpretation.

“Kind of Blue” and “A Love Supreme,” one muted, vulnerable, and spare, the other tumultuous and
dynamically far-ranging, are chosen for their attenuation of the composed elements to a bare but
essential minimum. Spontaneous voices articulate not simply the dialectical tension between
freedom and structure, but also the condensation and displacement of improvised voices which
simultaneously coalesce and precipitate out of the musical whole in a manner transparent to the
listener. The peregrinations around the tonal center of the piece, the blue or flatted notes, the
improvised lines which remain at a tonal remove from the melody while simultaneously implying
them, as a subliminally perceptible subtext, the rhythmic suspensions and emphases, are all explicit,
audible elements of the routes taken in creating musical meaning, their colors, topographies, and
emotional scintillae available to the listening ear. This process demonstrates implicit structure
occurring in vivo, in the act of conception, rather than through the rehearsed rendition of a prepared
text.

It is a jazz convention that in the classic “rhythm section,” piano, bass, and drums outline the
harmonic structure of the tune, with a steady pulse and unpredictable rhythmic accents, as
accompaniment to the improvising soloist. In these representative works, central themes are stated
by each instrument, not as whole song forms but as structural and affective features, leitmotifs, and

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points of departure. It is remarkable that throughout much of these performances, nothing composed
is present except the scalar context, and sometimes a single melody, akin to a koan or slogan of
ambiguous intent. All voices are immediate associations to the central thematic “ideas” and their
essential scalar reference points, or to the other musicians’ associations to the now-implicit theme, a
discussion of ideas about an idea no longer directly evident. Yet the listener may be surprised to
find that he still recognizes that he is listening to the same piece, undergoing reconceptualization
and development and still retaining its identity. Like the musicians themselves, the listener stands
within the spectral arc of the unfolding thought process. The drummer swings and anchors the
rhythm, but is playing tuned drums and resonant cymbals on which he can divide the beat into a
limitless range of accents, counter-rhythms, and poly-rhythms, using his judgment as to how best to
serve to musical whole and the soloist of the moment. The bassist, “walking,” accentuates the pulse
of the piece while choosing notes that both anchor this harmonic identity and introduce the
ambiguity that spurs the dissolution of a previous idea and the anticipation of the next. However,
the bassist’s traditional role, the provision of pulse and harmonic reference, like the corresponding
functions of the other players, is de-emphasized as a prescribed role in this era of jazz. In particular,
among such highly disparate groups as the Bill Evans Trio (Evans was the pianist in much of “Kind
of Blue” and a proponent of this aesthetic) and the more dissonant and unconventional Ornette
Coleman groups of the same time period, all instrumental voices became equal participants in group
improvisation. The spread and throb of the bass, and the wash and penetrating sheen of the cymbals,
create a sonic envelope which amounts to an affectively and ambiently rich, tactile holding
environment. The bass is not a function, but an entity with a voice, as is the drums. They are
instruments of content too, spanning a range of primary and secondary process. They are vehicles of
idea and coherent image, whose repression is lifted in the interest of broadening and deepening the
range of musical consciousness across their ideational modes. Once the listener has learned to
relinquish reliance upon familiar melodic lines played by the dominant in a hierarchy of
instruments, he learns to sense the holistic, aesthetic identity of the piece, and a meaning carried in
different voices and ranges. How does a musically uneducated listener know she is listening to A
Love Supreme at those moments when the signature phrase is not being uttered? Apocryphally, how
did I always know, as a four and five year old, whether the music on the phonograph was Mozart,
Beethoven, or Brahms? It must have had something to do with the human capacity to express and to
discern qualities of feeling and meaning in song, in a kind of speech not always recognized as such

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except by those who simply speak it and listen in turn.

Polyphony as Creative Splitting

The “creative splitting” (Bion, 1977) of which Bion writes is evident in the solo jazz performer’s
ability to synthesize the voices of several subjects channeled through individual fingers, limbs, and
lips. This is the skill of creating a complex of voices out of the raw turbulence of affect registered as
contact of body against strings, reeds, or membranes. The guitarist and pianist Ralph Towner, who
combines classical technique and jazz improvisation into an especially developed and idiomatic
voice, has stated that his goal on nylon-string guitar is to achieve the interplay and independence of
the whole Bill Evans Trio with his own fingers. The plasticity of boundaries in improvised music
allows affect and idea to flow freely but coherently between the agencies of an ensemble, regardless
of whether these agencies are separate musicians or separate aspects of the technical endowment of
a single player. The fingers, feet, breath, pulse, and sonorous oral cavities (Lecourt, in Anzieu,
1990) of the players; the several voices contributed by each; the differences and dissonances
between the sonic qualities of each; all of these are among the multiple elements of theme, rhythm,
and mode referred to by Rycroft as the materials requiring integration in a musically conscious
psychoanalysis.

Mythic, Archetypal, Universal

In previous chapters, I explored the relative positions, tensions, and points of convergence between
Freud and Jung on the subject of the relation between underlying structure and psychic contents.
This is a necessary tangent, and though some of it lies outside the scope of this paper, the relation
between the archetype and its instantiation, and of the relationship between any underlying form
and its emergence into subjective life, is relevant to the question of the universality and
applicability of any sort of musical model. By comparison, there is far more written, with more
visibility in academic and popular literature, about the special relation of language structure to the
structure and qualities of psychological life.

However, to return to points raised at the very beginning, this project aims, among other objectives,
at illustrating the values of music as a dimension of human subjectivity, and as a neglected

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hermeneutic for building theory about human subjectivity. This cannot be achieved without
approaching music from the same angles as language. What are the structural and functional
dimensions of music as a psychological dimension? To what extent are grammar, syntax,
semantics, semiotics, and aesthetics universal, and which elements? How are the fabric and
elements of music constructed such that meaning, in the broad and particular senses, is encoded and
communicated? What is the relationship between the biological and the cultural in images of any
modality?

Certainly these cannot all be answered here. But the relevance of these questions can be conveyed.
We have already given “myth” a new context, extending it beyond its familiar connotation of an
instructive symbolic fiction encoding cultural meaning, to encompass, as a verb, the psychological
function of ushering intuition into coherent form; the giving of thinkable structure to intuition and
its precursor conditions. A bit of reductiveness is in order. After all, Bion refers to fundamental
psychic elements as well as geometry. Jung, too, in that most misunderstood concept of the
archetype, postulates nothing more mystical than the categories of apprehension based in the
elemental structures of the body which in turn express the most stable, species-specific instructions
of the genome. The archetypal structure of mind is the assignation of a template to psychic activity
(image) in much the same way embryology “assigns” the shapes of body parts and the gestational
order in which they manifest. Bion, too, arrived at this notion in his speculations that mental
capacities may bud off the differentiating soma the way auditory and optic pits do, and with them,
their particular somatosensory sensitivities. Even the archetype as radically revised from the
Jungian by Hillman (1972, 1989) maintains and emphasizes the anchoring of psychology in image.
Again, to raise a provocative but necessary point, Freud’s focus on the erotogenic zones and the
infant’s polymorphous perverse nature may have itself been an embryonic effort to describe,
through the crude mesh of the sexual theory, the phylogenesis of a matrix for potential
psychological forms, encompassing cognition, image, feeling tone, and behavior, arising into
particularity at each somatosensory threshold. Freud wrote of the primally repressed as arising in
response to that which constitutes a dilemma for the species; in discussing Jung and Bion, we may
substitute sensitivity and potentiality for dilemma, expressing and propagating a necessary and very
different epistemology from that of Freud’s, one in which image and myth declare the truth of the
individual by means of the repertoire available to the species. This is a repertoire that includes

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repression as a micro-economic principle within a much broader structural dynamic, one in which
much of the imagistic dimension of life declares very different aims, forces, and processes.

When reading Jung on the categorical nature of the archetype, and Bion on the axiomatic
psychological function of myth, it is tempting to interpret these in an absolute or reductive sense.
However, neither archetype nor myth, in this context, are to be construed as laws, nor as any
particular finite set of potentialities, of any particular size. We have already seen how the concept
of the archetype has been corrupted by the basic error of confusing it with the archetypal image, and
then treating the individual instance of an evocative image as an odd sort of closed-end symbol,
having a fixed, conventional meaning. Without venturing into irrelevant areas of mathematics, it is
valuable to treat the archetype and the axiomatic myth as both open-ended templates organizing an
indefinite, even infinite range of potential human experience, and as Jung’s and Bion’s own
rhetorical, hermeneutic linchpins, equivalent to Freud’s self-declared “myths magnificent in their
indefiniteness” (SE15, 1916). The point is not to identify which myths or images are “archetypal”
or axiomatic – though this is a fruitful pursuit in other contexts – but to open-mindedly approach the
daunting question of how these concepts anchor theoretical approaches that dramatically expand the
ability and set of topics that depth psychology can make sense of. Oedipus, in Freud’s originally
sense, is secure in its anchoring role; the Sphinx, the oracle, the characters of whole pantheons,
Aesop’s fables, etc, contain both examples and embodiments of actual human endeavors – case
examples, one might say - but they are also fingers pointing at the moon, indicating what else
might be manifest if we do not foreclose on meaning too quickly. The triangle has three sides; the
variety and potential triangulations is infinite.

Bringing this magnificent indefiniteness back to music, things become clearer. Music presents the
contour of affect; affect is the subjective impact of the presentation and apprehension of image;
image is cross-modal, encompassing the forms pertinent to each domain of the human sensorium.
Jung wrote of the archetype of number, never seeming to realize that in the rhythms, scales, modes,
and infinite proportions of acoustic physics lay a manifest and easily accessible – transparent to
consciousness and readily summoned - palette for an infinity of musical images.

What exactly makes this “archetypal”? If we treat the archetypal concept not as the particular

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manifest musical utterance, akin to the manifest layer of the dream, but as the capacity, the
potentiality to manifest O, then the exemplary nature of a particular approach to jazz, among other
possible exemplars, becomes clear. The compositional and cultural mandates – the song referent,
the scale, the physical and temporal organization - are stripped to a necessary functional minimum.
Players now improvise together based upon as little as a basic agreement about attitude, or musical
elements and sequences; or as much as a complex yet elastic score to be re-ordered at the whim of a
conductor or the soloist at the moment. Even the seemingly arbitrary change of meter, bleat of
trumpet or stabbing piano interjection, or discontinuous leap to another tone in a scale, or element
or section of a score, fall within the horizon of this shared musical subjectivity. Musical
consciousness, across the boundary between one person and another, is not discontinuous or
deconstructed, but has now bridged voids and abysses, the contour of the bridges joining and further
synthesizing the contour of this meta-affective construct. It holds together because the categories of
musical cognition – still rooted in the contour of affect expressed in acoustic image – have not been
breached. They have been manifested by musicians who may share nothing whatsoever besides the
phylogenetic propensity and learned skill to manifest affect in sonic image, and the cultural,
consensual decision to suspend convention and intention. They may have taken the same bus to
the session, had lunch together, or met in a Norwegian studio for the first time after disembarked
from flights from the USA, India, and Brazil, but the essential musical elements - the purely
human, the conceptual, the idiomatic and idiosyncratic (for these are the spontaneous gestures of
individuals), the empathic – are tensile silk which they spin into bridges between distal starting
points. That which is not a reiteration of a cultural truism or habit, and is not merely accidental
(though accident may form the basis of sublime expression), may qualify as archetypal, or if you
prefer, musical myth-making. Freed of the tyranny of memory, understanding, and desire, they
manifest new combinatorial possibilities of the axioms of human subjectivity in new emergent
forms, channeled through skilled extremities and implements. Since this is not an expression of
mathematics per se, but rather an aesthetic grounded in the number archetype, its pivotal criteria are
beauty, authenticity, even “swing”, in its most esoteric and indefinite circular sense as that without
which it don’t mean a thing.

The symphony, as the exemplar of classical, notated music, similarly partakes of the universe of
human possibility – the particular dynamics, the thematic developments and resolutions, the sheer

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latticework of a single melodic line are not arbitrary. They tap into something that can move and be
grasped by most people who allow themselves to be receptive. Musical creation and receptivity are
dreamlike, in the sense, besides taste, conventional expectations, and/or sensory impediments, that
attitude and a conducive fluidity of consciousness are the difference between experiencing the
affective resonance of a given piece of music, or being annoyed or deaf to it. But in classical music,
we hear the manifestation of a primary creative act belonging to a past time, which itself is musical
imagination notated and codified for later manifestation. The act of imagination was dreamt in one
person’s private experience, inviting a future very different interpretive form of art in the hands of
conductor, ensemble, and soloists. But in the improvisational musics, including the ritualized yet
complex and indeterminate Indian classical music, which has cross-fertilized with jazz over the
course of the last few decades, the dreaming is both transpersonal and audible, in the moment of its
conception. And, like the dream that presents the potential – archetypal - shapes of the mind qua
mind, through the physiognomy and idiomatic image-repertoire of the dreamer, the music of the
improvisational ensemble is a conduit for the presentation, among a scattering of familiar reference
points, of transpersonal affect-in-image, things never before uttered, rooted in things little changing
beneath the floor of culture.

There is vast variation between western and eastern classical music, between jazz, symphony, and
raga. Their affinities, and the responsiveness of people of all cultures to each others’ musics denotes
the breadth, depth, and indeterminacy of the musical archetypal world. The responsiveness is
dramatic. Another archetypal, O-conducive element of music is its capacity to induce numinous
affect, dramatic changes in consciousness facilitating therapeutic, edifying, or purely pleasurable
varieties of states. Different types and styles induce different states: the power of the Chopin
“Funeral March” to induce mournful, resolute solemnity is not, I conjecture, the result of cultural
conditioning; Kind of Blue and Ravel’s Bolero are among the most popular musical aphrodisiacs of
the last century, and this is not likely to wane. The Ode to Joy is not so simply because Beethoven
said so, and who are we to question? These are affectively, physiologically affecting and effective
constructions of tones, intervals, and rhythms – expressions of the interface between the physical,
biological, and cultural worlds, the patterned, timbral vibrations of the musical artist, drawn through
the higher-order systems of the psyche-soma, into consciousness and culture. Whether we buy into
the formal construct of the archetype, or Bion’s O and axiomatic myth, these are powerful and

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indispensible hermeneutic devices for integrating the many facets of the symbolic, aesthetic holism
of the psyche. Their range is only emphasized by their reach into an unintended musical dimension
of life and theory.

Music and the Symbolic

Psychoanalysis has always spoken of the symbol, and from Klein forward, the symbol or the
word have been where the object is no more, or where it will return. But it is not the object, per
se, which calls for a symbol; it is the affect, the charge threatening to overflow the holding
capacity of the psyche. This charge is not unitary or particulate, but is a complex waveform, an
event with resonance, precursors, and an aftermath, and it takes a powerful discrete symbol to
meaning-fully bind a whole living episode. What language and visual image offer in manifest
particularity, they lose of contour, depth, time, and quality. Living meaning is the contour of the
envelope defined by particular meanings, the harmonic tension between its co-existent values,
and its temporal emergence, development, and falling away. To use a more familiar Kleinian
example, it is not the breast that is symbolized, but rather, in myth, binding the dynamics of
passion and sense, the dynamics of breast experience, propagating within the mental space of its
anticipation, ecstasy, and devastation. This is a dimensional construct, as Bion teaches us, and it
is no longer a stretch to say that music captures and animates its contours uniquely. The creation
and experience of music rest on the ability to establish the rhythmic and harmonic contour of
affect from turbulences, tamed into notes and beats. This is a synthetic achievement, with
striking analogy in the analytic experience and interaction, as explored by Knoblauch, whose
work will be discussed in the next chapter. Knoblauch’s work makes good use of the work of
Bucci (1997) on the subsymbolic, with respect to the sensitive at-tunement to the communicative
elements of subjectivity, which constitute the impacts, meanings, and inter/transpersonal power
of the analytic encounter. We find that attention to the music of interaction more fully, and with
enhanced nuance, conveys the events of analytic experience than the verbal analysis of so-called
mental contents. Binocular sensitivity to both provides a formidable tool-kit for the analyst and
the analysand, whether in the consulting room or in the passage of ordinary living.

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A Few Words on Idiom
Musical forms, art forms, fictive forms will change and on occasion a new form for these
types of thinking will evolve and change the range of thought possibility and of
unconscious creativity. Each of these differing forms arrives representationally in
consciousness, but each individual at differing points is "guided" or "determined" by those
unconscious processes of thought peculiar to the form. (Bollas, 2002).

Idiom: via late Latin from Greek idiōma ‘private property, peculiar phraseology,’ from
idiousthai ‘make one's own,’ from idios ‘own, private.’

What is properly psychoanalytic? What is properly jazz, or bebop? Where is there room, in our
ever more numerous and crowded cubbyholes, for a private and peculiar phraseology of one’s
own – one that is neither symptomatic nor shameful, eccentric nor isolating? There is a
contradiction built into our use of the term idiom; or, if not a contradiction, a repressed article of
tyranny. Like the paradigm, idiom defines a horizon. But, as understood by thinkers such as
Bollas, it respects the uniqueness of the paradigm as a human concern – something arrived at
organically by individuals alone or with cohorts, who will continue arriving. But, in bebop,
practitioners can torment themselves and others over one’s ability to play over the changes, or
improvise freely over rapidly cycling chords in any key. As a human idiom, it becomes just
another in a great library of Big Books that tell practitioners what to do and how to play; an
idiom that leaves little room for idiom, except in the hands of the greats who remain
individualistic voices no matter the level of idiomatic mastery. Psychoanalysis, like jazz, has
spawned its professional and theoretical idioms too, ones that encourage the acknowledgment of
a range of human factors, practice variations, and personal styles. But Freud’s caution about how
we might be corrupted away from the “pure gold of psychoanalysis” remains like a divine
admonition. To sustain some tenets but not others of Freud’s guiding discoveries bears the taint
of eclecticism, through which the idiomatic 21st century practitioner of depth psychology must
slowly evolve an authentic practice, if at all.

Like bebop, for example, if one goes to other cultural idioms in seeking and refining the personal
voice, the personal idiom, one is less concerned with running the changes, and is, from the view
of that tyrannical jazz pulpit, less pure, perhaps not really jazz. The problem is not with purism
as an aesthetic or as an approach to the hybrid art of psychoanalysis. It is with tyranny, the
tyranny of definitions and techniques. With this tyranny comes the great risk of a loss of

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awareness and proper respect for the human idiom, for the idiom of the patient and of the analyst
himself, the improviser and his cohorts on stage and in the audience. They are looking for ways
to be genuine and speak genuinely, and perhaps to have their genuineness and voice belong in
and to the world. This is a transformative process, awash in feeling, that must be as alert and
nurturing toward transformation in the course of a moment and of a decade, as skeptical and
analytical. Though it would take another chapter in another book, Bollas’ (1979) work on the
transformational object and the aesthetic and idiom of personality represents an essential
synthesis of viewpoints – rooted in Freud, but happily sprouting rhizomes and fruiting bodies
from his hybrid of nuanced aesthetics and Freudian attention.

One may speak music, for music’s sake, or in the spirit of play; but what does one say, and in
whose voice? One may practice a technique or espouse a theory. But what freedom to love and
work, what connection with the dreamlife, what apprehension of beauty, comedy, and tragedy,
what perspective upon and freedom of movement within the trajectory of a life, have been
brought within the horizon of this person, this patient?

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The Musical and the Clinical
The Bridge From Music to Therapy
The effort to develop an ear for subtle and emergent affective states, and their various rhythms,
dynamics, and idioms, offers the clinician a broader frame of reference, both practical and aesthetic,
by which to experience the analytic encounter. The work of Steven Knoblauch, in particular, to be
explored in the next and final section, makes careful use of this clinical potential. But music and
analysis are corresponding ways in which psychological life and the natural world present and
organize themselves in the intersection of a moment with a history in progress. To reiterate, jazz
offers something besides a music consisting of the performance of epochal works of composers of
previous generations, artfully, faithfully, and even sublimely interpreted.

This approach to music – not jazz per se, but any evocative aesthetic - evokes the fecundity of
image, idea, and affect available when we are at-tuned to psychic space and time, their structure
and elasticity. Such attunement and its imagery have plenty of analogs - the “thought forms of
one’s own mind” to be found in the transition-state chaos and torment of the Bardo Thodol in
Tibetan Buddhism; for Jung, the numinous feeling of the imagery encountered at the collective
archetypal level, felt as both alien and primal to the personal ego seduced out of its familiar
territory; the catastrophic dread of Bion’s encounter with the infinities of O, and the poetic and
transformative insight brought into conscious life from dreaming O into coherent form. These are
examples of the emergence of differentiated image from the background state, achieved through
the release of the ego’s attachment to familiar states and objects and the simultaneous expansion
of its own horizons, opening onto broader and deeper territories.

This music is not to be mistaken for music therapy, nor is analysis a “kind of jazz performance,”
as my colleague protested. Yet it promotes many of the values and goals of analysis. For
decades, I have found a number of diverse musical events – such as Keith Jarrett’s stream-of-

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consciousness piano recitals, Miles Davis’ Bitches’ Brew era recordings, and Jan Garbarek’s and
Ralph Towner’s plaintive, ruminative tone poems - to be reliable accompaniments to creative
and meditative work, apart from the pleasure to be found in close listening. In spite of their
intensity, they are conducive to clear and creative thinking, presumably because they create a
space in which affect and form, freedom and discipline, turbulence and stasis, amount to an
auditory environment in which I feel at home, mirrored, encouraged, challenged. They induce
personal integration like that found in analysis by virtue of their mercurial bridging of psychic
thresholds, bringing consciousness and the unconscious into better and more fluid terms of
exchange, amounting to a space mysteriously like that holding environment in which a child or a
patient develops the capacity to think thoughts and inhabit their own bodies.

“Kind of Blue” and its five pieces strike many listeners as both intensely intimate and rhythmically
seductive in a manner complementary to the ecstatic prayer of “A Love Supreme.” It is as swinging
and virtuosic as any other jazz form while communicating a deeply affecting, broad spectrum of
emotional colors and melodic ideas. Most notably it seems to breathe and pulse, unforced and
devoid of clichés. One can surmise that this is because it meets its goal: with all the chords and
ritual conventions of Bebop stripped away, it is as though the group and soloist are no longer forced
to adhere to “memory, understanding, and desire” (Bion, 1970). Each complex chord substitution,
though a challenge and an aesthetic possibility, is a saturation, the foreclosure on a whole further
dimension of possibility. Each chord represents a conceptual and harmonic mandate as well as an
opportunity for a new statement; each narrow window of time before the next chord, and the
number of choruses before the cycle repeats and/or the next soloist takes his turn, represent an
artificial demand that the soloist make his personal statement along this path and this path only,
resolving it in short and fixed order. These parameters amount to a commandeering of
psychological time, for all the virtuosity and creativity to be expressed within that gymnastic
window of time. Players are judged by how well they can solo over “changes,” and whether they
have the “chops” to manage the tempos.

By contrast, such tunes in “Kind of Blue” as “All Blues,” “So What,” and “Freddie Freeloader” are

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based on the same structures as the blues-based tunes popular in Bebop. However, they dispense
with even the whole 1-4-5 blues sequences of chords, retaining as pre-determined, for example,
only the first tone of the scale corresponding to those chords to indicate the harmonic contour to be
followed. Just as the modal approach is a turning-point in opening up the harmonic field for
improvisation, the handling of time in these works is also transitional. Without either the exacting
and demanding tempos, or the definitive and complicated demarcations of multiple chord changes,
the underlying pulse of the music becomes more elastic, more indefinite, more easily divided and
extended, regardless of how fast the explicit tempo. Phrase lengths can be collapsed or telescoped
without losing synchrony with the changes; bass, piano, and drums are equally free to follow the
soloist, and contradict or confound him without bursting the envelope of the song, because the piece
is no longer the rendition of a song, so much as it is a group association or meditation on an idea.
The ear does not hear that anything essential is missing. The swing and the harmonic integrity of the
music are still implied and judiciously rendered by players capable of maintaining them intuitively,
rather than by adherence to “saturated” chords and sequences. These, again, are the musical
conventions of memory, understanding, and desire which circumscribe the spontaneous dreamwork
of music.

In this manner, like a certain type of analytic session, the utterance of something simultaneously
fundamental and revelatory of one’s nature can happen, be absorbed, and enter into reflection. One
does not go into session knowing the order of things, nor the way they are to be judged, interpreted,
and sorted out. One knows only that something will be said; that there will be an implicit order,
both unique and ultimately apprehensible if the right sort of attention is offered; and that otherwise
it will stimulate a new point of reference and thus a new capacity for feeling, perceiving, thinking,
and organizing experience. Davis and Coltrane, as the advance-guard among many other jazz
musicians, “discovered” the improvisational de-saturation of a musical language already
evolutionary and rich in possibility for subjective exploration. In so doing they came up with
something akin to the modifications made by Bion to the foundations of Freud and Klein – both
radically revising as well as radically preserving basic values and concepts. Davis and Coltrane’s
developments reunite the original song-form and gut-level humanity of the music with the infinite
possibilities of articulation. For analysis as for music, this infinity narrows into the caesura of the

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moment from which we can come to know ourselves and evolve, with an expanded capacity for
consciousness.

Resonant Minding and Fields of Influence in Clinical Experience

In “The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue,” Steven Knoblauch presents a coherent model of
psychic dimension, resonance, and intersubjective dynamics based on the “effects created by the
intersection of two different bodies or fields of influence” (Knoblauch, 2000, p.159). In what
follows I extend his reflections toward the implications which my own framework carries for
clinical practice.

Knoblauch cites the story Flatland (Abbott, 1884) to illustrate the effect, on a receptive surface
(2-dimensions), of the encroachment of a spherical object (3-dimensions). The point of contact
appears, on the 2-D surface, as a point. As the sphere passes through the surface, its impression
on the 2-dimensional world grows into an expanding circle, which contracts back to a point and
disappears as the sphere recedes. Knoblauch expands this metaphor to suggest that “the
intersubjective field is a subset of a range of potential points of contact between two subjective
worlds…[occurring] along a wave that changes as subjectivities interact with or intersect each
other” (Knoblauch, 2000, p.159). From the point of view of the 2-dimensional surface, the
intersections occur at disparate locations and moments in time, some seemingly simultaneous,
others in a rhythm, forming a scattering pattern of images representing the points where the
waves intersected. The continuity of the higher-dimensional object cannot be perceived from a
surface lacking depth, but one can infer it from the pattern of intersection-points.

Knoblauch makes the point that human interaction consists of multiple waves of varying
characteristics, understood as acts, thoughts, and feelings, issuing from two or more subjects.
Our particular affects and representations, he states, “are, from this perspective, the effects of the
affective field or wave, precipitated by the intersection of two subjectivities” (ibid.). However,
these symbols and objects are “the tip of the iceberg,” the place where a greater structure
penetrates our perceptual threshold and challenges us to know both its reality and our means of

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apprehending it. That penetration is the irruption of time into psychoanalytic consciousness –
Freud’s aforementioned destabilizing surprise and cross to bear.

I understand the two-dimensional surface to be a metaphor for the limitations presented by our
modes of apprehension which depend upon the registration and evaluation of discrete impacts on
the linguistic surface of consciousness. The changing circle represents a point of contact seen
from a limited perspective, which implies that our customary ways of doing analysis fail to
recognize process and wave in four dimensions, and between subjects. It means that we usually
attend too closely to the apparent meanings of discrete events (the circles appearing and
disappearing), and often misattribute them to the personal unconscious’s own “neurotic”
machinations, when the phenomena at hand are instead the product of the interpenetration of
subjective “spheres” or waves of influence. Our “dimensionality” and our interpretive horizon
are restricted, then, both to discrete points of contact and to the vicissitudes of the personal
unconscious. There is an amnesia for the higher-dimensional fabric of experience and the
subordination of psychological theorizing to it, one which allows nonetheless for extreme
erudition, rigor, and imaginative brilliance in the construction of discourse about the moments of
discontinuity – this is one pole of error, the other being the over-incorporative and euphoric
discovery of transcendent meaning in everything. One may appear more sober and scientific than
the other, but the question remains as to how well the human truth has been accounted for. The
wish for scientific or philosophical sobriety is no less wishful, nor invulnerable to error, than the
wish to glory in our participation in a unified, meaningful cosmos.

Knoblauch, following the trend of Bion, Winnicott, et alia, calls attention to the essential
importance of the full range of “effects” upon and within the intersubjective field created by the
patient’s reality and our own. Our clinical paradigm has grown to balance interpretation with
holding, dreaming, containing, and empathically resonating; we can no longer understand or help
transform our patient’s reality by excessively attributing their struggles and distortions to a
neurotic dreamwork going on “in their heads,” or by causally attributing symptomatic
complexities to past distortion and interpersonal trauma. Nor does the in-the-moment perspective
itself suffice, because the moment is an intersection of histories and trajectories, and of

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subjectivities with their own view of self and world intersecting in unpredictable ways. We have,
in Bion’s terms, the demand for a “binocular” view (1962b) on clinical reality as both wave and
particle, and as both cause/correlation and as relativistic/quantum phenomena of mutual
intersecting spheres of influence. Our clinical dreamwork is one uninterrupted weave of our
acuity, theory, method, and expertise, with the values of feeling, breathing,
personal/interpersonal rhythm, and intuition. All the elements of this weave serve as both sources
of information and faculties for registering reality.

The wave/field metaphor, underlying what Knoblauch calls “resonant minding” (2000, p.93),
draws on the tangible reality of our acoustic/musical world. It serves as an alternative metaphoric
construct to the object relations and intersubjective (“plastic”) model of mind, and also to the
classical drive (“hydraulic”) model. The drive model, with repression at its core, posits mind as a
space divided into fixed regions, in which energy is distributed and regulated. Resonant minding
builds upon the drive model’s acknowledgement of energy, and the plastic model’s ability to
articulate a multiplicity of internal and external relationships (ibid.). However, the focus in both
models upon the energy, space, and materials of the psyche contributes to resonant minding’s
synergistic focus upon action and attention. It is no longer so mysterious how one person’s
psychic condition induces a complementary one in another, because it is no longer a matter of
exchanging contents so much as mutual inducement and participation in the generation of form
by means of multiple modes of apprehension. Knoblauch makes it clear that resonant minding is
a construct of attention, awareness, and empathy, thus of the dynamics of change and continuous
process. This provides the affective contour, rooted in physical presence, in which the discrete
particulars of language are nested. One does not require a model of ESP to understand why a
good song, in a good space, played on a good stereo or by a good musician, makes us tap our
foot, boogie, weep, remember, imagine. Resonant minding is the interpersonal expression of this
sensitivity, the same one at the heart of the parent/child dyad, brought to the analytic encounter.

His model allows us to make sense of such statements as “Minding resides not just in one’s head
or that of another” (ibid, p.95). The generous capacity of this view emerges when placed in
contrast to Freud’s concern that mother-infant communication was “extrasensory,” (Freud,
1933a, SE 22). Freud’s view necessarily consigned the pre-verbal to the province of chaos and

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wish. Knoblauch’s insight is that the psyche is not even well-represented by the various object-
relations theories which acknowledge the complex internal analogue of the external world.
Rather, he offers a significantly different insight: rather than a phenomenon of the brain and
body, “minding is the active mediation of the interplay of an array of fields constrained only by
the capacities for awareness of the dyadic psychoanalytic partners” (Knoblauch, 2000, p.95,
emphasis added). Mind is the domain of nature where its capacity for dreaming, consciousness,
and subjectivity take place. Action and interaction within this domain make use of energy by
means of particular dynamics which are not simply those of the brain, nor those of a seething
cauldron or some system for manufacturing encrypted forms, nor some complementarity of
affective and rational modes. A subject within this domain makes sense of its nature by
elaborating inherent templates (myths) into increasingly differentiated explanatory vocabularies
and methods for developing and articulating them among other subjects. What would my five-
fingered hand do with that fallen stone, or that receptive lover, that saxophone, or the hand of my
acquaintance? My gesture and my fantasy grow from the mental and physical shape of my being
and my body. This is the role of archetype and myth, and it explains, among other things, the
qualities that make communication possible, how we and our thoughts fit the physical and
transpersonal world.

Psychoanalysis is a particular setting in which the problems and possibilities of life are addressed
by means of concerted attention by patient and analyst to the dynamics of their co-constructed
field. Music is another sort of concerted attention to and action upon emergent form in the field
between participants. They both express concentrated attention to the possibilities of forms to be
achieved through the intersubjective participation and construction of the resonance which
envelopes each subject. Music is thus an intersubjective dreaming in sound, which focuses on the
resonant medium expressed elsewhere in visual, verbal, instrumental and kinesthetic forms.

Two psyches are at work in analysis; co-creation is therefore a constant within that setting, and
the transference-countertransference dynamic, alongside ensemble dynamics, equally draws on
that constant. The action and process of mind, per se, exemplified by both psychoanalysis and
music, make up “the active mediation of the interplay of an array of fields,” (Knoblauch, 2000,

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p.95). This includes both the linguistic, conscious levels of interaction, and the participation
mystique (Levy-Bruhl 1928; Jung CW9i) of subjects connected on an unconscious yet
differentiated level. Psychic life and subjectivity no longer need be thought of as the peculiar
activities of the psyche-soma limited to the perimeter of the body, or as the efflorescence of the
nervous system. Psyche and subject are better represented as a domain of nature in which
localized subjects participate in highly varied and specialized actions resonating both “inward”
into personal experience and outward into co-constructed zones of differentiated image and
meaning.

Knoblauch notes that the resonant-minding model does not resolve the problem of how psycho-
somatic effects are registered in the affects and thoughts of an experiencing subject. Both effects
and affects are, individually, only zones of registration, individual shifts on “Flatland” surfaces,
in a field that envelopes the ego, the other, and the events of the encounter. Again, the
encroachment of a three-dimensional sphere upon a two-dimensional surface registers as a point,
growing to a circle, receding back to a point and disappearing as the sphere finishes traversing
the surface of Flatland. Multiple waves pass through a surface at multiple points, registering as a
rhythmic scatter of such expanding and contracting point/circles. The scatter of points and circles
– the beta-elements (Bion, 1962a) or raw unsynthesized turbulences of reality – are two-
dimensional intersections of a wave that extends into the space and time of the field,
encompassing self and other. Of course, we need to have a psyche capable of “connecting the
dots” so as to transcend these isolated impact points, and synthesize higher-dimensional patterns
suitable for thinking, dreaming, and communicating. Bion and Winnicott address this need by
means of alpha-function (Bion, 1962a) or a “primary psychic creativity” (Winnicott, 1953, p.34)
within the function of maternal reverie (Bion, 1967) and potential space of the holding
environment (Winnicott, 1971). By these means the psyche is prepared not only for dreaming
and going-on-being but also for participation as a subject and an agent within an intersubjective
field.

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Thus second-generation psychoanalytic thinking forms the template which Knoblauch would
erect for intersubjective reality. The result shows how a musical construction of the therapeutic
relationship reaches back to earlier thinking to integrate the field. Knoblauch thus addresses a
mercurial, musical challenge for the psyche which struggles to dream, much as the theorist
struggles to create a model for a scatter of elements exceeding the dimensions of his paradigm;
each must expand Flatland into a differentiated space where resonances from multiple surfaces
propagate and co-create the music of an internal world meeting an external world. In large
measure this thesis has done the same thing, by holding out the musical model as a field of
resonance into which much of the psychoanalytic tradition then enters on a new basis. By falling
into rhythm and harmony with the larger field sustained by multitudes of such “symphonic”
contacts, one becomes capable of being in “concert” with both one’s own internal resonances
and the voices of one’s counterparts. This activity marks both a literal and metaphorical
threshold, where multiple agencies meet and join. We have rounded back upon our initial topic
of the vibratory boundary, seeing that it embraces both the thresholds of the psyche’s internal
complexity as well as the “interplay of an array of fields” (Knoblauch, 2001, p.95).

Resonant Minding and Time

Freud’s treatment of time, as the reader will recall, focused exclusively on temporal rupture and
disorder. These took the form of deferred revision and the insinuations of primal repression and
phylogenetic memory into the time-stream of the individual psyche. Temporality was not only
the discontinuity of the unconscious, and the modes of timelessness and order separating,
respectively, primary and secondary process; it also made its impact as destabilizing surprise
(Freud, 1914c); the strangeness of the patient’s reincarnation of someone from the past (Freud,
1938, SE23); and a burdensome cross for the analyst (E. Freud, 1963, S. Freud’s letter to Pastor
Pfister). Yet sublimation and the erotic thread of wish contained Freud’s intuitive solutions to the
problematic connections of temporality, including the connection between primal past and
uncertain future. Our core of post-Freudian thinkers expanded matters with themes of
integration, wholeness, and continuity of being, so as to include complex organizations of mental
space as well as to reconcile the convoluted and coherent rhythms of psychic time. Freud’s
scientific consternation at the aesthetic and the numinous was that of Apollo alternately robbed

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and seduced by evasive, mobile, mercurial Hermes; it was left to his successors to integrate
psychic object with elusive process, through an increasing understanding of paradox, creativity
and the non-verbal domains.

Knoblauch’s work builds upon this achievement by bringing attention back to a basic set of
psychosomatic factors whose grounding of time and subjectivity are largely overlooked in
psychoanalysis. Pulse, breath, and rhythm permeate the body, language, and our non-verbal
modes of being and communicating. They serve as a living matrix upon which the convolutions
and ruptures of psychic time can be reconciled, and which analytic interaction – and all
psychological development - can tap into. The “drummer in the pocket” which allowed Charlie
Parker to play rapid, asymmetrical lines weaving unerringly in and out of the meter of the tune is
pre-figured in the body, in the “groove” set by pulse and breath and their synchronization with
psychic functions. Yet it is this synchrony, this groove, that is fractured in trauma and pathology,
and which can be restored therapeutically - or be mobilized in the service of healing - by means
of the intersubjective rhythms of a holding relationship and its reverie.

Knoblauch melds the abstract and metaphoric with the momentary details of clinical interactions.
On the one hand, he surveys a variety of insights into how all matter and energy can be
understood as rhythms throughout nature at any scale of observation (Knoblauch, 2000;
Sheldrake, 1988); to their examples I would add hormonal cycles and patterns of cosmological
motion. On the other hand, Knoblauch speaks as a musician describing the features of a
collaborative effort. He illustrates the speech and breath patterns of patients, identifying the
fractured music of their communication in the presence of his efforts at tuning a response which
might let affect take shape. He illustrates how the music of speech contains remnants of the
patterns of affect, failed and impinging, which preserve the intersubjective history of the patient
to be relived in the transference. He describes the “staggered beats” (Knoblauch, 2000, p.1) of a
patient stammering in anxiety and disorganization, and his own intuition that his measured and
authoritative tone evoked the stifling authority of the patient’s father. Knoblauch writes
revealingly of the knife-edge moment at which he found himself stuck between the possibilities
of either dominating with his comfortable assuredness or of dropping it, and in that stuck

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moment collapsing the containing structure of the session. He writes of the parallel between
himself and the patient, each struggling with the paradoxical attitude of emotional and verbal
control that squeezes out the possibility of genuine emotional expression. His solution is to
attend to the binaural balance of “listening time,” focused on the reflective analysis of
particulars, and the “action time” in which affect is presented in the contour, tone, and rhythm of
speech, alternately fragmented, rising, falling, suspending itself and passing away before it can
fully manifest or be fully formulated in the mind of the analyst.

Like an interpretive soloist, he articulates the dynamics of his and his patient’s speech as one
might analyze the dynamics of a musical duet, in terms of accents, beats, timbre, and pitch,
attending to both qualitative and quantitative structures which run through and beneath verbal
expression. He traces the way in which his own steadying of breath, in response to his anxiety
that he might have precipitated the patient’s fragmentation, managed to invite a mutual
synchrony and relaxation. Their rhythms of breath began to coincide and form a mutual groove,
indicating that the moment of heightened turbulence had passed. Moreover, he uses this intensely
affective, qualitative attention to the here-and-now interaction as a window onto the living past,
the intersubjective dimension of the patient’s paternal struggle. Knoblauch weaves into this
concrete example the intersection of several traditional and contemporary perspectives on
analysis. For one, the transference in this case illustrates the ways in which classical dynamics
are carried on the affective, non-verbal wave which defines the field or holding environment
constituted by two sensitive subjects. The mutual inducement and resonance, however, obviously
go beyond an acoustic phenomenon into one touching the “effective force” of phantasy (Freud,
1930, SE21) as it expresses itself in projective identification (Klein, 1946; Bion, 1961). Klein
and Bion treat projective identification as the evacuation of unprocessable emotions to be placed
“into” the container of the analyst/other. Knoblauch’s resonant-minding model on the other hand,
necessarily treats this phenomenon without its magical implications, as instead the perfectly
natural mutual inducement of affective patterns by two subjects in affective proximity, whose
unreconciled differences set off a mutually turbulent response requiring from the analyst
reflection, careful listening, and tuning or attunement. The analyst’s attunement and conduction
of this resonance prepares the field for the possibility of differentiated words that might carry the
verbal, conscious expression of the patient’s differentiated affect. Such affect denotes the

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possibility of evolution of the “primitive” defense of projective identification into an interaction
that incorporates turbulences into a dreamwork available for reflection, speech, and growth. Seen
from the viewpoint of content, projective identification reads as an absurdity – like phylogenetic
memory, a magical means of thought-and-emotion transfer. But from the viewpoint of the
affective process just described, which links the “two dark nights” (Poincaré, 1963) illuminated
by the flash of mind, Knoblauch makes of resonant minding a model in which human beings
transduce and transfer their energies in their characteristic ways, as any physical entity does.

And this difference is of course the province of the mercurial, the negotiating of exchange and
resolution across the gradient between two distinct subjective territories. We “investigate the
caesura” (Bion, 1977), the emotional storm of the in-between where two personalities meet
(Bion, 1994; Eigen, 2005), rather than standing off from the patient, his utterances, and his past
patterns. Transference and countertransference are then as much about the assertion of and
response to the pattern, theme, and rhythm of a characteristic voice, which issues from an
affective pattern unavailable for reflection, as they are about the “repressed contents” projected
onto later relationships. And as these personal patterns and themes are enveloped by patterns and
themes characteristic of culture and the human psyche per se, they enter into synergy with
something archaically human. A musical model for psychoanalysis can show how much of that
collectively available ground pattern is, indeed, musical. Patient and analyst alike become
increasingly capable of a new kind of relating which gains strength by drawing on the affinities
of our primal bodies phrased as breath and pulse, grounding our capacity for words and music.
This grounding works out to very large amplitudes, for instance through the binding of phantasy
and archetype, or the emergent possibility by which a personality manifests its particular forms
and “becomes” itself. Such emergence amounts to the personality’s transformation in its O
(Bion, 1965), or to its individuation (Jung CW6). It describes a sublimation, as in Freud’s
definition (Freud, 1910b, SE11) by which Eros expresses its dual embodiment of original
wholeness and inexorable self-elaboration, an event both grounding and transformative.

Rhythm and Resonant Minding in Clinical Interaction

There are several avenues for discussion of the clinical relevance of resonant minding and a
musical model of mind. Rycroft’s “themes and modes”, and the image of music as the contour

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of affective life provides a key approach. We can regard the narrative structure of an individual’s
life experience as a story or script expressed in episodic transactions, an approach made popular
in the work of Eric Berne (1947, 1973). Continuity of experience implies not only the qualities of
experience, but a correspondence of an experiencing subject with the events and actions of life as
it unfolds in discrete events. Life-scripts may be thought of as both stereotypical themes and
unconscious ways of interpreting events (analogous to transference), and as the arduous and
often unsuccessful re-writing arising from the conflict between the existing script and a
disillusioning stream of events. In this case, the unifying thread, or its discontinuities, must be
seen as more than an aggregate of discrete events and the psychic processes taking place upon
them. A melody in actual music either implies or takes place within and against a background of
shifting harmonic and rhythmic structure, with a broad, if not limitless, palette of colors and
temporal qualities. The affective qualities of the subject’s experience, including both its degree
of cohesion and plasticity, the capacity to vary, respond, endure, imagine, carry contrapuntal
themes, resolve, contextualize, or its falling into static repetition and discord, is either musical by
analogy, or representable literally as music, whether composed or improvised. Heard as analogy
only, this life-music describes the ways in which we and our patients live our lives and handle
our crises, whether the little nagging ones of daily business, or the grand themes of love and
work over the course of a lifetime. As actual music, we need look no further than the soundtrack
to the film which offers a stylized and composed component of the quasi-reality envisioned by
the director, producer and writer. Or no further than the qualities and functions of our own
favorite music, its impact on our consciousness, the memories and aspects of identity bound and
highlighted by this song or that overture. The contour of affective experience belongs to the
event as imagined by the artist, as it does to the conscious subject going about his business, or
the dreamer going deeper each night into the dream-life which envelopes him 24/7.

So regardless of our theoretical orientation, this awareness of the theme, mode, and variation of
thought, image, and idea, as Rycroft recommends, nourishes our ability to appreciate our
patient’s quality/qualities of life. And, as we are concerned with change and growth, we are
really speaking about the variations which lead to richness, autonomy, and the capacity to
reconcile and harmonize inner and outer, instinct, relation, and desire, pleasure and reality, a
depth and authenticity of music befitting a complex and integrated identity.

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Knoblauch has focused on the musical nuances of analysis – rhythm, tone, mutual attunement--
because these report deeply on both the patient’s emotional reality and the analytic conditions that
constitute the intersubjective “field” from which the contents we interpret differentiate themselves.
The changes in this field affect the analytic ability to effect growth and change in the capacity for
creativity. In these closing sections I complete my summary of Knoblauch’s approach and then
describe my own work with a patient whose case, on reflection, lets me see at work in session the
factors which I have highlighted in this thesis.

An increased awareness of these basic values to all therapeutic practice is essential. Empathy and
attunement, being on a wavelength and attention to interpersonal “vibes,” to name just a few, are
feeling phenomena inextricably linked to sound and to subjective contact, rather than mere
figures of speech. Common vernacular is full of references to the ways in which we “get” the
impact and meaning of someone’s condition, whether spoken or not. “I feel you” means I
comprehend your meaning on an emotional level. “I hear what you’re saying” means I get the
message behind the words. These examples point out the attitude necessary for participation in
the co-constructed field of resonant minding, not simply to be washed over by the other’s vibes,
nor to simply acknowledge it as information while ignoring one’s inevitable role as a variable in
that field. It is not simply in quantum physics that it is impossible to observe without influencing
– the analytic and scientific attitudes toward experiential phenomena are always at risk of
intentionally dissociating the resonant and participatory from the discrete and objective. This
leads to the sorts of category errors indicated by Rycroft and Loewald in their critique of Freud’s
dualities. Both our very presence and the qualitative aspects of our presence – rhythm, tone,
timing, timbre, attitude – constitute an inevitable part of the relational field, whether attended to
or not.

Knoblauch looks to the works of Sufi mystic H.I. Khan for a discussion of the correspondence
between tone and emotion. Khan identifies nine feeling aspects and corresponding modes of
tonal expression, among them fear=broken tone, wonder=exclamation, courage=emphasis,
frivolity=lightness, and attachment=depth of tone. While one can question the strictness and
accuracy of these equations, they are intuitively right. The correspondence between tonal quality

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and communicable affect is obvious in all speech and music; for evidence, one can look to the
lugubrious minor tonalities, sliding over one another in a slow crescendo of despair, of Barber’s
“Adagio for Strings,” most popularly known as the funereal theme in Coppola’s film
“Apocalypse Now;” or to the confident, bursting at the seams and striding forth quality of
Beethoven’s aptly named “Ode To Joy” from the Ninth Symphony. We do not need to qualify
the statement “he sounded sad” in order for a listener to imagine the likely vocal qualities to
which we refer. Moreover, it is not tonal quality itself that “denotes” an emotion, but rather
context and the unfolding patterns of shifting tonality in combination with rhythm, accent, and
musical dynamics which, as discussed earlier, are isomorphic to the contour of affect which
always moves from a given emotion or nuance to the next. The move from a minor seventh to a
suspended fourth conveys one sort of affective progression – I hear reflective resignation moving
into tentative hope, while an ostinato minor seventh pattern dropping in intensity to a gentle
harmonic minor has still another – again, to me, sitting at the piano, suggestive of sad protest
moving into resignation. The same tonal values apply in speech, without the tuned harmonies. A
torrent of stuttering syllables opening into a clear exclamation indicates both different beginning
and ending affects (disbelief rising into celebration, perhaps) as well as different overall
situational meaning (long-awaited but doubted good news being received) than would the same
torrent of syllables, rising in pitch, narrowing in timbre, and decreasing in loudness (anxious
futility, protest, and surrender). In context, we are sensitized to the mismatch of content and
affect – terrible news or wonderful news offered in a matter-of-fact tone, or the opposite,
apparent trivia delivered in the tones of tragedy. Knoblauch treats this non-verbal, qualitative
range of information in terms of Bucci’s “sub-symbolic” activity. Sub-symbolic processing
accommodates infinitely fine variation; this processing is not represented by standard
metric systems or computational rules. We recognize changes in the emotional states of
others based on perception of subtle shifts in their facial expression or posture, and
recognize changes in our own states based on somatic or kinesthetic experience” (Bucci,
1997, p,194)

This processing zone is an idiomatic and mercurial level of registration within the structure of
bodily experience and intuition. In light of Knoblauch’s insights into music and body awareness,
he adds this task: “to face and posture the subtle shifts in vocal tone, rhythm and turn-taking”
(Knoblauch, 2005, p.817).

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These examples, following Knoblauch’s lead, reflect what can be done throughout every session.
We can attend to the patient’s prosody as information about his state, but this approach is greatly
enhanced by mindfulness of the patterns emerging in the duet of analyst and patient. The
analyst’s assessment of his own emotions, images, and qualities of reverie during these
exchanges enables another binaural perspective, mobilizing the creative splitting alluded to by
Bion (1977) in which the analyst divides and expands his attention in coordinated fashion so as
to encompass the profusion of turbulences he is tasked to dream for the patient. The analyst hears
the patient’s voice and its affective character, as well as registering his own, but also regards the
resonant field consisting of the two voices symphonically. This assessment goes beyond the
content of the patient’s utterance and the analyst’s countertransference, to the music arising from
the plucking, playing, voicing, and resonant minding of two interactive subjects, capable of both
engaging in the play and discovering the extent to which their ensemble music arises from
processes exceeding the consciousness of both, but of which both can become progressively
conscious. While this sub-symbolic level of registration and response is characterized by Ogden
(1994) as a level of non-verbal interpretation on the part of the analyst, Knoblauch states that it is
the “process contour” of the analyst’s participation in the resonant field which accounts for the
therapeutic impact, rather than the “interpretation” conveyed on a non-verbal level. He cites
Balint’s concept of the “creation of a mutative emotional climate” (Balint, 1968) as an example
of this notion, emphasizing that interpretation, as a concentrated act of meaning, is as easily
destructive of this “climate” of resonant field as it is mutative and therapeutic. The infinite range
of the musical and the sub-symbolic mirrors the continuous contour of affect; interpretation and
insight must preserve and support this contour in order to function in the manner of a dream that
exists to contextualize and shape instinct into form conducive to consciousness. Interpretation
which violates this affective contour has disruptive qualities of a bizarre or persecutory object
(Bion, 1962b), or an impingement (Winnicott, 1960) regardless of the accuracy of its content.

Knoblauch, following the example of Bion’s grid of transformations, offers a 31-point set of
“foci for attention” (Knoblauch, 2005, p.827), with a disclaimer that it is a post hoc exercise in
tracking analytic events. These foci are linked sequences of sub-symbolic and symbolic acts –
silences, shifts, sighs, and speech rhythms - alternating with verbal reflections. These foci are

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marked by three “nodal points” or thresholds within session where consolidation of meaning
took place. He notes that
any of the sub-symbolic registrations noted would lose its analytic significance were it
considered out of the particular contextual flow of analytic interaction in which it
occurred. The onset of crying or a shift in gaze to the floor are events as unclear in
meaning as the affective impact of just playing a B flat note below middle C, if the
listener/observer is not able to experience the events within the flow of previous,
synchronous and subsequent activity. We do not impact one another through isolated
points of contact, but within a continuous flow of exchange on acoustic, kinesthetic,
olfactory and other registers… Secondary symbolic organization of this flow creates
order and understanding, but also loss of important dimensions of experiencing.
(Knoblauch, 2005, pp 831-2)

With this last point Knoblauch consolidates a pair of crucial threshold ideas. First, unlike a
system of interpretation based on fixed relationships between symbols, this level of analysis
derives its meaning from context and flow, each of the “foci of attention” marking a moment in a
context, as does a note, phrase, or harmonic construct in the midst of music. The second idea is a
paradox, namely, that the shift of emphasis onto the symbolic, linguistic level of interpretation,
necessary for “order and understanding” (ibid.), also comes at the expense of a loss of meaning. I
suggest that the “continuous flow of exchange” (ibid.) on multiple levels, as in music and the
musical edge of therapeutic dialogue, is also characteristic of the temporal complexity to be
found in repression, deferred revision, transference and countertransference, and the thread of
wish that connects meaning backward and forward in psychic time. The latter is routed through
the affective juncture of the moment, given context and color under the mindful attention of the
analytic dyad. This attention expresses the sense of Bergson’s statement cited at the start of this
chapter. It highlights the poignancy of the analytic moment, demanding an enhanced, binaural
attention to the natural interplay of symbolic and sub-symbolic to be found in the patient’s own
presentation.

Knoblauch moves back and forth between patients’ voices and the sonorities of jazz
instrumentalists. He does so in order to indicate the emotion conveyed by a voice, and its parallel
in the sonority of a particular instrument attached to a particular individual, both resonating with
a mindful listener/participant. I add to Knoblauch’s examples: Ornette Coleman’s alto sax is a

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hair-raising cry of ineffable impact; Cecil Taylor’s explosive piano and Bartok’s sudden shifts
are the broken, quickening rhythms of eye movements, constricting and expanding space, and
marking changes in time perception; Charlie Parker’s alto, fleet and asymmetrical, is the ornate
obbligato to a phrase of deep concern and wishfulness; Miles Davis’ softly-blown, vibrato-less
trumpet is the plaintive, vulnerable, yet subtly resolved voice of a man who wants to find a
direction and reclaim lost opportunities. Knoblauch’s examples of the sub-symbolic, expressed
in sound, conform to the semiotic utterances, discussed earlier, by which Kristeva describes the
sensuous and affective declaration of the instincts. Knoblauch cites Loewald’s (2000) shifting of
emphasis “from Freud’s word-thing model, privileging translation into somatic symbolization, to
the significance of an acoustic field in which words always have somatic impact, both pre- and
post-verbally” (Knoblauch 2000, p.7). The choice of the word, the word itself, and the qualities
of its spoken expression are all affective dimensions, pointing to the affective and linguistic as
“interpenetrating dimensions of the same experience” (ibid.). The word is sensual and
meaningful itself, an object to be rhythmically manipulated with lips, teeth, tongue, and breath,
and serves as a sensual object of meaning in the transaction with another human being.

To Knoblauch’s examples of the voices of soloists, I add the analogy of the analyst to the
contrabass in jazz. An instrument offering the harmonic underpinnings and pulse for the
ensemble, it also envelopes the acoustic space, its resonance establishing a kind of ambience. An
acoustic fact is that the deeper a frequency is, the less directional it is; the bass literally surrounds
one and permeates the acoustic space. Bass frequencies are also conducted more fully through an
intervening medium than higher frequencies. For this reason, we can extend the analogy to that
of bass as resonant holding environment, grounding infant/patient to the sonority and rhythm of
the world and the pulse on both sides of the caesura of birth. While the tones of speech are
reaching the infant, they are set atop a resonant bed of bass pulses and reverberations. And, as
the word itself it is a sensuous thing of resonance and physical engagement, so too is the bass
instrument a carrier of differentiated meaning. As in analysis, musical roles and practices have
shifted to accommodate changing insights. The bass has gone from a ritual quarter-note pluck,
often inaudible except for the barest throb and hum, to an equal partnership among instrumental
voices, such as the role played by Scott LaFaro’s fleet-fingered bass in the Bill Evans trio, and
Charles Mingus’ and Dave Holland’s assertive virtuosity in their many ensembles. The bass

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suggests the harmonic possibilities and the unifying pulse without demanding them or spelling
them out; it can make complex and fully articulated solo statements; at the same time, it forms a
resonant foundation and envelope that brings all other voices into relation with each other. As
such, the analyst as contrabass may be active and challenging, may be subliminal and suggestive,
or merely provide a sub-symbolic pulse and containing resonance that induces and supports the
emergent voice of the patient – but he is no longer constrained by one way of working, so long as
he is a catalyst for dreaming rather than an interpretive intruder in the dream-space.

Rex Stewart’s growl and grunt on trumpet in a Duke Ellington piece is his comparison to the
deep intake of air and exhalation of a patient’s characteristic start of session; one day this same
pattern, usually mournful and resigned, had a different cadence, indicating something opening
up, still sad and despairing, but enlivened with anger and tinged with something akin to hope
(Knoblauch, 2005, p.821). He details how these moments in session led gradually into her
expressions of dissatisfaction in numerous arenas of life in which things were ostensibly good,
but inwardly not enough. This in turn led into his own speculations about her dissatisfaction with
treatment, and her characterizations of the rhythm of dissociated and devitalized starts, shifting
into complex somatic and semantic encounters, an engorgement experienced as ultimately
dissatisfying, cycling again into the following week. This unsatisfying engorgement came to be
understood as the reenactments of events and patterns characteristic of her eating disorder, and
her failure to vitalize either the analysis, the analyst, or her memory of her deceased uncle. Yet
this cycle was marked by her feeling of being “gotten,” or understood, as well as his experience
of the increasing emphasis in her voice running beneath the rhythm of inflation and deflation,
build-up and enervation.

Knoblauch effectively demonstrates here the multiple layers of content, process, and affect, its
themes, dynamics, convergences, and divergences – familiar melodies played in shifting time
signatures, first over slow drones, then over a counterpoint of increasing complexity, and
returning inexorably and disappointingly to key points to begin again, D.S. al coda, with the
underlying tonality shifting in pitch and rising in emphasis. These layers compose a story of
repetitive themes played over sustained but slowly mutating backgrounds, revealing a picture
which changes inexorably though with agonizing slowness.

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The interaction between analyst and patient is also a meeting of rhythms seeking or resisting a
groove. Accompanying the composition of voices, tonalities, and rhythms is the awareness of
body. Knoblauch consistently cites his sensations, his awareness of the tightness of chest or
throat, the breadth of breath accompanying speech of a particular tonality and affect. He jettisons
artificial distinctions between the symbolic and the somatic, so that the sensation induced in the
body by a turbulence in the resonant field serves in the manner discussed earlier in this paper –
as an image, the currency of thought and understanding. This expresses a related insight – that
the achievement of subjectivity and the capacity for consciousness entails the synthesis of image
expressed across a range of modalities; breath, pain, chill, erotic arousal, anger, etc., are brought
together into some collaboration under the banner of the dreamwork, where they are available for
experience and analytic reflection. Knoblauch treats them as mutually negotiable currencies in a
volatile instinctual market (a function of Hermes/Mercury) across psychic thresholds, including
those between analyst and patient, rather than contents of largely interpretive value. This
approach highlights the continuity between sensation, image, symbol, and concept, in a manner
that makes it difficult and counterproductive to exile the body and the non-verbal from any talk
of higher functions.

This is only a partial synopsis of the dimensions of the resonant minding model, but should
suffice to indicate its depth and breadth, as well as its complementarity with interpretive and
semantic approaches. It is resistant to systematization, for many of the same reasons that the
music and language are not translatable except partially, and by liberal use of metaphor. Neither
medium alone expresses the relationship between affect and reason, content and process, or
semantics and contour, such as constitute the whole human event encountered in analysis.

I have worked at length with several generally highly functioning patients who have struggled to
integrate intrusive thoughts and persecutory feelings produced by discontinuities in the stream of
thought, and by both small and large explosions in otherwise intact psyches. These could be seen
in the continuum of breath, speech, and dream, and manifested the whole psycho-somatic
repertoire explored by Knoblauch. They showed up as well in distinct patterns of transference
and countertransference. One of these cases concerns a woman whom I will call Ellen.

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A Case Example
“Ellen” is a 63 year old woman who was referred for help in coping with her husband’s
dementia, and her increasing despair and nightmares. Exhausted, she drove 250 miles into New
England to see “Charlie” at least three times per week. Ellen spoke tearfully about the love of her
life, a bigger-than-life man of spirituality and compassion, who is now reduced to clutching
stuffed animals, unable any longer, finally, to recognize her or respond to language.

Ellen was ashamed about “having to resort to therapy.” She framed her decision as a last resort,
stating that she couldn’t live with the sense of loss any more, that it was “finally time.” She was
equally resistant to considering the medications recommended by the psychiatrist, seeing them
similarly as signs of personal failure and weakness, although she repeatedly requested consults
for new meds, which she would shortly discontinue of her own accord. She postponed her initial
therapy session twice before eventually volunteering that she would “suck it up” and get started.
When she finally arrived and endured a session, I was struck by inconsistencies – a rugged-
looking, unadorned woman who made fleeting eye contact. She spoke in a lilting alto, alternating
between breathy confidences made while leaning in, and eyes dramatically averted, head turned
toward the bookshelves on the wall, voice caught on the brink of sobs that never came until
nearly 8 months of weekly and bi-weekly therapy. I had the immediate impression, confirmed
and elaborated over time, of an intermittent person – someone who, despite no reported history
of psychiatric treatment, and a self-report of unbroken functionality as a mother, wife, avid
reader, gardener, and music lover, seemed to disintegrate in small ways on a regular basis. As I
spent more time with her and she became less guarded, her intermittent quality manifested as
colorful, humorous flows of thought in expressive musical speech, interrupted by static and
silence. At the ends of our first few sessions, she told me she was encouraged by how easy she
found me to talk to, and that I shouldn’t take it personally if she clammed up – private matters
are private, after all, and therapy represented something unprecedented for her.

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This began an ongoing cycle of approach and avoidance, false starts and anguished retreats. On
six separate occasions, Ellen arrived for session stating that she had almost cancelled, once and
for all – I could have no idea how agonizing it is for her to pick at old wounds, and if I cared
about her, I would let her bury “it” and go back to her life. This is all a big mistake, she would
state, large hands waving, not something someone like her, from her family, should do; perhaps
it would be “unfair,” undeserved, for her to have the opportunity to speak and feel better. Her
vacillation evoked anxiety and exasperation in me, which I countered, at first, by a clumsy retreat
into explanation and reassurance about “the nature of the process.” The exasperation relented
somewhat after Ellen began to establish her pattern – roughly half the time she would arrive at
her next session eager to reassure me that she realized the awful feelings she attributed to me, to
therapy, and to her deserved punishment, which she had been carrying around for years anyway.
The rest of the time she would return to session persisting with her protests, asking plaintively in
choppy, little-girl tones for me to tell her what to say and what to do. Despite having read
considerable amounts of psychology, self-help, sociology, and philosophy, Ellen found it
baffling that anything of value should come of blabbing.

Ellen was born in the rural midwest and spent most of her childhood traveling with an geologist
uncle who worked for the government, and his second wife. Her father died in while she was an
infant, and her mother “wasn’t up to raising me”, and she claimed to remember nothing more of
her mother, who she believed she last saw when she was five or six years of age; no more detail
about the adoption by her uncle was forthcoming, except that her brothers – two older, one
younger – would kill or disown her if she “told.” After the first month of sessions, Ellen offered
her first dream and her first detailed account of the family secrets, the very consideration of
which served as an unforgivable breach. Her uncle, she told me (later admitting that she had to
take an Ativan in order to find the courage), was a bitterly angry, denigrating man who “never
wanted me in the house – how horrible for a child, a second rejection! But listen to me whine…
what’s more, he blamed me to my face, in front of my brothers, for being a waste of money,
pointless.” Her adoptive aunt was a “non-entity,” mouthing empty reassurances to her in uncle’s
absence, yet standing mutely or in ostensible agreement with the verbal abuse in the his
presence. She was “benign, I guess, but she was no role model – imagine, doing nothing!” In
telling this, Ellen demonstrated a distinctive speech pattern. Often a euphonious playful, alto,

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Ellen’s speech came in pressured exhalations while divulging secrets or begging for relief. It was
as though each sentence required her full breath, exploding outward in a rush of wind, which she
would then block, like a door closing on a storm and on the thought process itself, to be resumed
a few breaths later. I found that my efforts at patient silence, empathic comments, and
contextualizing and sharing my subjective response were met by the same look of beseeching
dolefulness, and the occasional request to be “let off the hook.” It became clear that when seized
by the pain of these memories and tales, Ellen had no option other than to see the figure in front
of her as the tormenter. Yet, she would invariably return to reassure me, if not next session, then
the one after that. She would later come to reflect that everyone in her family, especially her sons
and daughter in law, considered her a “tough old bird who needs nothin’ from no one” (spoken
with humor and irony, as her grammar and diction are nearly flawless, yet peppered with
sharply-bitten vulgarities on the occasions when she allows herself irony or bitter feelings about
being left to her own devices in the hardest times).

Ellen’s therapy offers a glimpse of the intersubjective “music” of a fragile therapeutic

interaction. Music per se plays a secondary but meaningful role. Discovering her response to
music and comparing our mutual responses to similar artists seemed to offer her a safe context in
which to explore emotions she found too threatening to discuss in the context of her own history.
She expressed an uncharacteristic curiosity, awe, and even enthusiasm for the range of
sensitivities touched by a variety of music, and which she could not express otherwise. This
small sideline in our work seemed to act as a catalyst for a transformational dream series that
demonstrated how she tentatively expressed the emergence of affective vitality in the expansion
of color, the evolution of shadow into chromatic human form, of an averted gaze into witnessing
perspective, and curiosity rather than fear about her own inner life. This dream series is
inaugurated by another, deeply disturbing dream, which serves as a traumatic eruption of an
encysted zone of memory and affect. Her psyche’s effort at tentative emergence was
characterized by seemingly paralyzing anxiety about self-revelation, contrasted by a nearly equal
desire to reveal and release. Through this process, I felt helpless in precisely those areas in which
I relied upon my desire to help, my techniques for helping, my frameworks for interpreting; as
long as I planned or reached for a method or tool, I found myself inept and Ellen inconsolable.

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Thus, this musical subtext also offers a cautionary look at the limits and minefields encountered
when a forbidden affective space is opened up. I found myself, as therapist, unwittingly
encouraging her into something she experienced as dangerous as much as liberating, with the
effect that, for every seeming advance, I assumed the dual role of liberator and tormenter. Her
urge to find a voice and have it acknowledged was countered by a corresponding fear of
annihilation as punishment for allowing herself to be seduced into the revelations of speech and
song.

Ellen arrives for a session hunched over, averting her eyes, walking in small, careful steps to her
seat. She sits, stifles a sob, apologizes in a strained whisper, holds her hands out in a gesture
serving to either steady herself, keep me at arm’s length, and/or convey “wait a moment, I’m
almost ready.” I am, indeed, feeling like a tormenting inquisitor. She apologizes for making an
embarrassment of herself, to which I reply that I believe she feels embarrassed, but that I only
see that she is in pain, and that I’d like to help her with it, whatever it is. She states in the same
whisper, “I’m not so sure. I had a dream that was totally, totally devastating, and it reminded me
of what I’m not telling you and what I’ve been trying not to tell myself. I am so tired of this
shit!” Her voice has steadied in this last sentence, its strangled and timorous quality gone, as well
as its usual lilt, “shit” bitten off with more aggression than I have heard from her.

Ellen reveals her inaugural dream. It is a quick and terrifying vignette: she is her adult self,
awakening at night in a house both familiar and unfamiliar, resembling a house serving in other
dreams as “my childhood house,” but in fact different from any such houses in memory. She is
seeking the baby she thinks she hears in a room at the end of the hallway, opposite the room
where she has awakened. She sees that the door is slightly ajar; from her position, furtively
crouching behind the doorjamb, she can see a newborn infant lying naked on a bare metal
“operating table.” The room is otherwise bare, and she understands it to be a sort of studio and
laboratory. She begins to move reach to open the door further, considering going to help the
infant; as she opens the door an inch further, she sees a large male hand with a wristwatch reach
toward the baby and slice it swiftly down the center of its torso with a large knife, then swat the
body onto the floor. She does not see any further details of the owner of the arm, and awakens in
tearful panic.

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As she leads up to the brutal detail, my own apprehension leads to an uncharacteristic
breathlessness. I am dreading the climax and interpretation I sense she is approaching. That
response is unusual for me, I remark inwardly, because I am cool at bad moments such as this;
should I be? Am I callous or defensively removed? I am also fearful for her, because it is so
vividly painful for Ellen, and also because I sense that this is a turning point, something with a
lifetime’s exile slouching toward consciousness. At that moment I feel as though I am to blame
for her pain, as though I had unleashed a beast or coaxed her into the fire. I soon find that this
process runs a close parallel to hers, a counter-transferential inducement into the guilt and shame
she herself feels.

Ellen is silent, then visibly composing herself, she looks up at me with a blithe “so whaddaya
think?” then a blunt request to tell her “what the fuck it means, where the fuck did I find that?”
My mind is reeling, and I am tense and momentarily mute. While Ellen has made a sudden
emergence from her paroxysm, I am still only registering my own. I am beginning to associate to
something brutal, in fact, a phantasy, or metaphor, that has haunted her and now has brought me
into its circle. I simply ask her how she feels, and invite her to tell me her associations; though I
know that it is sensible method to let the patient offer her associations, I feel compelled to rescue
her, to cover her eyes and lead her away from the room. She states, “I can’t let myself think that
the arm belongs to my uncle, that would be too much, who thinks this sort of thing? I must be
SICK to dream such things, so awful!” Her negative association to her uncle is unbidden; it is as
close to a direct accusation as she can make, yet almost instantly it makes her culpable, both for
dreaming something so brutal, and for the betrayal of attributing such an act to her uncle. She is
silent when I ask her about her uncle association; I am careful not to assent, but merely to follow
her thoughts. After a silence of labored breathing, seeming to indicate that she will not be
induced further down that path by my hand, she returns to it herself, stating that there is no other
conclusion she can draw – something precious and infantile was murdered, but what could it
mean? Surely no one in her life murdered a baby. She has begun to apprehend the symbolism of
the dream, approaching it binocularly, as theme and affect, when just as quickly she retreats into
a concrete denial of the facts; the “voicings” of this complex chord collapse into a strident minor
second, the dissonant sounding smallest possible interval in conventional western scales; she

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cannot sustain the distance necessary to elaborate her own symbol, and disowns the image
because it simply cannot, must not, be true.

I have remained silent except for gentle encouragements, nods, and validations of the pain this
causes; I allow myself to tell her that though this feels like too much to bear, she has “finally
gotten it out”, but that we do not yet know what “it” is. I immediately reproach myself for my
concreteness, treating “it” as a content, for which she might then take concrete responsibility, as
though she had been harboring something destructive, now loosed upon the world. Instead, she
says with an ironic chuckle “Yeah, well, what good could it do…anyway, this has been fun!
Time to go?”

She arrives for the next session apprehensive, asking first off, “Do we have to pick up where we
left off?”. She says, “I can’t just sit with this, and I’m completely terrified to say anything else
about it. I haven’t slept and I really resent you for making me do this, but I’m also pretty sure
you haven’t made me do anything.” Ellen is leaning forward on her thighs, shoulders rounded,
breath audible and shallow. She leans up and back, extending her torso as she steadies herself
against the back cushion, takes a full breath and says, with a familiar ironic gallows humor,
“Well, here it goes… more pain!” She asks if I believe there might be a kernel of reality behind
her dream, some possibility that she saw her uncle do something brutal. I tell her that reality in
dreams is not always a matter of disguised facts – what else can that vignette be about, if not a
recording of an event? She comments that feelings aren’t facts, they’re reactions that make
people draw crazy conclusions about their relatives and then about the therapists they go to
because their feelings prevent them from handling the facts – she chuckles, saying, “You didn’t
think the old broad was so clever, did you? My friends, the ones I don’t let see me as a basket
case, think I’m pretty funny and they come to ME for a healthy perspective on their problems –
if only they knew!” I tell her that her humor in the midst of her greatest fears is a sign that she is
handling the facts – but that she might consider letting the humor clear some brush for her, so
she can plant some flowers (she is an avid gardener). She giggles and mocks my metaphor, then
catching herself says that “I really must be trying not to talk about what I came here determined
to talk about.” I laugh with her and I ask if she wants, at this moment, to follow her insight, or is
something else pressing forward to be spoken? She responds that, no, she’ll go for it.

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Ellen then tells me straightforwardly that, though she knows it is unrealistic and maybe crazy,
she feel overwhelming guilt that Charlie’s dementia is her fault. She recounts that she was
estranged from her aunt and uncle for years. They had grown old and frail, and contact with
them had been limited to rare visits without Charlie, and to occasional phone calls with her
mother. She recounts that Charlie – a “gentle giant, the sweetest, most harmless giant bear of a
man you could ever meet”-- wondered over the years why he had never had the opportunity to
meet them and see for himself. At his encouragement, she arranged for them to spend the
weekend at the rural home of her aunt and uncle, several hours away, so that introductions could
be made. She stops herself, seizing up, clenching her fists, cursing herself for being “so utterly
stupid.” I wait, saying no more than mmm-hmmm. She continues on an important tangent – she
did not know at that point, or did not admit to herself, that Charlie had been different, that his
clumsiness and forgetfulness were more than his ordinary tendency toward fatigue and brooding
absent-mindedness. Charlie, it turned out, would soon be given a terminal diagnosis. She
proceeds with a capsule summary of the weekend’s climax. Her elderly uncle sneered and
“baited” Charlie from the moment they arrived, mocking his politics and his manliness –
“couldn’t do any better than my dumb daughter, could you?” When Charlie finally objected, her
uncle grabbed a shotgun and began to rant and threaten. Ellen remembers being choked up in
panic to the point of muteness: “A blur, a horrible blur, the first time since I was a little shit that I
was scared of him to the point of shitting myself, thinking, its all my fault, I never should have
brought Charlie here.” Her mother sat, impotently pleading. They left and did not speak about it.

Shortly after, Charlie was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He lived at home with Ellen for several
more months, and was then admitted to a nursing facility, where he deteriorated quickly. He
became prone to tantrums and lashing out, which, given his large stature, made him increasingly
unmanageable in the moderate-care facility. After one such outburst, Charlie was deemed
unsuitable for treatment, and was transferred to a facility with an available bed, three hours
distant. After several winter months of driving to visit him, bringing him the dolls and clutch
toys he had regressed to requiring to be happy, Ellen had sought the help which led to our work
together. She finally made and began to explore the connection that, having survived her uncle’s
destructiveness, she had minimized it, hoping that her love and sincerity would make repairs

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possible, to bring the family together. She felt crushing guilt and shame that she brought her
gentle giant into the muzzle of a gun. She expressed no direct blame toward her uncle at this
point, seemingly unable to simultaneously sustain her awareness of her own “mistake” and her
uncle’s life-long culpability as an abuser. She had taken the burden, consciously, entirely upon
herself, disowned all rage except what was directed inward; and she became beset by the
association – not quite a belief, but an unconscious conjunction - that, somehow, her exposure of
Charlie to her uncle not only stressed and frightened him but also caused his regression to
infancy.

It has become clearer to me that there is an insistent projective identification passing first within
the family, and then onto me. It has the character of a one-way passage of anger and blame,
originating ostensibly in her uncle, from his utter lack of empathy and self-justification for his
violent impulses. His voice simply nullifies all others, making exchange and relation impossible.
In his emotional presence, such as during session, Ellen’s voice did not exist; and as the powerful
other who induced her self-exposure, my voice could be nothing but that of a tormenter. At all
other times she is a playful and colorful partner in dialogue. I could manage Ellen’s plaintive
begging to be released from the torment of therapy by means of a convenient concept of
transference and countertransference, which could serve as the hat by which I identify my role.
That is one thing, but it is quite another, after years of therapy and supervision, to be in the
moment of an inducement, a resonant emotional chord of great power, that would raise a visceral
anxiety response, and consequent attitudes of guilt, protectiveness, and helplessness.

In Ellen’s next dream series, she told of a recurring dream she’d had for years, varying in minor
detail: she is lost in a primal forest, to which she associates the universe of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia.
Though she knows her way around and out, she finds herself disoriented, and shadow forms,
animated patches of darkness, begin to surround her; they whisper things always just barely
inaudible, no words discernible, sounding like accusations; they are trying to decide what to do
with her. Sometimes she thinks of them as dark angels (she is not religious); sometimes, ghosts
or shadows of material beings just out of her line of sight. She finds herself cowering beneath
brush or at the base of a tree, hoping and/or imploring them to go away; sometimes she is
paralyzed and mute from fear and says nothing. She always wakes up with a start and feels short

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of breath, and the next day is “pointless – it’s like the shadows follow me around; just cash me
out and let me go back to bed, except I don’t want to dream anymore.”

Some months later, the dreams change character, opening up. It is then that Ellen tells me of a
wonderful singer she has heard. Music has been a favorite topic of hers to discuss; everything
from Mozart and English romanticism to classic rock and folk delights her, and, by both our
accountings, are reliable contexts in which to safely discuss emotion, making pain bearable and
articulable. She has a general preference for happy music, but is drawn to a certain comforting
darkness in the music we are to discuss. It is a darkness and sadness that she spontaneously
called a “mirror for my sadness in which I didn’t look quite so bad, not so pathetic.” I told her a
bit about my interest in music, and this self-disclosure about musical tastes and sensitivities has
put her at relative ease; she reflects at one point that this lets her know I am an “emotional being”
in some way like her, and thus less scary. I am cautious about this joining and self-disclosure, but
it has safely opened her up to find some “bliss” to seek and talk about, quoting one of her
favorites, Joseph Campbell. She talks about her urge to begin painting again; she tells me that
she “withheld” from me that she had been an avid student of painting in college, but that she had
put it aside as frivolous after her uncle scoffed at it; no one besides her husband, and now I,
knew this “bohemian” side to her. To the rest of the world, she was just a quiet, stoic old broad
who tended her garden and could be counted on for a patient ear and good landscaping advice.

In the next session, she reports that “my dream has taken a new twist.” She is in the same forest,
apprehensive but not frightened, because it is her own section. The shadows are still achromatic,
dusky and hard to see directly, but she can make out that there are varieties, some winged and
birdlike, some two and four legged land creatures; they are trying to tell her something, and she
soon realizes that no harm is meant at all; she is abashed that she cannot make out their message
or respond to it, and hates to seem rude or stupid. She senses but does not actually see the “living
color” of these forms, attributing their invisibility to the twilight. She is still uneasy that these
strange creatures cannot be trusted. She wakes up, feeling embarrassed but generally positive,
and increasingly frustrated that she cannot make out the forms in her own dreams.

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She reports no further dreams for another two months. She then brings three at once, one of them
a dream of painting at an easel in the very same forest. She reports that she has awakened happy
several times after dreaming of painting. She reports that in these dreams she is painting vivid
colors against dark backgrounds; some are happy primary colors she associates with children’s
toys, while others are “new” colors, not yet possessing human names. She recalls in one such
dream learning, by methods unknown, that the “new” unnamed colors are represented by “stand-
in” colors which she will be able to take out of the forest and remember, but that the new colors,
in their actual form, will stay in the forest because they are “not ready yet.” Ellen looks vibrant
while she tells me this; there is a sense of delight and mild embarrassment, as though she has just
discovered an erotic feeling, both disconcerting and captivating. Her painting dreams have made
her want to paint, and they serve as a conduit and organizing structure for the affect previously
inchoate and assigned an automatic fear and shame value.

The other two dreams then come out during this and the following two sessions. She is in her
forest, but she is up in a “tree-house,” a domicile built amongst and between the trunks and limbs
of large, strong trees growing amidst large, vivid tropical flowers. She is surrounded by several
dozen “little dark people,” like pygmies or child-sized rainforest people reminding her of tribal
people she saw in National Geographic. They do not speak English, but they listen closely and
respectfully to her as she instructs them in how to “dump the water” out of the tree-house. This
action is understood not as a response to a flood, but as some sort of civilized skill to be passed
on to the natives if they are to be able to live in the tree-house. As she dumps some water out of
an open-air window, she hears an unusual splash, and realizes that there is a child’s inflatable
pool beneath the tree house which she has not seen before. She sees with alarm that there is a
person in the pool; she goes to it, and discovers a little girl, seemingly nine or ten years old, who
wears a pink dress and appears to be in pain. A middle-aged man in a tux, his sleeves and pant
legs rolled up, is hovering over the little girl, and turns to Ellen, saying that “its OK, it is being
taken care of.” This man seems furtive and “doesn’t belong there.” Not trusting him, and feeling
a sense of dread, she walks to the girl and asks if there is anything she needs. The little girl
moans that she needs something to make her belly feel better, and then Ellen notices that around
the little girl there seems to be a pink, greasy tinge to the water, which Ellen associates to blood.
She awakens.

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I immediately inwardly associate to a rape or an abortion. Ellen suspects that the little girl got her
first period, but then tentatively speculates that the girl may be too young for that. I choose not to
voice anything, following my sense of foreboding that whether there is memory or sheer
phantasy behind this dream, it represents something about which Ellen will not be able to tolerate
much insight. She seems stumped – neither frightened nor particularly curious any longer, falling
back into a passive “I don’t know…doesn’t remind me of anything, can’t really say… no one I
recognize, except the guy looks like [a popular actor].” I ask her about the tree, the little dark
people, the water, and the dumping. She seems slightly relieved to be focusing on those
enigmatic but less disturbing details (or perhaps I am relieved), but remains vague, offering brief
queries in a rising cadence – “bailing? Little tribesman, because [her daughter] is considering
going to Polynesia to do humanitarian work?” She wants me to tell her. Her enthusiastic glow
has faded, to be replaced by a passive, dull reticence. Though consciously she is trying to be a
good sport, I have the sense that she has shut down, on hiatus from thinking and resonating,
while I myself am shell-shocked from the sense that we have survived another near-disaster. She
is blank, and I am afraid of her dream; it is, for this illusory and elusive moment, as though the
burden of her dreaming has been passed on to me, and it is now my responsibility to say nothing
about it.

This dream is not spoken of again. Ellen then brings in the last of this series of dreams, which I
take as a binding metaphor for the power that divides her affective life, and divides her from it.
This dream took place the next night, after our session – two nights after the tree and pool dream.
She is walking along train tracks on an open plain, mountains in the distance, beer bottles and
other detritus lining the tracks. She hears a train approaching, growing abnormally loud. The
train becomes visible, and she immediately sees something wrong with it; it is a solid mass, not a
linked sequence of cars. There are no windows, and no breaks through which light would pass,
therefore no illusory translucence, no strobe effect. The sense of motion is provided by the
blurring of other features – the train is covered with the color fields of her paintings, some alone
and some woven into intricate patterns. But all are drained of color; they are all grays, which she
understands on some level to be a function of color disappearing at great speed. The train passes,
loudly, huge and looming, and keeps passing. She begins to walk alongside the tracks, with a

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sense of resignation that she may not be able to cross the tracks at all, but should probably keep
moving, and eventually get somewhere.

Ellen’s dream of the unbroken train must be seen side by side with her repeated traumatic
experience of being nullified, and the gradual accretion of color fields and of shadows emerging
“in living color.” In walking the tracks and regarding the train, she encounters a relentless,
unremitting force blocking her path for as far as the eye can see, keeping her on one side of the
affective track. This force, this train, has the power and speed capable of draining all affect and
light from her life. Yet the achromatic paintings still suggest the tonal color and rhythms of her
inner life, carried away by something more powerful than she. The rhythm is to be found not
from the regular intervals in the train, but in the passage of her own forms, always exceeding the
speed of her consciousness and presence, but following a path she has no choice but to take.

Ellen dreams both of the force that desiccates her dreams; and, in sequence, of her fluid, colorful,
living forms gradually emerging into light that makes them visible. She is reminded by means of
her nightmares, and I with her, of the traumatic rupture and flooding that interrupt her breath and
speech. These are relics of a repeat injury that has cast her back upon her own taxed resources, at
a time in life during which she is slowly losing the one person who she is aware has ever loved
her. I have a sense that she will be alright, but that she will have a hard time holding on to solace.
Her sensitivity to color, and the emergence of the colors of the flowers she tends into the colors
of her dream life, both suggest a broadening capacity for forms to carry emotions. Her love of
music, expanding into a love for darker and more complex, romantic kinds of music, suggests a
“tuning” of her inner ear to new intervals, chords, rhythms, modes, and themes of affect –
indeed, to the possibility of new experiences that do not overwhelm or collapse under the gravity
of old experiences.

Despite our best efforts, Ellen has never overcome her urge to flee and to blame this strange
context in which she feels compelled to speak the unspeakable; she has never gotten past the
certainty, despite my best efforts, that she is compelled to injure herself with her own memories.
She took one break of two months’ duration, and called to resume with an admission of
understanding that nothing about her pain changed when she was away, except that I was not

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there to “hash it over” with, and that made it worse. “Remind me next time I blame it on you that
I told you to tell me it’s not your fault,” she said laughing, ruefully and ironically, but also
playfully. She is re-establishing her muse, choosing richer music, knowing that her slow loss of
Charlie deserves sad songs too. Yet she has left therapy again, citing a comment I made over a
year ago about the cost of attempting to be too self-sufficient. She did not appreciate my effort to
point out that I am only the latest of her duet partners, but the only one who will sit to talk it
through with – or, if you will, rehearse and review. The show must not go on, but instead be
resumed in cycles of rhapsodic bursts dissipating into shards and silence. I do not know yet
whether or how it will be possible to allow her to sustain and midwife into song the cacophony
of the present or of childhood, except by holding a pedal point, at times a vamp, always a
welcoming but not wishing place to which she can return and digest a little bit more.

In no other case have I felt quite so intensely the importance of both the endurance and the
patience Bion tells us we must sustain. It is not the Freudian evenly hovering attention, precisely.
It is not about hearing the putative repressed wish suggest itself through its derivatives. It is
about readiness to hear the fragments of broken rhythm and melody, the dynamics that disappear
beneath and shout beyond the limits of audibility, of tolerance, so that this desolate O might be
dreamed into something one or both of us can apprehend. It is the best I can do to maintain what
feels like negative capability, neither to explain it all nor save her, nor reach for relief for the
grinding dissonance enveloping the moments of. My presence and capacity to tolerate what she
brings into session might resonate in a manner that models for her the possibility of going on
being, finding that all pains can, in some way, be given a voice, a harmony, and a groove that
keep it anchored to the ocean floor.

Afterword, and Reprise

Pulse, breath, and rhythm permeate the body, language, and our non-verbal modes of being and
communicating. They serve as a living matrix upon which the convolutions and ruptures of
psychic time can be reconciled, and which analytic interaction, relationship per se, and
psychological development can tap into. If a goal of depth-psychological treatment and ethos is
to tune the psyche/soma to conduct the fullest possible range of experience, from love and

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pleasure to work, art, and science, then we must, at least occasionally, open our inquiries and
meditations to pursuit and metaphors not ordinarily compatible with the analytic working day.

Fordham’s fenceless field of Freud, Jung, and Klein represents a great integration, or rather an
acknowledgment of the integrity to be found beneath the fractured surface of depth psychology.
But it, too, is only a local and recent perspective. I always find it bracing, humbling, and
entertaining to remember the eye-blink of earth’s biological history occupied by human history.
Psychoanalytic history also marks only a mere instant in the history of culture, during which
much of what has been learned about the qualities of human life has been marginalized in the
creation of our versions of the talking cure. We sit in contemporary offices, of various décor
styles, but still likely reflecting the academic or medical image of the professional expert-
consultant. We still argue about the value of the medical model and the DSM-IV or V, about the
differences between hard and soft sciences – these exist in a big 4-D picture in which our
conventional present is bracketed by millennia of discovery, insight, and error on one side, and
an imaginary but inexorable future of probable astonishing new discoveries and sobering
repetitions.

This year’s analysts are perhaps less conflicted about shaking a patient’s hand than in a prior
decade, may reveal feelings and personal data in the interest of making a connection. Countless
pages have been written about these issues from technical and theoretical standpoints. But, from
another perspective, they are useful or convenient trivia, conventions meant to enable us to focus
on the business at hand. I hope that my position is clear at this point that words spoken in a
comfortable and private setting are still our main modality, our main currency, for good reason.
In some far future, the psychology of the practitioners and culture of such a serious art, and why
particular boundaries and customs mattered so, may be the topic of much anthropological interest
in the circles still concerned with the history of twentieth century therapeutics. Particularly the
continued marginalization of the body, pried apart from the psyche-soma, in a discipline whose
19th century outlook made all romance and variation a form of perversion. So much has been
written already on the body in psychoanalysis, to which I have added a focus on music and
resonance, with an ear toward ecstasies and plastic boundaries that needn’t be thought of as
regressions. Yet Puritanical and elitist attitudes, rife with reaction formation and envy of the

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beautiful and the spontaneous, still remain, a sobering and ironic reminder of how repression is
most alive and well close to home. To think otherwise would be sheer denial, tinged with hubris.
We are not, on the whole, an inclusive bunch, and could not be to do what we do. Romantic,
passionate expressiveness and frivolity is not easily integrated with the work-life of the analyst,
whose work is likely woven from and into a whole weltanschauung. Again, this comes at a price,
of lesser severity but similar kind as that exacted for denying Dionysos his due, in the tale by
Euripedes. The “vine that cures sorrows” signifies not just grapes, but all the boundary solvents
that allow Eros to flow and Hermes to make his revisions and sing his songs.

People have always come around, after fallow or repressed periods, to pay attention to the body,
to ecstasy in its various forms, to the sub- and meta-symbolic, to the skin, to the poetic lacunae,
wavelengths, and “energy fields” that inevitably envelope us, or arise when one or more people
pay attention in a particular way. Once upon a time, there were yoga and tai chi, in their original
forms. And here they are again, among other esoteric arts, such as reiki and feng shui, in both
austere and commercialized forms to fit the tastes of contemporary cultures. Today, in schools
and hospitals, we have prosaically-named occupational therapists, particularly those addressing
sensory integration difficulties, offering a whole-person approach to tuning and promoting
growth in the psyche-soma so that the discords originating within the body and in response to the
sensory deluge can be eased, emotions managed, and capacity for thinking and doing promoted.
The reader may notice that music therapy as a distinct specialty has barely been mentioned in
this book on the missing music of psychoanalysis. This is because I don’t know much about it. I
have enjoyed what I have read, and have wondered what it would be like to submit my
questionable facility on various instruments to a hypothetical musical “analysis”, getting away
entirely from the verbal focus of all else I do in my clinical life. Certainly, there is no lack of
depth to the thinking and writing of its representative practitioners. In the meantime, I have a
lifetime of immersion in making and listening to music, reflection on attention and the boundary
between events and the subject, and eighteen years of clinical attention to the phenomena that
flow in and around the concepts and contents of session to remind me of the gap between
existing paradigms, whichever they are, and the totality that envelopes the faculties. Not to
mention the influx of impressions and easing of mood and breath offered during my yoga,
meditation, and solitary noodling on the neglected instruments in my home. These nourish my

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sleeping, dreaming, and comfort in my dealings with people. These elements of soul-hygiene are
an essential compliment to the intellectual and professional rigor I strive to bring to my work –
perhaps, to some degree, they are a precondition to thinking and working in a genuine manner.
Ours is a work of heart and sensitivity, along with intellectual acuity and reserve.

So, clearly there are “topics for future study and development”, areas of further reconnaissance
and diplomatic outreach for depth psychologists interested in the nuances and depth of the non-
verbal life of the mind. The practitioners of various “body therapies”, and “eastern spiritual”
disciplines, will likely all attest that, on a practical level, their work heals, makes emotions less
intense or the subject more emotionally durable, thoughts clearer and less conflicted, patience
extended, attachments both more stable, satisfying, and less urgent, relations more respectful.
They are both transcendent, and daily forms of hygiene. The musculoskeletal system grows more
supple and strong. Yoga, in addition to its justifiably popular benefits with respect to strength,
flexibility, attitude, and immune and cardiovascular health, has been shown to be an effective
adjunct therapy in addiction treatment (Kissen & Kissen-Kohn, 2009). Various forms of
meditation have been found to produce dramatic positive changes in temperament, concentration,
and neurobiology (Shapiro, et al, 2003). The intersection with Buddhism has been particularly
fruitful in the last two decades. We have had to look to the east to remember how to breathe in a
sensible and nourishing way, and to find that a synchrony of breath and motion makes for a more
supple frame of mind, more elastic thoughts, a better fit within the flesh. Good for what ails you,
and it promotes clear thinking, and, just maybe, better relations between people. Science has
gone a ways toward validating what practitioners have known for centuries before the first
microbe yielded to a synthetic antibiotic, expressed in William James (1936) century-old
observation that
“most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle
of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their
possible consciousness. We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not
dream.”

To the rejoinder that psychoanalysis and depth psychology are not really meant to accomplish all
these things, or that one or any of its forms accomplishes something none of the other healing
arts can, I say, well and good. It has its own ethos. It was conceived and its varietals flowered in

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a time and a place, and at a particular cost. It is a therapy, an outlook on life, an academic
treasure trove, and more. And yet without large doses of irony and curiosity about what lies
outside the range of its instruments, it runs risks – of marginalizing whole swathes of life and
thought, of internecine and imperialist appetite, of monastic and myopic dissection of the living
culture it encounters. As it is in religion, so it shall be in science. We have the tools, the
restraint, the ethos to interrupt our own worst tendencies. But too much insularity, too little
visceral contact, music, laughter, and awe - and the juiciness of life24, analyzed or not, is lost.
The field has a conflicted relationship with the expressive arts, and their creators, at its roots, and
it is still with us.

I hope and suspect that nuanced, reflective, uncensored private dialogue both survive and evolve
into future millennia, alongside neurobiology, each mutually informing, with hard-won
shepherding of our reductive, hegemonic inclinations. We have added a highly refined
instrument of self-knowledge to the orchestra, albeit a peculiar one that still tends to make
perversions of most of the erotic and romantic palette, and symptoms or at least targets for
deconstruction of works of imagination. And it is one that in its brief history has come to know
and absorb little of music, of the resonances, complexities, and ecstasies of other membranes
besides the mucous and erotogenic. Nor anything of jazz, or any of the improvisational musics
which flower on the knife edge of passion and sense. Again, this is not a battle between
ideologies, but a reminder that whether we strive to be helpful, to develop our angle on this
apotheosis of means to self-knowledge, or something in between, we must neither ablate nor
ignore what others have known before us, nor pit one dimension of the psychic space, and its
proponents, against the others. If this sounds like a call to some insufferable psychoanalytic
pluralism, then, so be it. Music is a great cultural bridge, which unifies the plural culture of the
psyche, the country of the mind, as much as any other. It animates deadened language and life
grown static. In a healing art that has, at its core, some of the suffering and speechlessness it
aims to heal, some spaces that don’t resound, a bit of musical re-vitalization must be welcome.

24
A memorable use of “juice” borrowed from Michael Eigen (1998a, 1998b)

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Addis, L. (1999) Of mind and music. Ithaca: Cornell University Press

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Ansermet, F. and Fairfield, S. (2007). Biology of freedom: neural plasticity, experience and the
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