Well-Tempered Bagatelles—A Meditation on Listening in Psychoanalysis & Music1

Teach me half the gladness / That thy brain must know, / Such harmonious madness / From my lips would flow, / The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

Listening is a cardinal feature of psychoanalytic work. Its elemental importance transcends and unifies all other components of theory and technique. No matter an analyst's theoretical orientation, and irrespective of the conceptual frame in which the listening is organized or of its focus at any given moment during an analytic session, listening is an activity underlying every aspect of the analytic interaction occurring within the auditory sphere.

Separately, a consideration of signal moments of the early part of the twentieth century reveals the coincidental emergence of psychoanalytic thought and the onset of fundamental alterations in music (such as serialism, 12-tone rows, and experimentation with sonority and form). A primary part of the overall task undertaken by early twentieth century composers was the implementation of a replacement system for governing the organization of sound in time. The implications for the project of psychoanalytic listening pioneered by Freud were no less momentous: to listen to the sounds of the human experience in a radically different, and profoundly deeper, way. Both psychoanalysis and contemporary music clearly derive from the breadth of each of their respective histories: Freud no more created the notion of the unconscious, ex nihilo, than could Schoenberg have written his first 12-tone works without benefit of the entire musical corpus which preceded him. Each is rooted in systems of thought, aesthetics