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This inspiring book—lyrical and profoundly original—is in danger of making its review into a mere ode. Dana Amir here brings together music, poetry, photography, inter alia to psychoanalysis to deepen what I would like to think of as the “lyrical school of psychoanalysis.” The faded and receding image of the author on the cover, which you almost miss, sets the tone for the penumbra regions Amir takes one to. This deceptively slim book is an intimate meditation on the music of listening.
In the prelude, she recalls trips to the woods with her father, straining to concentrate on just one sound, closing her eyes to cut out all other stimuli: “senses can get in each other’s way” (p. xvii). The attentiveness to sounds Amir illuminates makes for an intimacy embedded in the posture of listening. The first chapter elaborates slowly a founding analogy which traces the relationship between tonality and atonality in music. Tonality is the “condition” upon which most music is organized (p. 1). There are syntactical arrangements like rhythm, beat and refrain that usher in reliability. Atonality on the other hand, notably in jazz, disrupts these assumptions. The atonal moments in music might feel jarring, disruptive or uncanny. Psychoanalysis steers us towards the atonal areas of the mind, the uncanny moments, like the navel of the dream.
Music—indeed aesthetic experience itself—may be born from the tension between tonality and atonality. Using Bion’s (1962) idea of links, she argues that the relationship between these two conditions may be commensal, symbiotic or parasitic. Furthermore, Amir suggests that the relations between tonality and atonality may not just refer to the psychic zones. Could it be, she asks, that psyches may be born with atonal or tonal dispositions?
Atonal psychic movement is not marked by substitution, but by a collapse. This is a preoccupation that runs like a thread through the essays—moments when language collapses. This Derridean preoccupation inflects mu