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In a meeting room at the United Nations headquarters in New York City hangs an early 20th-century Persian carpet from the city of Isfahan, which, amongst its elaborate geometric patterns, contains, in gold lettering, a poem by the 13th-century Iranian poet Sa'adi Shirazi. The first two lines read:
English translations vary, but a good faith one renders the words as such:
The sons of Adam are limbs of one framefor in creation, from one jewel they came.
The book Here I'm Alive! The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis by Adam Blum, Peter Goldberg, and Michael Levin uses music as the basis for a radical re-reading of psychoanalysis, rendering it no longer just a method to make the unconscious conscious but a means to re-attach the dismembered and dissociated aspects of lived experience back into the shared bodily frame of humanity. Sharing Sa'adi's metaphor for humanity, they present a vision or should I say symphony of psychoanalytic theory and practice that emphasizes the connectivity between the body and the mind as well as the communal and the individual, where the foundational animating metaphors of the analytic process are no longer visual, linguistic, or tactile (think: frame, holding, container) but instead auditory and therefore musical.
They view psychoanalysis as a form of socialization without indoctrinating, a means to fold the dissociated and alienated aspects of human experience back into the individual and communal psyche-soma not through domination and forced conformity but rather attunement and translation. The authors explore the musical foundations of psychoanalytic theory and, in so doing, provide a radically different way of thinking about
psychoanalytic practice. I will not be able to present a thorough account of the ideas in this dense book, but instead, I will present a summary of a few key concepts within it.
As a non-representational art form, music occupies a liminal space between the body and the mind. Sound waves vibrate and, therefore, move t