Interdisciplinary or “applied” psychoanalysis has tended to direct its attention to the plastic and literary arts, while neglecting music as a subject for serious inquiry. Various reasons suggest themselves: Freud's expressed indifference to music and the very abstract nature of musical language come to mind. Still, a number of musically trained analysts and analytically trained musicians have ventured into this territory (see, e.g., Ostwald and Zegans 1993; Feder 1992), and prominent among them is Julie Jaffee Nagel, who has dedicated her professional life to the exploration of this interface.

In the present volume she has assembled, edited, and rewritten a number of her publications aimed at demonstrating the possibility, indeed