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The book under review is designed to illustrate how a therapist, identified with the intersubjective-relational school, works effectively with his patients by employing musical concepts as part of the therapeutic dialogue. In a series of nine chapters, the therapeutic dialogue is depicted in musical terms: Listening to the Rhythm (Ch. 1); Listening to the Tone (Ch. 2); Improvisation and Accompaniment (Ch. 3); The Unspoken Dialogue (Ch. 4); From the Individual Notes to the Expanding Composition (Ch. 5); Mind Metaphors (Ch. 6); Play and Interplay: The Counterpoint of Subjective Bodies and Experiencing Desire (Ch. 7); Listening to the Dialogue of Harmony and Dissonance (Ch. 8); and Coda (Ch. 9).
While blueprints for this approach date back to the self-psychology of the 1980's (see Dunn, 1995; Hitchcock, 1989) as well as therapeutic concepts associated with the relational school of psychoanalysis, the author's own contributions and modifications are exemplified by a postmodern, neologistic definition of psychoanalysis: “the creation of an imaginary place, a way of attending and affecting, where time and space absorb, stretch, and contract in an interwash” (p. 2). Thus, the reader should not expect in his/her literary journey to come across such landmark demarcations as the study of free association, transference-countertransference, analysis of defenses, dream interpretation, and unconscious fantasy. They have gone the way of the Viennese waltz. Instead, this text stresses the co-creation of the psychotherapeutic (musical) relationship, emphasizing a jazz-oriented improvisational format where East meets West and vice versa. Listening to what is verbalized is supplemented by the “musical qualities” of language and dyadic interaction. The therapist is the metaphorical musical accompanist whose role is not to analyze, i.e. offering interpretations and exploring enactments in relation to projective identification. Rather, it is the here-and-now “musical environment”—the atte