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If you have ever worried that psychoanalysis may have put itself in an intellectual ghetto, and that the extraordinarily rich insights of our gifted clinicians are failing to engage an ongoing dialogue with the wider world, here is a book to confirm your anxieties. A work of massive scholarship relating to the mental development of infants (24 papers, 37 authors, 627 pages, weighing close to 3 pounds), it includes not a single reference to Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Mahler or Bion. Among psychoanalysts, Daniel Stern alone is abundantly referenced; John Bowlby, in many ways an ancestral figure for Stern, receives one mention. The authors are developmental psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists, musicians, anthropologists, music therapists; Jaak Panksepp, rather wonderfully, is a Professor of Animal Wellbeing Science. Trevarthen himself was until recently Professor of Child Psychology and Psychobiology at Edinburgh University. Not one of the authors is a psychoanalyst.
The topic, however, has to be of profound interest to psychoanalytic thinkers. The editors intend ‘musicality’ as a term of the utmost generality: they write: ‘It is our common musicality that makes it possible for us to share time meaningfully together’ (p. 5), and they show convincingly how psychology, prior to the late 1960s, was blinded to this fact by its prejudice in favour of problem-solving and the belief that ‘communication’ was primarily to do with cognitive information processing. (Trevarthen and Malloch do not, of course, think these functions are unimportant; merely that they emerge out of the deeper space of ‘musicality’ and the whole world of dance-like nonverbal communications that Daniel Stern called ‘vitality affects’.)
It is impossible, in the space of a short book review, to comment on all the papers in a book of such scope, variety and often densely packed erudition. Rather than try to say a few dutiful words about each in turn, I shall, very arbitrarily, comment on half a dozen of t