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Elective Affinities is proud to include in this issue a fine piece of essay writing by one of Canada's most interesting young psychoanalytic thinkers, Christian Godbout (2002; 2004a, 2004b, 2005a, 2005b). The text presented here offers a highly personal and, I believe, emotionally profound combination of M. Godbout's considerable talents as a writer, musician, philosopher, and psychoanalytic clinician.
“Le privilège musical” confirms the value of the personal essay form as a vehicle for the transmission and dissemination of knowledge and research in the psychoanalytic field. It can be counted as a model example in the great European tradition of essay writing to which Freud belonged, stemming from Montaigne, through Samuel Johnson and Hazlitt, to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, among many others in the last century.
Psychoanalysis is known as a self-consciously language-obsessed discipline, but this emphasis stems primarily from its interest in meanings generated from emotional experiences that are not necessarily verbal in form. Indeed, much of psychoanalytic theory rests on inferences about consequential forms of mental activity that antedate linguistic development or in some other way escape full accounting in the order of language. It might be described as an attempt to make sense of the least accessible areas of affective life in a rational verbal manner—to open them up to systematic investigation in a way that one hopes does not do them too much violence. In clinical work with individual patients, theory and scientific research, and other kinds of commentary on human affairs, psychoanalysis tries to locate a generalizable centre of gravity in all that seems idiosyncratic or ineffable about human life.