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In addition to being in memorial to Dr. Schillinger, this essay is also dedicated to my mother Alicia Malca-Alcee who taught me how to read the changes and find wonder at every new turn in our work as therapists.
“The psychoanalyst's job is to turn neurotic misery into personal suffering that is beyond category”
Unbeknownst to himself, Freud ushers in psychoanalysis as a jazz art form. From his earliest work with Miss Lucy R. and Fraulein Elisabeth Von R. in Studies on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1895/2000), where he guides patients to “concentrate” and yet openly report “faithfully whatever appeared before [their] inner eye or passed through [thei]r memory at the moment” (Breuer & Freud, 1895/2000, p. 145), to his primary advice to beginning therapists on evenly hovering attention (Freud, 1995), Freud champions both free association and a disciplined approach to following the dynamic changes of the psyche. His method requires and celebrates a spontaneous and improvisational receptivity to experience. In allowing patients the freedom to not worry about censoring any of their thoughts and feelings, he echoes jazz vibraphonist Stefon Harris' keen observation (Harris, 2011) that: “There are no mistakes on the bandstand!”
According to Harris (2011), one shouldn't force or commandeer the band but rather open and flow into new territory together, with both the ensemble and soloist truly listening and expressing simultaneously. With the complementary processes of evenly hovering attention and free association, Freud's work mirrors the jazz aesthetic. His was a revolutionary movement towards mutual interplay and, to bend Sullivan's phrase (Sullivan, 1954), profoundly observant participation.
A 19th century poem by Frances Cornford (1965) sums up this lovely process best. Entitled “The Guitarist Tunes Up,” we learn that this musician leans into their instrument with “attentive courtesy”:
Not as a lordly conqueror who couldCommand both wire and w