“It was Desire Itself”: The Use of a Hook in Music and Psychoanalysis

The word “hook” is used in both music and psychoanalysis to designate a distinct though not entirely unrelated phenomenon in each of those fields (which are perhaps themselves not entirely unrelated). Though not a strict technical term in either context, “hook” has made up for in utility and popularity (having an intrinsic relationship to each field) what it has lacked in theoretical specificity. Psychoanalytic discussions often acknowledge that a patient finds a hook of reality in the analyst on which to hang projections, specifically of one's “infantile prototypes” (Freud, 1915), resulting in transference. The coinage of the term in this context can be traced to Sterba (1944) who analogized the role of the analyst, with its element of influence upon the patient, to that of a “good fisherman, who knows how to play the fish after it is caught on the hook [of transference]” (p. 148). He continues.

[T]he formative activity in our therapy can be likened to the other power essential to the artist's creation: the ability to give his idea form, to body it forth into the final artistic product, (p. 148)

Sterba offers an associative link from the initial image of the fisherman's hook to a comment on the creative act, a notable sequence in which hooking operates as a precondition for not only a therapeutic experience, but an artistic one. The hook prepares the creative act. Sterba's metaphor gives form to an idea that Freud (1912, 1915) had begun to develop several decades prior: that the way in which a patient comes to discover or locate or perceive, through a mixture of phantasy and reality, some aspect of his/her own history in the person of the analyst is in fact the desired mechanism by which transference, or “transference-love,” proceeds, as implicit in his assertion that “the resistance [of transference-love] did not, after all, create this love; it finds it ready to hand, makes use of it and aggravates its manifestations” (p. 168). Such aggravations become the grist fo