Editorial: Towards a Listening Thinking

The title of this Editorial is borrowed from an essay in an anthology on musical art, dance and aesthetics (1). The essay takes as its departure point the Greek concept ‘mousike’ which is much broader and more undifferentiated than our ‘music’. ‘Music’, as a verbal term, compared to ‘mousike’ can be seen as an example of the typical western development of thinking into more and more specific concepts, which then may be interrelated to each other. ‘Mousike’ on the other hand seems to be more akin to eastern traditions of a more holistic kind of thinking, where specifics unfold from the whole without being separated from it. One way of putting it is that western thought favours contiguity between elements, while ‘Mousike’ and eastern thought favours continuity. As I understand it, ‘Mousike’ thus relates to different ways of giving attention to, observing and psychologically transforming what is, compared to our usual western thinking.

Psycho-analysis, as in so many respects, simultaneously leans in two directions — towards western rationality and towards a ‘mousical’ orientation. In a way this split can be seen in the very word that Freud chose for our discipline. ‘Psyche’ would then represent the ‘mousical’ tendency, related to the whole Greek mythology as it is, and exemplified in the psychoanalytic universe by the predilection for other myths such as Oedipus, Narcissus and so on. The second part of ‘psycho-analysis’ has the etymological root meaning to ‘dissolve’. ‘Analysis’ can stand as sign for a basic pattern of thinking in western science and philosophy. It has so deeply entrained into our world view that we hardly are able to consider any other way of thinking as thinking.

The ‘mousical’ and the ‘analytical’ can perhaps loosely be related to different aspects of psychoanalysis. The ‘mousical’ is more typical for the actual psycho-analytic work with patients, while analysis is more closely knit to theory production, theoretical teaching and learning and theoretic