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Roger Kennedy, a British psychoanalyst and child and adolescent psychiatrist, has published a comprehensive book on the effects of music. Numerous studies and psychoanalytic texts have shown how and why music affects different levels of experience. There has long been general agreement that music has a variety of effects on people. However, there is no agreement on the underlying processes of how music touches the inner depths (p. 16). What distinguishes this monograph is that it not only integrates empirical research findings and psychoanalytic considerations, but also shows how they complement each other. In doing this, the author considers the work of composers and musicologists as well as the reflections of philosophers and psychoanalysts, and the findings of neuroscientists.
Among other things, the author introduces the thesis that the intensity of the artistic vision is responsible for the power of music and distinguishes between the cognitive and the emotive perspective on the relationship between music and emotion (p. 2). He points out the important theoretical distinction that music can be understood either as inducing emotion or as expressing emotion. In dealing with the emotional effect of music, parallels and similarities between musical listening and (psycho)analytic listening are pointed out and this is a common thread running through the book. Both modes of listening are intense musical experiences. After all, psychoanalysis is about grasping the deeper unconscious structures and moving as an analyst on different
levels of experience in order to enable processes of change.
In his approach Kennedy not only addresses well-known psychoanalytic concepts such as free association or Winnicott’s intermediate area, but also refers to contemporary psychoanalysts such as Francis Grier, Riccardo Lombardi and Julie J. Nagel, who are musicians themselves and have contributed remarkable approaches to the similarities and peculiarities of music and psychoanalysis. P