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Freud held that creative writers - and this might be extended to artists generally - could arrive intuitively at the same knowledge that psychoanalysis acquires through a laborious empirical process (Freud, 1907). Of all the arts, music, by its nature, is the one that lends itself most particularly to evoking the most profound aspects of a human being: indeed Schopenhauer claimed, with good reason, that it allowed one to apprehend the nature of the world without the mediation of representations.
I have, in the past (Lombardi, 2008), explored the clinical implications of the analyst's musical associations as a part of the more general function of psycho-sensory reverie, whose roots reach into the unconscious and the pre-verbal dimension: the presence of music in the analyst's mind collects the scattered sense impressions of the session, arranging them in an organized spatio-temporal flow, thus facilitating the emerging temporal organization of the analysand's mind. The development of an awareness of time fosters the development of one's own spatio-temporality, which is rooted in the body: in this way the subject organizes the sensory matrices of his/her own identity and is less subject to the pressures of imitative dynamics.
In connection with my interest in the role of music in the analytic relationship, I have also repeatedly observed how the appearance of musical references in the analysand's communications can coincide with the activation of significant dynamics of change, in which the subject begins to be aware of and identify with her/his own bodily dimension and to develop inexpressible sense experiences. I maintain, in fact, that we can now no longer take for granted the coherence between body and mind in those difficult patients we are used to treating in analysis: indeed we often find this condition reaching even to the point where the body and the mind have become mutually inaccessible (cf. Lombardi, 2002, 2007). Consequently the analytic working through sho