On: The Comment of Stein

Dear Editors,

Upon reading the comment of Alexander Stein (Stein, 2007) on Dantlgraber's review of my book about music (Dantlgraber, 2007), I would like to make a brief remark. Stein noted that my book is not the first psychoanalytic text about music and lists various articles, beginning with Noys' thoughts . This is perfectly true. Since Bardas' first article in Imago (Bardas 1917), musical topics have been subject to psychoanalytical investigation. To my knowledge Michel (1965) was the first author to publish an anthology of this field in France, followed by in the USA and Bernd Oberhoff (2002) in Germany.

But what does that mean? That we possess a psychoanalytical theory of music? I cannot see one. Many texts about music deal specifically with the relational interplay of an opera, with the personality of a composer, with the creative process as such, or propose that music has something to do with emotions. But what could be a psychoanalytical theory of music? Which criteria must we apply if we want to speak about a coherent theory? Firstly, I think, such a theory has seriously to question the nature of music. And this question, to my conviction, cannot be answered by recourse to Freud or Lacan, but has to be based upon newer psychoanalytical theories, such as those which consider the structure of the early organization of sensual perception (Ogden, 1989; Tustin, 1981).

Rooted in a concept of a psychic process that is organized beyond the structures of language and unconscious fantasies, a psychoanalytical theory of music has to explain from a coherent point of view such different phenomena as: the roots of music in primitive experience with the partial object voice, beginning in utero; the fate of these archaic experiences in the later psychic organization; the linguistic form which this experience takes in music; the mythological reflection of this area of psychic life (which I see in the myth of Orpheus) and many more.