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Roger Kennedy’s book The Power of Music joins a small but growing library of psychoanalytic literature about what is arguably the most difficult of all subjects to articulate. It is a welcome addition and has a wide-ranging scope. The overarching question that preoccupies him is how to understand why music, western classical music in particular, affects the listener on such a deep, emotional and intellectual level. What is happening when we have a musical experience that puts us in touch with our feelings in this way and what are the origins of its power? “Music has the power to take us on an emotional and intellectual journey transforming the listener along the way; the aim of the book is to examine the nature of this journey” (1).
The prospect of this is appetizing and the reader is provided with a rich variety of ideas, thoughts and speculations derived from many fields and examined with scholarship and enthusiasm for the author’s subject. The subtitle of the book – Psychoanalytic explorations – gives an idea of Kennedy’s reference point as a psychoanalyst; however, he believes that to fully appreciate music’s impact on the emotions, one needs to piece together information from a variety of disciplines. He does this by not only looking at psychoanalytic connections and perspectives, but also bringing neuro-scientific, philosophical, cultural, evolutionary, biological and musicological views to the task. His method is thus to elucidate the question by examining it through a number of different lenses, as if approaching music as a multidimensional aesthetic object, while acknowledging that at its heart lies a mystery that “reaches into areas of experience where words leave off” (148).
The notion of a multiplicity of voices is one Kennedy previously elaborated in his book The Many Voices of Psychoanalysis (2007) and perhaps this gives a clue to his approach here. In that book, he writes that “the analyst needs access to a multiplicity of voices in order to take accoun