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Three collaborators, Adam Blum, Peter Goldberg, and Michael Levin, join the small chorus of psychoanalysts and philosophers who have attempted the formidable task of unlocking the importance, mystery, meaning, and value of music in our lives. The authors are listed in their biographies simply as members of the Bay Area psychoanalytic community.
Their book, Here I’m Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis, explores the polemic of music as the interface between being human in culture, thereby expanding a psychoanalytic view of human development that traditionally evolves from the coos and gurgles of the nursery into language. The writer-trio suggests that an internal and external interplay of various theoretical elements of music (i.e., rhythms, melodies, and harmonies) begins, inchoately, before birth and resonates throughout one’s lifetime, somatically and psychologically, to create what they call a “weave” or interplay between internal and external stimuli that they ascertain are inherently and fundamentally musical.
The authors’ approach to this topic reminds me of Erik Erikson’s 1950 classic “The Eight Stages of Man” that uses but expands Freud’s concept of stages. Erikson’s schema extends and conceptualizes development as life-long and adds societal and physical development to the psychology that evolves from the infant’s relationship with their caregivers. Erikson’s theory of development emphasizes, without naming music, the lifelong influence of infant sounds or
music (i.e., coos and gurgles) beginning in the nursery. According to the book’s authors, this music etween infant and caregivers becomes a prominent force that contributes to feelings of confidence, mastery, control, and relationships first with parents and then others not only through language but through sounds of the initial ohhs, ahs, gurgles, coos that are musicalized (emphasis added).
Here I’m Alive. The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis’s s parts with Erikson’s developmental theory, howeve