“Silence the Pianos … Let the Mourners Come”*: How a Moment of Musical Rupture Transformed Kohut’s Tragic Man, in Life and in the Analytic Hour

This paper examines a minor yet significant musical/psychoanalytic moment from our joint perspective as a psychotherapist (Ephrat Havron) and a pianist (Ido Ariel). We wish to present a small, modest musical moment from a concert—a 2-minute song where the singer choked up and could not continue singing. This moment demonstrated the potential for the Tragic Man to escape the tragic nature through art. We will first address how the transformative moment became possible in the concert hall and then explore the clinical implications of this experience by presenting a vignette from an analytic session the morning after the concert. We will argue that precisely because of the singer’s rupture, all those present assumed a selfobject role: the singer to the audience, the pianist to the singer, the audience to the artists. For one fleeting minute, this musical moment elicited a selfobject presence with an inspiring impact, allowing us all, if only briefly, to transcend tragicness. This experience and its interpretation engendered an empathic stance, enabling a selfobject stance in the analytic session the following day. We hope to modestly contribute to understanding art’s potential to transform, even temporarily, the state of the Tragic Man here in conflicted times.