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In the Forward to this short book, Music explains that a version of it was originally published as part of a series of slim volumes commissioned by the Freud Museum, and re-published by Icon books in 2001. He says: ‘I don’t know if I am pleased or worried that so many of the themes in this short book are ones that still preoccupy me and which are present in much of my later writing’ (p. ii). This put me in mind of one of the surprising pleasures of teaching psychoanalytic theory. Each time you revisit a seminal text, wondering if it is really necessary to read the whole thing again this year, you find you’re glad you did because it’s changed again! Of course, it’s me who has changed, bringing a different lens, depending on my recent experiences, which make different aspects salient to me each time I reread it.
If much of what Music was writing about 20 years before, is still what interests him now, perhaps this is because psychoanalytic ideas are alive, growing in response to the way they are used. They become ever more intricate in their applications to individual patients, and simultaneously become more generalisable, as an ever-widening range of specific instances can be pooled to render an increasingly accurate blueprint or essential version of each idea. In this way, we are never done learning about psychoanalytic ideas, because they are not static.
Psychoanalytic ideas are particularly alive and given to growth in Music’s hands because he keeps them in dialogue with both his clinical experience, and with other schools of thought. He is famous for illuminating the ways in which neuroscience and attachment, but also ideas on culture and development, offer helpful support for psychoanalytic ideas, as well as challenging them. The important thing here is that he allows a reciprocal dialogue: where his clinical experience and findings from other fields demand revision of theory, he welcomes this as developmental. He tells us that this edition of the book ‘keeps much