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Reading the book Melodies of the Mind by the psychoanalyst and musician Julie Jaffee Nagel was analogous to peeling back the layers of the unconscious, a process that was slow and reflective with punctuated moments of insight and satisfaction. The lyrical title and the striking image of a violin and a bow resting on a vibrant red analytic couch suggested an unusual encounter with music and psychoanalysis. Nagel presents an in-depth and sophisticated scholarly exploration of the interplay between Freud's oral road of psychoanalysis and the aural road of music as a convergence of her two disciplines that create a particular road to the unconscious. In Melodies of the Mind, Nagel uses personal reflections, clinical work, and scholarly knowledge to build upon the commonalities that exist between classical music and classical analysis, all the while showing us how the specific details of European music history and theory are beneficial and enlightening to the art of psychoanalysis.
I resonate with Nagel's premise that an integrated analytic approach that includes the creative arts offers nourishment for analysts and unique and important clinical benefits. Nagel builds her thesis on a classical Freudian structure, but by using these psychoanalytic concepts, she deftly pulls from her classical trainings to demonstrate that ‘music itself [is] a primary source of psychological data… the distinctive method of analysis that I bring to my interdisciplinary exploration of mental processes and affect’ (p. 4). Nagel's interdisciplinary focus on analysing the structure of music suggests the art concept of isomorphism, which is the internal psychological state of the artist being expressed through process and structure of the visual product (Arnheim, 1974). Mozart departed from his compositional style when he wrote his Sonatas during the summer when his mother died. ‘Emotionally, the music… reflect[s] the duality of Mozart's affects during 1778: both the “happiness” he sought in his