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Grier's paper sets out to show that ‘(m)usic can act as an aesthetic container for the feelings of a community: a container which itself expresses the combination of extreme and conflicting emotion’ (p. 530). He points to the value of listening to the musicality of often wordless states of chaos and destruction found in and out of the consulting room, particularly in times of extreme conflict, shuttling in focus from an individual's world of internal objects to wars being waged within families and between peoples on large scales: ‘the contents of the musical containers of my discussion have to do especially with the external realities of conflict, horror, and grief, and their impact on our internal worlds’ (p. 530). Grier engages in depth with three masterpieces of the Western Classical music tradition, briefly acknowledging the limit of this focus. Referencing biographical accounts of the composers' lives at the time of writing, and positioning himself firmly within the psychanalytic tradition of object relations, his underlying thesis rests on the twin theories of the oedipal problem and the warring of the life and death instincts, love and hate—the depressive position holding the place of the ‘wisdom of disillusion’ (p. 544), which, when worked through, may offer up, following Segal and Winnicott, the place of creativity. The author's intention appears to be to stress the sublime capacity of the musical ear to hear and contain feelings and emotions that might otherwise be inarticulable. He compares the process of composing with that of psychoanalysis contending that both ‘… allow their own being to be penetrated and filled with the inarticulable horror in order that the effect can not so much be constructed, as emerge from their very being’ (p. 532). I am reminded of Jung's insistence that the analyst be prepared to be infected by the patient and indeed accept that the reverse is also the case.
The passages on and analyses of the three musical pieces reveals a mus