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I felt more alive after reading this ambitious book. It asks us to think through a music that affords expressive and embodied modalities. Music is here a technology for sensing our, your and my living being, as individualities always interweaved through the social. The authors call this ‘socio-cultural-individual musical system the weave’ (p. xii, emphasis in the original). And, in reference to those places where this weave is frayed, the authors examine one’s consequent deadening to a larger world - as well as the therapeutic means through which one might be reinduced into practices of worlding. ‘Music’ accordingly unfurls different lines in this book: in an elaboration beyond the word’s normative definition - although that is not forgotten - one is led to imagine how a more attuned musicality contributes to better knowing and feeling what it is to be alive.
The urgency of this book is grounded in two contemporary challenges. First, there are the material and psychical conditions of twenty-first-century living, in which atomized individuals bear the pressures of burnout and information overload. Our time, the authors write in chapter 3, entails a ‘loss of access to communion with others, resulting in sensory isolation, cocooning-in-the-world, an anti-culture of sensory imprisonment and personal isolation’ (p. 56). The dialectic of self-other and individual-social that are pursued, both as an implicit method and at times explicit theme of the book, is an important contribution to resources addressing these issues. Music, which is ‘never the creation of an individual in isolation’ (p. 5), is a locus for rethinking and refeeling what this dialectic is.
Second, there is the challenge of what psychoanalytic thinking can and should do in response to these conditions. Accordingly, the authors suggest that today’s psychoanalysis be valued as interrupting the ‘onslaught of sense-ablating stimulation’ experienced in contemporary life (p. 49), and as addressing the widespread d