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From its beginning, psychoanalysis has been an interdisciplinary enterprise. For example, Freud utilized ancient Greek literature to organize his model of the human mind. At its best, this interdisciplinary dimension
can set in motion a virtuous cycle of enrichment and influence. Psychoanalytic ideas open avenues for experiencing art and culture more deeply; in turn literature, theater, and cinema are themselves influenced by analytic theories and bring them alive with more elaboration. Social, behavioral, and neurosciences all have been influenced by analytic ideas and are sources of ongoing impact on evolving psychoanalytic concepts.
As a founding faculty member of the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity and as an author five books and more than 160 articles, this book’s author, Frank Lachman, has a long and distinguished career. He has been an important contributor to the field of self-psychology. His interdisciplinary work with Beatrice Beebe and others has made a major contribution by bridging the fields of psychoanalysis and infant research; he has brought seminal insights to and from the consulting room with adult patients and the infant observation laboratory.
Lachman is among many analytic theorists who have sought to show the role of music in psychological life. Recent authors (Barale & Minazzi; Grier; Whitebook1) have pointed out that Freud took pains to exclude music from his analytic theorizing. Freud privileged language and visual imagery as communication from the unconscious. Freud writes of his difficulty with music:
Nevertheless, works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting. This has occasioned me, when I have been contemplating such things, to spend a long time before trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Whenever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pl