This paper is about listening. It sounds simple. In music and psychoanalysis, listening is something so fundamental as to be nearly taken for granted. Indeed, it might be easy to suppose there is little to be said that has not already been heard. There is an appreciable body of literature on psychoanalytic listening and, as for music, it goes without saying that listening is an absolute requisite. But the shared necessity of engaged listening is only the beginning.

I believe music2 and psychoanalysis most significantly overlap in the domain of emotion—the communication and registering of feelings. The aesthetic, philosophical, and psychological components underlying all manner of emotional response are intimately interrelated and, I contend, are substantively the same in music and the analytic situation; they are actually, not analogously, comparable.

There is also an historical connection. It is important to realize that psychoanalytic thought and