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There is a rich literature on the power of music to create and convey the varieties of emotional experience (Janovitz, 2023; Juslin & Laukka, 2003; Juslin & Sloboda, 2010; Kennedy, 2020; Kramer, 2007; Rogers & Ogas, 2022), to touch the spirit of what it means to be human (Bernstein, 1976, 2004; Cott, 2013), to comfort (Feneberg et al., 2023), to facilitate access to unconscious process (Reik, 1953), to engage us in intersubjective exploration (with the performing artists, composers, lyricists) and consolidation of Self (Lachmann, 2022), and to “ … significantly influence the listener’s capacity to feel, to access affects that otherwise may be verbally inexpressible and/or emotionally unavailable … an aural pathway to emotion and unconscious process …” (Nagel, 2013, p. 4). Indeed, the bedrock discipline of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis is mindful listening to the music we compose together with our patients in each therapeutic moment, attending to more than lexical content. As Shapiro et al. (2017) put it:
The verbal dimension of the patient’s presentation can be compared to musical notes that comprise the score of his or her conscious life. A rich, nonverbal prosody carries the melody of the score’s interactions and conveys its relational context and its somatic, affective, and associative impact on its listener, that is, the therapist. How is the story told? Why is it told now. (p. 228)
Like jazz musicians, we improvise and co-create melodies moment-to-moment with our patients (Frost, 2015; Knoblauch, 1997, 2000, 2021), seeking to discover how their interactive patterns and inner narratives make sense – given lived experience – and to find ways to help block them, mobilize the will to change, and to learn more vitalizing, creative, and generative ways of engaging with the world (Benjamin, 2018; Lichtenberg et al., 1996, 2014, 2017).
The essays in this issue have approached the notion of musicality (and sometimes, more broadly, embodied communication) – the somethin