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In Musicophilia Oliver Sacks ventures deep into the heart of psychoanalytic territory and provides passports for psychoanalysts, neurologists, and music therapists to journey into each other's countries. Drawing on the case study method of medicine as well as erudite familiarity with anthropology and deep respect for the healing potential of music therapy as a field and for music as therapy, he returns over and over again to the topics of memory and of relationship as the coinage of treatment. Although psychoanalysts disagree about theoretical models, we agree on the centrality of these concepts. I am sure this is why many in our field will find this book compelling.
Webster's Third International Dictionary defines “philia” as “attraction towards” or “abnormal appetite for,” two very different shades of meaning, and both meanings are applicable to Dr. Sacks's title. In the text, he casts his medical as well as his musical eye over the whole spectrum of musical phenomena: musical gifts, abnormalities, and obsessions. At both ends of the spectrum, excess and deficiency, genius and affliction, he is intensely curious.
Dr. Sacks is certainly not the first nor the last to step back and examine music as a phenomenon. Performers, musicologists, composers, and conductors have written extensively about their own field. It has been scrutinized by other fields as well, especially by psychoanalysts (Reik, Winnicott, and Kohut among others), anthropologists, fiction writers, and philosophers. In contemporary culture, there are such interesting “crossover” figures as Daniel Levitin who is a neuroscientist, musician, and writer all at once. Levitin has written best-sellers reviewed by the New York Times (such as This Is Your Brain on Music), which draw on several disciplines simultaneously.
Dr. Sacks is obviously a passionate musician and speaks eloquently about how meaningful it is for him to make music and of how important it is in his leisure time: not a hobby only but a passion.