Separation-Individuation in a Cycle of Songs—George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children

Consciousness of self and absorption without awareness of self are the two polarities between which we move, with varying ease and with varying degrees of alternation or simultaneity.

… gradual growing away from the maternal state of symbiosis, of one-ness with the mother … is a lifelong mourning process.
—MARGARET S. MAHLER (1972, p. 333)

IT HAS BEEN REMARKED THAT WITHIN THE BODY OF PSYCHOanalytic writing the art of music has received scant attention. What has been said falls more or less into the category of pathography or psychobiography.1 The thorny problems with that general approach are well known and have been extensively discussed by contemporary aestheticians, including Bouwsma (1954), Tormey (1971), and Kivy (1980). It is my purpose here to