I have been playing music, especially chamber music, almost all my life, beginning long before psychoanalytic ideas intruded into my thinking. I have assiduously avoided examining my experience with music as well as analytic explorations of music in general, although names like Noy, Feder, Kohut, Langer, and their connection to the subject drift in and out of my awareness when the temptation makes itself known. I am reminded, defensively to be sure, of Nathan Milstein's comment regarding playing music that deeply moved him, that the trick was not to spoil it with effort, to let it speak for itself. I have always sensed that my investment in a musical life, one I have lived alongside my more public one, involved a determinedly separate and inviolate part of me. This literary foray into the world of chamber music, viewed through an analytic lens, feels risky and exposing. The analogy I wish to draw is connected to this risk.
Playing chamber music is like the intimacy experienced in the context of personal restraint that characterizes the psychoanalytic treatment relationship. There, I have said it! Now to what I mean. To a musician, playing music is a private, personal expression of inner experiences…affect, fantasy, sensate intensity…elaborated in a highly complex language shared only by other musicians. Playing chamber music is like a private dialogue among the initiated. One of the unique musical experiences is to greet a total stranger, settle into some ritualized physical arrangement, perhaps fidget with bow hair tension and rosin, arrange sheet music on a stand and fold corners for page turning efficiency, and then launch into the deepest of emotional communications. Brought to bear on such a dialogue is a history of cultural traditions, a lifetime of striving for technical mastery, a silent chorus of teachers and coaches. I remember reading through a Mozart duo with a visiting graduate student at my university who spoke not a word of English or any other language I recognized. Within a minute we were sharing a private ecstatic exchange that we had learned to engage in with others who had access to our private language.
To a musician, playing music is a private, personal expression of inner experiences…affect, fantasy, sensate intensity…elaborated in a highly complex language shared only by other musicians. Playing chamber music is like a private dialogue among the initiated.
It has always been my assumption that, to some extent, my musical co-participants have in common with me a history of wishes, fantasies, fears, and perhaps temperamental proclivities similar to my own. I am certain this shared history attracted them to our alternate world although I have never felt any need to test out such a belief. What has always been important to me in choosing musical partners is fluency in this language and access to its emotional concomitants. I experience playing music as highly complex, symbolic secondary process with an immediate connection to an underworld of sensate emotional experience. The language rules and their emotional correlates are shared and their execution is as automatized as familiarity, study, and talent allow. The relationship is circumscribed but deep, sensitive, and reciprocal in the moment. There is the oft told story of the Budapest Quartet, which could perform miracles of communication together but stayed in separate hotels when touring due to rancor and strife in their social relationships with each other. I think here of some analysts' capacity for sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and empathy at work without any guarantee that such attributes will consistently spill over into their personal lives. Music is like a second register, and a precious one at that. The appeal of analytic work and the discomfort in translating its pleasures for non-analysts come to mind as well.
Most of what I have said is suggestive rather than clear. I am certain this is by unconscious design but I have no inclination to try harder. Recently, a now disbanded quartet to which I belonged for years reunited for an evening of musical reminiscence. Our dissolution as a quartet was far from uncomplicated and disappointments lingered. We played some familiar and pleasing repertory. Then one of us suggested Shostakovich #8, a work of surpassing beauty, passion, and harrowing intensity. When we were done, we felt depleted, packed up our instruments and dispersed almost silently. We did not want to spoil it. Our private language had rendered our social language anemic and unnecessary. We knew where we had been.
Steven T. Levy, M.D., is Bernard C. Holland Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University where he is also director of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the editor of JAPA.