Like many of you, I tuned into the APsaA Sunday Town Halls on Zoom when we first began the lockdown and found them supportive and thoughtful. For a large group of members, many of whom know each other only through badges at APsaA national meetings or on Open Line postings, there was an extraordinary sense of camaraderie and sharing personal feelings. Kerry Sulkowicz and William Glover provided a safe and welcoming atmosphere.
At the beginning of the third Town Hall, in reply to Kerry Sulkowicz's question “How are you all doing and what's helping you during this time?” I was particularly moved to hear several members comment that music provided relief for personal and professional fears. Particularly poignant, was the comment by one member who recently lost his mother and mentioned the comfort a particular musical composition brought to his mourning. Two of the Town Halls concluded with recorded music provided by William Glover.
As I write in mid-summer, we are moving beyond our initial efforts to scramble to adjust to working remotely with patients, the initial rise and fall of the Covid-19 curve, and tragically, a Covid-19 surge occurring again in July. Additional trauma including the murder of George Floyd, civil protests, exposure of systemic racism, unemployment, a conundrum around opening schools, and analysts' anxieties about safely returning to their offices—or not—has exacerbated Covid-19 anxiety.
In many analytic sessions, currently and past — not unlike in the APsaA Town Halls — a number of my patients have recalled music in their lives. Mr. T. spoke about a “spectacular concert” he attended and “wished I could have heard the music.” Exploring his comment in our session, he revealed his wish that I could have been with him at the concert. Mr. C. softly hummed melodies as he walked from my waiting room to my consulting room, totally unaware, until I inquired, that he was remembering a special song. Ms. D. recalled that as a child, she shared music with a currently estranged parent and associated to her faded but ever-present wish to establish an adult relationship with this parent.
Music is always present inside the consulting room when we listen and pay close attention.
Classically trained as both a musician and a psychoanalyst, I feel acutely attuned to melodies in our minds. I am curious about what resonates intra-psychically when words have limited value. What brings particular music to my mind — or to your mind? Why did Leonard Bernstein's “Age of Anxiety” (especially the Masque movement) comfort me immediately following the heartbreaking, untimely death of my mother? Sometimes, melodies enter my mind when my patient is not associating to music, and this influences my response. In my clinical work I have noticed my patients soften their defenses, express affect, and recall memories that resulted in fruitful associations from their past, relevant to present relationships, and expressed in their relationship with me. Can analysts creatively use music both inside and outside our consulting rooms to reach out to a public that is coping with the pandemics of illness, loss, death, racism, and murder? My answer is yes.
The polyphonic, or multiple functions of music, like overdetermined principles in psychoanalysis, enable us to feel both elevating and disquieting dynamics simultaneously. I remember once saying to my analyst, “I wish I could speak like a full orchestra so I could talk about all the feelings I am having at the same time. With music you can play more than one note at the time.” With words, you can only say one word at the time. “Multiple formal musical elements resonate with the disparities among simultaneously conflicting impulses, defenses, affects, and actions that we and our patients share. We hear the resonance and nuance of music in our analysand's associations, their tone of voice, the rhythms in their speech, the timing and length of their silences, and the power of
Julie Jaffee Nagel, Ph.D., graduated from Juilliard, University of Michigan, and Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. She integrates music and psychoanalysis in Melodies of the Mind, Managing Stage Fright, and A Conversation Between Freud and Mozart. Nagel is in private practice in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
their affects. Increasingly, I have appreciated that the symbols and formal structures of music I studied at Juilliard also can be thought of as an auditory representational world of individuals and a non-verbal pathway to the unconscious. Music is always present inside the consulting room when we listen and pay close attention. The late psychoanalyst, Stuart Feder, stated, “Music is a simulacrum of mental life.” In my book, “Melodies of the Mind,” I suggest that Freud's adherence to the (verbal) Royal Oral Road of dreams has a (non-verbal) Royal Aural Road counterpart which can lead psychoanalytic thinkers to embrace a theory of affect left incomplete by Freud.
In my presentations and writing, I have illustrated an intersection between music and psychoanalytic ideas with the iconic musical “West Side Story,” a timeless masterpiece that premiered in 1957. Through the story of rival gangs, Jets (White) and Sharks (Puerto Rican), on the streets of New York City, this musical explores intolerance, prejudice, searing pain, boiling anger, and intense frustration between the gangs and within the individual minds of their members.
The overtly comic but deadly serious song, “Gee! Officer Krupke” illustrates the way neither gang felt heard nor respected. Despite the loving (and forbidden) relationship between Tony (Jet) and Maria (sister of the Sharks' leader, Bernardo), a fair fight between the gangs turned foul, culminating in Tony's unintentional murder of Bernardo. The harmony sought through the story and in the song “Maria” becomes dissonant, sonically representing intrapsychic and interpersonal conflicts in all the characters as well as reflecting the aggressive and loving conflicts in all of us. Poignantly, throughout “West Side Story,” from the opening sound to the last note, composer Bernstein weaves a musical interval called the tritone representing instability in sound. The tritone does not resolve consonantly but ambiguously. In psychoanalytic terms, there is no psychic resolution by the end of the show.
As with colleagues and patients, music is in our minds on many occasions. Psychoanalytic ideas have homes and purpose both in our consulting rooms and outside our clinical walls. In pointing out the similarities between music and psychoanalytic ideas as routes to affect and the unconscious, it is my intent to illustrate that the Royal (oral) Road has converged, rather than diverged, at an aural and oral junction within the larger community of ideas.
Creative, bold challenges and opportunities invite, indeed demand, involvement by the psychoanalytic community as we discover our new “normal.” Multiple crises and opportunities are begging for psychoanalytic listening, understanding, re-evaluation, and active involvement in novel ways. When we work in harmony with other disciplines, psychoanalysts can confront the deadening viruses of hatred, intolerance, injustice, anxiety, loss, and grief by providing creative approaches to emotional healing. As we respond to the lessons of the current moment and their psycho-historical precedents, psychoanalytic contributions both inside and beyond our consulting rooms can have a powerful impact on others, especially when music has something to do with it.