by SFCP

DIALOGUES IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOANALYSIS: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE MUSICAL WEAVE OF BEING

March 13, 2021 | 11:00am - 1:00pm

Presenters: Peter Goldberg, Ph.D., Michael Levin, Psy.D. and Adam Blum, Psy.D.
Moderator: Julie Ruskin, Ph.D.

$50.00 General Admission
$40.00 SFCP Members and SF-PPTP, PAPPTP and CAPPTP Trainees
Free for SFCP Candidates
2 CME/CE Credits available. CME/CE credits are FREE for SFCP Members. Non-SFCP Members Fee is $24.00.

This program is open to licensed clinicians or pre-licensed associates / trainees only. Pre-registration is required. Please click here to register.

What does music have to do with psychoanalysis? There is growing recognition in our field that we must go beyond the intrapsychic and the relational to account for the collective character of psychical life. While striving to understand how economic, racial, and gendered relations of power in the social world structure the unconscious positions of analyst and patient, we may also wonder what it is that draws us so powerfully into the sphere of collective living in the first place – perhaps on levels where psyche and soma, self and other, are not differentiated.

A closer look into this domain reveals the foundational role of culture in individual and collective psychical life. No matter what our minds say, our actual lived experience in the world depends first and foremost upon being woven into a cultural fabric that provides collective, syncretic forms – that shape and coordinate our bodily habitus, the rhythms of erotic life, our ways of perceiving things – that comprise the infrastructure and connective tissue of human being itself. How are we best able to understand these collective forms psychoanalytically?

Music provides more than a metaphor for this fundamental dimension of our being; music may actually comprise the collective forms, inducing the patterns and rhythms in which the body finds its place in psychical life; every “piece” of music, then, provides a particular semiotic form that momentarily shapes our body-sense and our feeling for the world of objects. The vitality of the clinical process depends at all times on this background quality of shared music. Many of the contemporary maladies we encounter in our work reflect the sensory and emotional isolation of those who remain unwoven, dissociated from this musical weave of human life.

In this program, the presenters will use selections of music, draw upon clinical theory, and provide a link to philosophy and cultural history to frame a discussion of the musical dimension of psyche-soma-social life.