Building bridges between psychoanalysis and music

Abstract

In this article, I begin by presenting how a Greek song erupted within the flow of my everyday existence and allowed me to reconnect with past trauma, grief and psychic pain. Operating in a register which is different from that of symbolic language, and yet always already within it, music enables productive encounters with trauma and loss in everyday life. I then continue exploring the connections between music and language by employing Kristeva’s notions of ‘chora’ and the ‘semiotic’, which place the ‘musicality’ of language, its rhythm and tonality, and pitch and timbre at the centre of the analyst’s attention. I finish by referring to the work of Ogden who argues that both poetry/music and certain analytic sessions seem to generate powerful resonances and cacophonies of sound and meaning.