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Abstract: Music is the embodiment through sound of lived experience. Conscious and unconscious modes of subjectivity are woven together in a tapestry of tone and sound, which is less about the world and more the symbolic equivalent of human subjectivity itself. Musicians through their interpretation of a composition invests their performance with self experience, and they come to experience themselves as vibrantly mirrored in the ideal form of the music. In other words, the musical performance is an opportunity for selfobject experience. Musical performance involves a two-phase process. The first is the practice phase, during which the musician seeks to achieve the experience of aesthetic resonance in which self-experience and music are brought into sync through the perfection of the performance. The dynamic role of selfobject failure and restoration in the musician's motivation to perfect the performance is stressed. The second phase is the public performance, during which the musician exhibits his or her ideal creation and experiences the mirroring of the audience. During these phases, there is a creative dialectic between internal and externalized aspects of self-experience. An examination of case material from analytic work with a musician shows how an inhibition in the creative process may be based on the expectation of selfobject failure, and how musical creativity can be facilitated through new opportunities for selfobject experience in the transference.
Music, musical ability, and the psychology of musical performance have been of interest to psychoanalysts for some time, despite Freud's firm dislike of the subject (Cheshire, 1996). Drive and ego psychologists have written the most on the topic, and at least one has attempted to formulate a psychoanalytic psychology of music (Noy, 1966, 1967). Of these authors, Heinz Kohut wrote several influential papers on music from a classical perspective (Kohut, 1950, 1957). Despite Kohut's early interest in the subject, his later self-psychological writings never took up the issue of music in any depth. In fact, although there is a handful of papers devoted to the visual arts the world of music has yet to be the subject of self-psychological analysis. This article is an initial attempt to explore the psychology of music using a self-psychological perspective. Specifically I will be focusing on the dynamics of the creative process in musical performance.
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