Rhythmic Listening
Sasha Frere-Jones
Written as a collective text by three psychoanalytic clinicians who transcribed their conversations, Here I’m Alive is musical not primarily because the authors “jammed” the text but because their ideas sprout in fairly unruly ways and tidy resolutions are hard to find. If we accept the authors at their word and see music as both model and method for their inquiry, then we have no choice but to point out that there is little more restrictive and Western—a slur, in this book—than a frame like “dissonance.” Think of how hard it is, if you’ve been raised around those loyal to the tyrannical baby math of European harmony, to accept that pitches with an unfamiliar aspect could be just as “right” as the chromatics of church music and radio pop. Why does any wave form need to find a particular numerical evenness to become a plausible event? Why would you ever need to spoil a well-posed question with an answer? For the purposes of this book and the review of this book, I posit music as an improvised practice, as it is in my own work as a musician. And why would a person need to deliver a psychological truth with the rhetorical symmetry of a proof? It’s hard for me to imagine that an analyst expects order from a patient, and no musician wants the merely expected from another member of the band.
What Here I’m Alive is ultimately about is language, how it fails us, and what alternative languages might be on offer in the clinical setting. Analysis, improvisation, and prayer are all ways of retrieving knowledge too heavy for words, the “musical experience” that takes place “in a psyche-somatic register that does not depend at all on memory, knowledge, or thought.” (The authors write that they use “the idiomatic ‘psyche-somatic’ throughout the text to retain the connection to Winnicott’s notion of ‘psyche-soma’ as a form of experiential continuity.”) Faith is perhaps as important as the idea of improvisational play here, as the psychoanalytic setting and musical performances both ask you to begin without knowing what you are going to say. You know that you have to play before there is something to say, or, in the words of the authors, “we listen to music or go to the theater or start a book or enter psychoanalysis first and foremost badly—which is to say, in an aspirational yet unintegrated mimetic impression of someone else.”
Adam Blum, Peter Goldberg, and Michael Levin—all members of what they call “the Bay Area psychoanalytic community—tell us this book was born “out of the spirit of music, in the spirit of recording an album.” They describe its writing as “three players practicing music together” and review their own book, accurately, when they describe its manner as “a spiraling musical mode that layers and elaborates recurring motifs.” The book is split into Sides A and B of five chapters each, some using song titles (“This Is How We Do It”), some not (“Re-Membering, Re-Beating, and Worlding-Through”). The authors do not table anything like a single, overarching thesis, but there is a tonal cloud, a set of intentions that return. In the language of a musician rather than that of an analyst, the authors are seeking to reintroduce the logic and nature of music to the clinical setting, suggesting that music might be a way to understand the nonverbal exchange between patient and analyst—and also a way of understanding life, in general. The work of psychoanalysis, in this view, is “cultivating and amplifying the idiomatic freedom of each instrument to sing through the chorus of musica humana, to resound the psyche-somatic energies of being human, to surf the waves of the weave.”
“The weave” is one of the key motifs here, emerging from a concept that the “operating system” of human beings was originally “essentially musical.” The authors’ name for this system is “the weave,” in due time broken by the Enlightenment. How this happened is that “the weave of shared sensation and communal habitus became the dibbuk of the Enlightenment, eclipsing the fundamental nature of human being with a fantasy of scientific mastery and self-sufficiency.” Here I’m Alive goes to war with those fantasies, which the authors believe ruined the view that the soul “was an integrated part of a wider meaningful world in which music played a natural and influential role.” All we wound up getting from the Enlightenment lovers were mid-thinkers like Steven Pinker saying that music is “auditory cheesecake.”
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The authors seek to fight “deeply established assumptions” and reassert that “our ancestors looked mainly outward, not inward, for identity and meaning.” That is where they locate all the music—out there. More specifically, they like the idea of a human “being open and receptive to forces and signs originating far beyond the self, and often these signs came in musical forms,” which gives music a fairly specific task. What happened to this concert was that, in the sixteenth century, “our modern conceptualization of a private, inner, discursive self began to emerge and take hold in the way it has ever since.”
What I struggle with a bit is that the inner discourse is associated here with the Enlightenment and the false security of science, while music is classed as a way of accessing the outside signals. I think this division may reflect the facts that I am a musician with a spiritual practice and the authors are analysts. They’re in the nice leather chair and I am on the couch (although, as analysts, they’ve been on the couch, too).
Music and God are within, and what I might call a spiritual exchange —which the authors see as a musical experience and which might be described any number of ways as a variation of the clinical setting—is rooted in the presence of God within us. Assigning the internal, “discursive” self to the realm of the Science Boys doesn’t fly for me, though this does not mean that the authors have a conception of musical exchange that I disagree with. I am roughly as conversant in Bion as these three are in disco, but I will quote the following because I like it. The authors invoke Bion’s injunction “to put aside memory and desire in order to make us available to psyche-somatic experience as it presents itself to us in real time,” which is part of their project to take the body’s language into play. (One is reminded of Brian Eno’s comment that “the body is the larger brain.”) They finish that thought with this lovely injunction of their own: “To the degree that we can relinquish what we know about pieces of music, the actual musical experience will be enhanced.”
There are so many gems like this, none of which add up to some kind of New Musical Therapy, thank God. It is perhaps their confidence to not propose a counter-Enlightenment that I favor most. I will not pretend that my faith in the authors is sufficient cover for the fact that I have not put in the hours to detect either the presence or absence of “Laplanchean sexuality” in any particular argument—by which I mean that I am a musician, not a psychoanalyst. I do understand this, though: “Freud says he could feel himself rebelling against music because his mind could not accommodate how affected he felt by it. Music made him feel too much.”
“They see the analytic and musical frame as both dissolving and restorative at the same time.”
This is where the book lives mostly—negotiating how that “too much” can open up aspects of the clinical setting. The authors don’t argue with Freud or Winnicott or any analyst so much as quote them and then circle back to their themes. When you become comfortable with the fact that music does end up representing pretty much any state, be it positive or difficult, the book opens. Music really is being called into play as a tool, not as itself a subject or a conclusion or even an idea, exactly.
The terms are often psychoanalytic—music, for the authors, presents “a paradox of presence and absence” because of how quickly it fades. “Unlike the plastic arts, music is always in a state of decay,” they write. This concept dovetails with more than one analytic area—pleasure, fixation, loss, hypnosis, grieving all come to mind. It even suggests repair itself: “Like hypnosis, [music] reconciles self-possession and loss of self, the impressions left by the vanished force; the beat goes on, even when the music stops,” they write. It is especially moving that they see the analytic and musical frame as both dissolving and restorative at the same time.
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To draw out how inclusive and unpredictable their method is, where some things simply fall flat in the middle of a larger success, we can slow down their combination of rhythm (everyone) and “going-on-being” (Winnicott). The authors write that “Freud could never write comprehensively about the role of rhythm in perception because rhythm is not perceived.” I do not know how to affirm or challenge the first half of that sentence, in that I do not denotatively know if Freud wrote about rhythm and I cannot make the interpretive leap that he couldn’t. As for saying “rhythm is not perceived,” I simply don’t know where to go with that. We continue, and they assert that “rhythm is itself a mode of perception, what may be best understood as a quality of perception induced by an organization of events that embodies time, that makes time feel real in a bodily way.” So rhythm, which cannot be perceived, induces the perception of rhythm? Not sure what this formulation gains us, but go off, kings.
They continue: “To perceive in the mode of rhythm is to feel a sense of becoming time itself, to identify and synchronize with the temporal patterns that give the sense of continuity of self.” We have another problem here of outside versus inside, in that “temporal patterns” seem to be happening out there, and we the humans are using rhythm in here inside of us to perceive those patterns, which gives us the sense of “going-on-being,” which perhaps exists in both places? But it seems rhythm is also a state of completion, or a synthesis of all these distances? They write, “A human being must be rhythmized; it is through rhythms that one becomes human, and it is in these rhythms that embodiment takes place.” They later revise slightly and come closer to something we can use when they say that “we rely on enduring cultural forms, none more than music, to sustain the translations and transformations of going-on-being.” So here music is not an end but back to being a tool to sustain going-on-being.
Their favorite mode still might be the synthetic Hail Mary, where they use all the terms at once and melt strategy into canon, stretch it out and chop it into little nuggets of praxis. In that spirit, I present one of the many moments where psychoanalysis is turned into music itself: “Might we say, then, that psychoanalysis, at its most transformative, induces the hypnoid state that constitutes an essentially needed experience of satisfaction—one that involves the meeting of a most fundamental, erotic need, the relief from subjectivity, the moment of zero gravity, the hang time, the absence—through which going-on-being, previously stuck, can then proceed?” A lot of states are being swept into the tub and heated up all at once, and music is certainly being adduced again and again here as an aid to this “hypnoid state.” I wonder though how music can both be so sympathetic to human connection and then also this agent of dissolve and release and reform, though I am entirely on board with staying in a state of, maybe, states-and-not-states.
What this connects to is a combinatory passage from (lucky us) new Nobel laureate Jon Fosse, whose “and and and and” style is perhaps exactly what the authors mean when they suggest scholars will have to “reconcile the repetitions Freud called rhythm with the system he called ‘perception.’” From Septology:
“All good paintings have something to do with what I, what Christians, call The Holy Spirit, because all good art has this spirit, good pictures, good poems, good music, and what makes it good is not the material, not matter, and it’s not the content, the idea, the thought, no, what makes it good is just this unity of matter and form and soul that becomes spirit, that’s what culture is, probably, he says, it’s probably just one person being like another person that creates a culture, for example wearing a suit and tie, while what art is, yes, art is everyone just being like themselves, and totally themselves.”