‘In these rooms there’s always some slight noise, like the rustling of a curtain, a woodworm, or a fly bumping against a window-pane. You notice it only later, in your memory. [. . .] In your memory you dis- cover that you had heard it constantly without attaching importance to it. But it’s later that this detail becomes important.’
These words are spoken in a famous sequence of Luchino Vis- conti’s film Senso (1954), during which the two lovers, Franz and Livia, converse, in the privacy of their room, about separation and memory, and become aware, prompted by their imminent separation, of an auditory world which is a direct emanation from their own inner worlds and from the emotional experience of their relationship.
The ability to tune in to ‘slight noises’ would here seem to represent the intimate and impalpable world of feelings in the context of a mental functioning which an intense and saturating passion threatens to disrupt. And the affective significance of the auditory dimension is made, so to speak, ‘tangible’ in the film by the soundtrack with the splendid Adagio from Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony: a work which the Austrian composer wrote to commemorate the death of Richard Wagner, his teacher and inspiration. The extremely evoca- tive nature of this music – in the exemplary interpretation by the great conductor Franco Ferrara – plays a fundamental role in creating the atmosphere of the film, offering a musical correlative to the ver- bally expressed recognition of the importance of auditory experience.
Indeed the audible world seems an expression of the ability to organ- ize an amorphous sensory magma, which would have risked to be lost in the adimensionality of the unconscious (Freud 1900), within the boundaries of the evocative forms of music. This ‘philomusical’
orientation seems established from the beginning of the film, which
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opens on the finale of the third act of Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice and later goes on to present – as back- ground to the start of the actual narrative – the ‘Miserere’ from the beginning of Act IV. The music and the libretto of Il Trovatore conjure up the dread of annihilation, harrowing separation and depressive and suicidal grief in the face of loss, providing a condensed foretaste of the tragic enslavement to passion recounted by Senso. And these are, not by chance, the same emotional reverberations that are developed in a purely symphonic manner by the Bruckner Adagio. In Senso, Visconti emphasizes, perhaps more completely than in his other masterpieces, the musical register that supports the filmic-visual-narrative dimen- sion. And the ear catches – by means of the sensory condensation inherent in the primary process (Freud 1900) – the dialectic of feel- ings and intuits the dramatic developments of the plot.
This scene from Senso thus summons up two of the meanings of the verb sentire, to hear and to feel, and also the film, by means of its elegant and apposite use of the soundtrack, in a more general way exalts its background music in relation to its visual, linguistic, symbolic and narrative components. So Senso seems an appropriate introduction to the subject I mean to consider in this chapter, i.e. the importance of the auditory dimension in the more general context of sensory (visual, olfactory, coenesthetic, etc.) and symbolic experience that takes place in the analytic relationship. The importance of the acoustic dimension is in contrast to its relegation to an insignificant background position: hearing ‘without attaching importance to it’. If instead we recognize our more intimate and significant relationship with ‘hearing’, however, sounds such as ‘the rustling of a curtain, a woodworm, or a fly bumping against a window-pane’ can represent the ‘noises’ that populate the analytic office, as an external reflection of the impalpable harmonies of our internal world. The most com- mon fate of this motley and fluctuating auditory landscape is to make way for other more obvious and objectifiable manifestations of affects and thought that emerge in the context of intersubjective exchanges and of the working through: a fate which may in some part be the result of Freud’s well-known disregard for music, which had caused him to declare that ‘a rational or perhaps analytic temperament sets me against letting myself be moved without knowing why or by what’
(1913, p. 299). More recently, on the other hand, Feder, Karmel and Pollock, in their collection of pieces about the relationship between music and psychoanalysis, observed that ‘acoustic-musical experience
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and expression occupy an exceptional position in relation to other sensory modalities. Consequently, musical creations may be a primary source for insights into certain aspects of psychic functioning’ (1990, pp. xiv–xv). So I shall focus my attention on the relationship between the development of the patient’s awareness of time and the replaying of music in the analyst’s mind, in accordance with the notion that music is ‘time made audible’ (Langer 1953).
Musical experience is just one example taken from a vast selection of internal events that hinge on the functioning of the specialized sense organs (hearing, sight, smell, taste, touch, etc.), a specific area where the activation of the sense organs (Freud 1911) contribute to the construction of alpha elements (Bion 1962), catalyzing the access to consciousness and thinking. (Bion 1962, 1966).
To exemplify the internal transformative processes that the alpha function gives rise to, Bion generally used visual elements, but he could equally well have chosen other senses, including hearing. ‘The totality of that moment of experience’, he writes (1992, p. 180), ‘is being per- ceived sensorially by me and converted into an image. [. . .] I am sure that much more takes place than I am aware of. But the transforma- tion of my sense impressions into this visual image is part of a process of mental assimilation. [. . .] By contrast, the patient might have the same experience, the same sense impressions, and yet be unable to transform the experience so that he can store it mentally.’
What I propose here about music should accordingly not be mis- understood as implicitly claiming uniqueness in this regard for the sense of hearing, but is instead a ‘model’ (Bion 1962) which can be applied to other senses such as sight, touch and taste. Musical expe- rience is just one example taken from a vast selection of internal events that hinge on the functioning of the specialized sense organs (hearing, sight, smell, taste, touch), a specific area in which the activa- tion of the sense organs (Freud 1911) contributes to achieving access to consciousness and thinking. According to Freud (1920), the sense organs function as a ‘protective shield’ (Reizschutz) that makes it pos- sible to construct elements that are thinkable in ‘small doses’: thus sense experience and its ‘distillation’ in the internal world make a decisive contribution to the passage from the atemporal character of the unconscious, which is unrepresentable, to an experience that fits within the limits of some form of representability. Thanks to the distillation of sense experience in the internal world, the spaces occu- pied by silence during sessions can, like rests in music, be a medium
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of communication and exchange at a preverbal level. As Bion wrote,
‘the psychoanalyst can employ silences. He, like the painter or musi- cian, can communicate non-verbal material’ (1970, p. 15). In Mat- teblanchian terms, the internal music of shared affects seems located at the crossroads of symmetry and asymmetry in the analytic relation and acts as an organizing stimulus to mental growth.
While Freud (1900, 1915) recognized atemporality as a distin- guishing feature of the unconscious, emancipation from the primary process and access to representation and discrimination must per- force proceed by way of the asymmetries that the temporalization of experience introduces, without which there would be nothing but the undifferentiated state of primordial chaos, with no recog- nizable ordered element. So when I speak of the objective compo- nent of consciousness of time, I am referring to the fact that, from Kant onwards, time has been seen as essential to mental functioning.
Those authors who, like Matte Blanco (1975, 1988), have stressed the importance of the unrepressed unconscious in psychoanalysis, recog- nize that the acquisition of spatiotemporal elements – in relation to the disorganized context of profound emotions – plays a decisive role in the growth and integration of mental functioning: the relational context of the analytic situation makes it possible, through the expe- rience of at-one-ment (Bion 1965) between analyst and analysand, to construct shared experiences in which emotions that had been infi- nite and unthinkable begin to take on a spatiotemporal framework which makes them recognizable and thinkable.
Sabbadini (1979), using philosophical terms, underlines the contrast between the Kantian view of time as pre-established, a priori, capa- ble of organizing consciousness, and Locke’s empirical view which, at the end of the 17th century, already regarded it as derived from sense experience. This Lockean notion of time is of particular inter- est to psychoanalysts, because it helps them understand the clinical problems and need for growth of those analysands who seem uncon- nected to temporality, and hence to any authentic form of mental activity that is open to change and novelty (Bion 1966), a condition that leads to a serious impasse (cf., e.g. Jacobs 2001).
In the course of this chapter I shall be emphasizing the affective experience and the intersubjective exchanges on the basis of which a knowledge of time is constructed; I shall thus be creating a sort of counterpoint to the scrutiny of more ‘objective’ phenomena – like the discovery of the existence of watches and of the different
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concrete manifestations of the passing of time – bound up with the perception of time during the analytic sessions, which I explored on an earlier occasion. This is not, of course, a contradiction, but two complementary aspects, like two sides of the same coin, which how- ever can to be treated separately. A psychoanalytic examination of time involves specifically intrapsychic elements, which are comparable, in philosophical terms, to Kant’s transcendental parameter, and, at the same time, an intersubjective side, understood as a context which has been created mutually according to interactive parameters. Hence my intention to consider the two complementary modalities for regarding the psychoanalytic significance of time separately: on the one hand the realm of conflictuality and thought defect (Bion 1962), which is found on the intrapsychic level in relation to time, and, on the other – and the focus of this chapter – the side of the more nuanced and ‘ineffable’ (Bion 1965) relational dynamics, as well as the specific quality of the analyst’s participation in the clinical context where perception of time is activated, as an occasion for constructing a sort of structural relay for the passage from the primary to the secondary principle (Freud 1900).
Here I shall be training my sights on the sensory phenomena that surface in a session and within the analyst, in contexts where the emergence of a perception of time in the patient’s mind is central.
I shall consider the internal auditory experience of brief musical sequences, associated with visual and gustatory aspects, among others, as well as with associative sequences of a verbal nature. The involve- ment of only minimally organized psycho-sensory levels, similar as they in some ways are to dream flashes, have been noticed by various authors, who report a specific reaction pattern on the part of the analyst at the protosensory level, where the provisional activation of the sense organs becomes a critical precursor of abstract thought (Gardner 1983; Norman 1989; Schust-Briat 1996; Ferro & Basile 2004). On the other hand, in this chapter I shall not explore the specifics of the relationship of time with the professional practice of music or with sublimational processes (for which see, e.g. Boyer 1992).
So in connecting time with the experience of music and with rev- erie, I seek to build a bridge between the objective awareness of time and the subjective context of experience, by attempting to describe components of temporality as indissolubly both cognitive and emo- tional, i.e. woven of elements of the perception of reality and the
‘unheard melodies’ (Keats) of feelings.
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Affects and temporal limits
Affects are by nature linked to the primary process (Freud 1900), and tend to be isolated from reality testing, which is connected with perception of time (Bonaparte 1940; Hartmann 1939/1958), as well as with the spatiotemporally organized aspects of mental functioning.
This means that affects naturally have an intensity which is impervi- ous to moderation and limits. Klein (1932), in particular, connected unconscious emotions with the intense emotions of small children;
Matte Blanco wrote of the presence of the infinite in the mind, a presence which disregards the differentiating and dividing parameters of thought.
My conception of time in relation to affects diverges from the view of those authors who stress the importance of the quality of the distortion of time, so that ‘the ego’s particular orientation in time pro- vides an essential element in the qualification of a particular affective experience’ (Hartocollis 1972, p. 106). Instead I consider it more use- ful in terms of clinical psychoanalysis to emphasize activating a percep- tion of linear time in the patient’s mind in the interests of reappraising the sense of infiniteness and uncontainability presented by the affects (Matte Blanco 1975, 1988), particularly in primitive states in which emotions are hardly integrated at all with perceptual functions. ‘One of the terrors of patients suffering from psychosis, melancholia, or similar conditions’, Grotstein writes (2000, p. 98), ‘is that they cannot endure time gaps (e.g. those between analytic sessions), either because they cannot partition time without dissociating or splitting off from it or because they cannot represent it symbolically in terms of object faith and trust.’
In the child’s mental world, not unlike all clinical contexts in which the psychotic aspects of the personality have the upper hand (Bion 1957/1967), awareness of time as a representative of limits is very labile, as Sybille Yates succinctly demonstrates in this simple but telling example: ‘Adults can say when they have acute tonsillitis “the doctor says in three days it will be better”; this makes the present pass more quickly than it would were it not lightened by hope. The very small child, on the contrary, does often feel that the pain will go on for ever like this’ (Yates 1935, p. 342, my italics). She goes on to observe that this way of functioning exposes the child, particularly if it is not protected by sufficient parental support, to ‘its earliest experience of annihilation’; so, to escape from these first experiences of anxiety
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‘perhaps the most drastic way is to break all contact, make oneself independent of time by putting oneself temporarily outside of time. There is a loss of the sense of reality and of awareness of the passage of time.’
(Ibid., p. 343, my italics). Yates particularly highlights the relationship between a disordered time sense and bodily participation, which, by means of the rhythms of excretory functions, contributes decisively to the construction of a sense of time. Thus getting to know the lim- its of the body interacts with the infinitization of intense emotions, fostering deinfinitization and mental containment (Bion 1965; Matte Blanco 1975).
Some aspects of the interrelation between reverie and music
The concept of reverie, introduced into psychoanalysis by Bion (1962), indicates a mother’s receptivity towards her child’s projective iden- tifications. This concept was recently expanded by Ogden ‘to refer not only to those psychological states that clearly reflect the analyst’s active receptivity to the analysand, but also to a motley collection of psychological states that seem to reflect the analyst’s narcissistic self-absorption, obsessional rumination, day-dreaming, sexual fanta- sising, and so on’ (1994, p. 9). For Ogden, reverie is seen ‘as simulta- neously a personal/private event and an intersubjective one. As is the case with our other highly personal emotional experiences, we do not often speak with the analysand directly about these experi- ences but attempt to speak to the analysand from what we are think- ing and feeling. That is, we attempt to inform what we say by our awareness of and groundedness in our emotional experience with the patient’ (1997, p. 568). And Ogden points out the contribution somatic participation makes to the events of the analytic process, to the point where the development of certain phases of analysis can actually depend ‘on the analyst’s capacity to recognise and make use of a form of intersubjective clinical fact manifested largely through bodily sensation/fantasy’ (1994, p. 13).
In this chapter I shall take Ogden’s suggestions into account as I explore some of the implications of the occurrence, in the analyst, of sensations, hence all closely related to the body but at the same time an original construction of the analyst’s and the response to a cer- tain type of primary emotional need of the patient. Various authors (e.g. Niedlander 1958; Boyer 1992) have seen a link between music
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