The Sound of Memory: Music and Acoustic Origins

Abstract

This essay advances a novel interdisciplinary approach toward understanding the dialectical transmission, registration, and interpretation of meaning from sound in the psychoanalytic dialogue. The first step examines the profound formative influences of the earliest sound environment in psychological development. The second, utilizing clinical material, considers adult patients' abstract or ineffable nonlinguistic and nonverbal communications as a form of music being verbalized in a language of sounds—termed the verbalization of music—which audio-symbolically conveys derivatives of archaic auditory impressions, perceptions, and interactions. The last segment proposes a consilient view of music and mentation, founded in a conceptualization of music as a patterned sonic iteration of affect and ideation giving auditory tangibility to the incipient sound world, with the aim of clarifying how analysts hear and interpret meaning in idiolectic sonic renderings of individual interiority—the sound of memory.