Here I'm Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis

by Adam Blum, Peter Goldberg, Michael Levin

Overview

Here I’m Alive explores the musical foundation of being human from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Writing in collaboration, three psychoanalytic clinicians develop a fresh vision of the essential role of music in psychical life. Through an interdisciplinary exploration, Here I’m Alive shows how music is fundamental to becoming human, establishing our embodied sense of membership and participation in a shared world through the fabric of culture. With one authorial voice, these pages resonate with the musical forms of living that make possible any individual style of conduct or shape of desire and without which we are forever lost in the noise.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231209441
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	03/28/2023
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Adam Blum, Peter Goldberg, and Michael Levin are members of the Bay Area psychoanalytic community.

Table of Contents

Preface: Liner Notes
Side A
1. The Body’s Way of Dreaming
2. The Rhythm of the Heat
3. Mind Waves
4. Learning to Live Together
5. The Living Frame
Side B
6. Re-membering, Re-beating, and Worlding-Through
7. Strange Loop
8. This Is How We Do It
9. The Art Teacher
10. Old Foundations in Psychoanalysis
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Here I’m Alive is quietly revolutionary in the way it proposes that we as psychoanalysts are in the business of reuniting our patients with the musical dimension of life through which they become more fully human, more fully themselves. These essays illustrate the role of music in the very fabric of life.

Thomas Ogden

The phrase 'music lover' always rankled me, and this wild, beautiful, polyphonic book shows why: music is not just loved; music is love, is everywhere, is everything. Far from being a book just about music and psychoanalysis, Here I’m Alive is an experiment in eros. Its venerable concepts—the unconscious, the drives, rhythm, harmony—become a loom that weaves a world-sized tapestry.

Seth Brodsky

Showing us that music is at the heart of human development, of sociability, of love and desire—at the heart of most of what matters to us—this book shows us what many of us have always somehow thought but have never been able to know with such clarity and vision. Not simply one of the most fascinating books written about psychoanalysis, Here I’m Alive is, more importantly, about just how musical our lives are and can be. It is a unique and remarkable book.

Adam Phillips