Time, Music, and Reverie

Abstract

Time is an important source of containment vis-à-vis the pressure of affects and the nondimensional immensity of mental space experienced by difficult patients. A more articulated spatiotemporal integration can be facilitated by the analyst's musical “reverie” during intense emotional exchanges in analytic sessions. This reverie can be visual, olfactory, kinaesthetic, etc., no less than auditory or musical. Music is indeed connected with both the concrete world of bodily sensations and the symbolic expressions of culture, and may be an important transitional phenomenon in analytic communication on both unconscious and conscious levels. Two clinical cases are presented in which the patient's awareness of the passage of time, associated with the analyst's internal musical experiences, made it possible in one case to reduce intense panic attacks and, in the other, to overcome the patient's rigid obsessive defenses, giving him access to fluid and unforeseen emotions. In these two instances of working through, the perception of time helped establish confidence in the creative contribution of the “unheard melodies” (Keats) of affects to the functioning of thought.