On Off the Couch we meet psychoanalysts who work in dialysis units, prenatal clinics, corporate board rooms, community centres, humanitarian organisations, and with vineyard workers just to name a few. We hope these conversations expand our awareness of how broadly psychoanalytic thinking extends into our communities. 

Off the Couch is produced and hosted by Harvey Schwartz MD, Chair of the IPA in Health Committee, and Steven S. Rolfe MD.
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Latest Episode 148

The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis
with Peter Goldberg, Michael Levin, and Adam Blum

We begin with recognizing that the process of human musicalization begins in utero and forms the basis of much of psycho-somatic-social life. Peter, Michael and Adam’s written collaboration, Here I’m Alive – The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis is intended to be a musical book about psychoanalysis – a representation of how music binds us to the individual and cultural domains of life. We discuss rhythmizing consciousness, atavistic vs enhancing music, and the blues as a companion soundtrack for loss and tribulation. We take up the relationship between Freud’s dream book and his joke book, how present analytic melodies contain aspects of the past, and how dissociation requires a remusicalization of the psychoanalytic situation. We close with Adam reading a paragraph which includes “The capacity of the sexual drive to propel the body back into musical movement and transmute the seizure of trauma into conducted energy to ground the current.”

Our Guests: Peter Goldberg, Ph.D., is a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, Chair of Faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and on the faculty of the Wright Institute in Berkeley. He has presented widely and written on a range of clinical and theoretical topics, including the evolution of clinical theory in psychoanalysis, sensory experience in analysis, the concept of the analytic frame, the theory and treatment of dissociative states, non-representational states; and the impact of social trauma on individual psychology. He is in private practice in Albany, CA.

Michael Levin, Psy.D. is a Training Analyst and Faculty Member at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He has taught and presented on topics including the work of Laplanche, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, and the place of psychoanalysis in cultural and intellectual history. He is in private practice in San Francisco.

Adam Blum, Psy.D. is an Adjunct Faculty Member at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He has written and presented on psychoanalysis and the music of Björk, Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, Stephen Sondheim, Aretha Franklin, and Michael Jackson. He is in private practice in San Francisco.

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2 December 2023