ABSTRACT
There is a growing interest in what psychoanalytic theory could mean for music and, conversely, what music might show us about psychoanalysis. Musicologists, music historians, analysts, and others continue to draw on psychoanalysis as a theoretical wellspring, in order to say something productively of music. One of music's challenges to interpretation is ontological: sound is its primary medium. What Lacan said of the voice in particular—that, just as it is uttered, it is lost—can in some sense be said of music more generally. The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, like many others, pointed to music's provision of the experience of what Freud called an "oceanic feeling", of limitlessness. The concept of mastery is often related to early childhood experiences and the oceanic feeling—and thus music is likewise associated with these same experiences. The problem of the assumed universalizing of a particular kind of music—and of its meaning—is readily apparent in some "vulgar" Freudian studies of symbolism.
