ABSTRACT
In the documentary, Max Richter’s Sleep (2020), Richter, who is a composer, musician and the subject of the film, says that “making creative things is … a kind of self-medicating in a way … you write the piece that you wish someone had written so you can listen to it”. The documentary focuses on Richter’s (2015) sumptuous and affecting work, Sleep, which has been performed live over an eight-hour period in a variety of locations, including London, Los Angeles, Sydney and Paris. Audience members are invited to listen to Richter, other musicians and a vocalist performing his “lullaby” (Ellis-Peterson, 2015) in concert; to fall asleep together. Music appears to function as a culture-breast for Richter (2020), who remarks that it “is my sort of vehicle for travelling through the world, you know, and for sort of, getting through life. It’s like I write music to do that”. It is a container. Richter and his creative partner Yulia Mahr carefully choreograph each concert to offer attendees an object while not foreclosing their experience of that object, or what they might do with their experience. The performance of Sleep (Richter, 2015) provides a facilitating environment for people to have an experience that is unique to each individual while also creating something that is shared with a group–some of whom are asleep and some of whom are awake. Sleep operationalises the evocative (Bollas, 1987), transitional (Winnicott, 1953) and transformational (Bollas, 1992b) aspects of music as a cultural object. It is a resonant reminder of music’s affective pull. Richter (2020) makes an observation during the documentary which is relevant to the subject matter of this book, and particularly to my approach:
I think of making a piece of writing and sort of creative work as sort of … It’s like now moving from a space which we know into a space we don’t know. And that’s … that’s the kind of interesting part. And actually it hardly matters what’s there. It’s that little process of just stepping into somewhere you don’t know. At a certain point, it’s almost like the piece starts dreaming.
The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis invites readers to move into a space of not knowing, and see what happens.