ABSTRACT
In the hands of the Nazis, music became an organ of the state, to incite, cajole, push people past natural inhibitions to the point of aiding atrocities on a massive scale. Music helped people go past the horror barrier and do things that might otherwise repel them. Jazz musicians speak of being in the zone and at other times it's cliche. When music is musical and music-ing, when it is alpha-ing, it not only mediates, conveys, and stimulates emotion, it also plays a role in processing, digesting, creating it. Something off in the music of the psyche. The music of the psyche, the rhythm of the psyche, can be a rhythm of surprise, a rhythm that plays against and breaks rhythm, that opens new rhythmic possibilities. No accident that one of Bion's last seminars explicitly viewed psychoanalysis as akin to art.
