Words and Music

Frank M. Lachmann, PhD

Papers and Reprints | Self Psychology Bulletin Board

Frank M. Lachmann, PhD
Frank Lachmann at a mixer in San Francisco,
California, November 2001, after giving a Master
Class lecture in the annual Pre-Conference

Words and Music

Originally delivered as the Kohut Memorial Lecture of the 22nd Annual International Conference on the Psychology of the Self, October 1999

Published simultaneously on the Self Psychology Page and in Progress in Self Psychology, November 2001.

Send a message to Frank Lachmann with your thoughts on this essay.

As I lay on my analyst's couch, associating freely, as we did in those days, amid the memories and narratives, among the words that went through my mind, bits of melodies burst forth. In speaking of my relationship with my parents, I heard, in my mind's ear, a theme from Bizet's Symphony in C. It reminded me of a concert I had attended with my father at which we both heard this piece for the first time.

(1) Theme from Bizet’s Symphony in C

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The music conveyed my bond with my father. In another hour, when recalling aspects of my relationship with my mother, I "heard"

(2) Waltz from The Merry Widow

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That's the waltz from The Merry Widow. Depicting my mother as a widow, which she was not, and a merry one at that, had an obvious meaning to my Freudian analyst and me. It was my Oedipal wish. However, equating the musical passages only with their verbal connotations, as was done in those days, did little more than substitute words for music. In retrospect, it raises a question for me: where is psychoanalysis situated with respect to music?

In those days, in the 1950s, before he had become a self psychologist, Heinz Kohut wrote several essays on music. In tune with the psychoanalytic writings of his day, he approached the enjoyment of music as he did psychoanalytic treatment and early development, from Freud's structural and psychoeconomic viewpoints.

"The mother's voice," wrote Kohut (1950, [1978]) "becomes associated with oral gratification for the infant; the mother's lullaby, with the drowsy satisfaction after feeding. Early kinesthetic eroticism (rocking the cradle [Coriat, 1945]), for example, anticipates the enjoyment of dancing and may become associated with definite rhythmic patterns" (p. 142).

The relationship between music and psychoanalysis that is contained in Kohut's writings was typical of the 1950s. It was a time when psychoanalysis relegated the arts to sublimations, vicarious means of conflict resolution, and affect abreaction. It was a time when psychoanalysts promised to unveil the mysteries of the world, of love, sex, and the arts. And it was the time about which Leonard Bernstein (1982) said derisively, "when Dr. Kubie (Lawrence Kubie) explained the creative process by simply invoking the word preconscious" (p. 229).

Kohut posited that listening to music presents a threat that requires mastery in that dissonance in the music and departures from the home key create tension. When the music returns to consonance and to the home key of the composition, Kohut reasoned, there would be a sense of relief and a feeling of mastery.

So, now for a brief excursion into musicology. The home key, called the tonic, is the key in which a musical composition is written. The tonic defines the beginning ambience from which Western composers have developed and elaborated their musical ideas for the past 300 years.

Scales, keys, and the tones or notes that comprise them, are derived from the "harmonic series," a phenomenon of the physics of sound. The harmonic series contains all notes that are heard when a plucked string or a column of air vibrates. As Leonard Bernstein now demonstrates, plucking a string stimulates other notes, called "overtones" in a constant relationship to each other.

(3) Leonard Bernstein demonstrates the harmonic series.

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The harmonic series is important because it demonstrates that tonality is an inherent physical property of vibrating objects. Different cultures, Chinese, Indian, or western, have made up different scales by using different series of notes from the twelve tones that make up an octave. Some cultures use a five-note scale, a pentatonic scale. We use a seven-note scale, the diatonic scale. All 12 tones make a chromatic scale.

(4) Demonstration [with Windows Media 8] of diatonic scale, chromatic scale, pentatonic scale, major chords and wild dissonance, a discord.

Demonstration [with RealAudio 8] of diatonic scale, chromatic scale, pentatonic scale, major chords and wild dissonance, a discord.

The harmonic series pulls music toward tonality. This bias was reflected in Kohut's comments. But, as Kohut recognized in his later work, there is another powerful pull, a psychological pull, in analyst and analysand, and in composer, performer, and listener. This powerful pull is the striving for self-assertion, self-articulation, and toward defining oneself uniquely. In music, these are the contrary pulls of tonality and atonality, of diatonic scales and chromatic scales and consonant and dissonant sounds. Armed with this brief foray into Musicology 101, we turn to the relationship between the listener and the music, and, later, between music and psychoanalysis.

The model for pleasure in listening to music that Kohut utilized was the libido theory. It is the very theory of sexuality that he, George Klein, and many other analysts roundly criticized a decade later. But, in the 1950s, for both sexuality and music, the aim was "discharge" rather than savoring an exquisitely sensual total experience including an exciting build-up of tension.

When it came to the enjoyment of sensual and sexual experiences, in pleasures of mounting tension prior to satisfaction through orgasmic release, composers, poets, and lovers had been way ahead of the analysts. Richard Wagner, for example stretched the erotic yearning of Tristan and Isolde over four hours. He does so through a series of excruciatingly ambiguous chord progressions that we hear at the beginning of the opera, in the Prelude, and that only reach a musical resolution at the very end of the opera. This prelude in which a key is not clearly indicated, ushered in a crisis in music, as we will see later. For Tristan and Isolde it is only in the very last notes of the opera, in their love-death that the chord progressions are resolved, that the two lovers finally consummate their erotic desires.

(5) Beginning of Tristan and Isolde:

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End of Tristan and Isolde:

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Like foreplay, departures from consonance and the tonic key also provide pleasure, and not only because of the expected return home. Although such an expectation may be in the background, the very violations of it are pleasurable.

Departures from the tonic, excursions through modulations in different keys and violations of expectations are characteristic of the development sections of musical compositions. Themes are taken up by different instruments and played in different keys. In effect they are "worked through." Like analyst and analysand, the performer and listener find a new way of looking at, and hearing, old material. The old material appears to both in an ever-changing context. As in analysis, in music, working through is not designed to eliminate the impact of the old, but to embed it in a variety of new contexts, which provide the old with a richer texture in the present. In both psychoanalysis and in listening to music, active creative participation is required.

In writing about music, Kohut also departed from his traditional psychoanalytic perspective and hinted at novel interfaces between music and psychoanalysis.

First, Kohut (1957, [1978]) linked the function of music to the function of the analyst. He extrapolated from Freud's advice about listening to patients with evenly hovering attention by recommending that analysts should listen to "... the sounds of the patient's voice, the music that lies behind the meaningful words" (p. 243). In listening to a patient's music, and not only the words, Kohut paved the way for the analyst's empathic immersion in the patient's experience. However, he was not yet ready to include the analyst's "music" and to depict psychoanalysis as an improvisational duet.

Second, Kohut (1957, [1978]) recognized the central role of repetitions and rhythm in musical compositions. However, he related the prevalence and acceptance of repetitions in music to a reduction in energy expenditure. He did not yet have access to the empirical research of Beatrice Beebe, that rhythms can forge powerful connections.

Third, Kohut likened music to "play," thereby departing from the anxiety-tension-reduction model of musical enjoyment. However, not having yet discovered self psychology, he ascribed the enjoyment of music to a defensive function of the ego, analogous to Freud's observations of a child playing "being gone" in order to master actively the painful passively endured experience of its mother's absence.

Fourth, Kohut (1957, [1978]) compared music and poetry. A simple rhythm may be covered or concealed by a sophisticated tune just like the deeper primary-process layer of rhythm or rhyme may be covered by the verbal content of a poem. Here Kohut pointed toward a broader, more complex artistic organization comprised of surface structures and deeper structures. This parallel between poetry and music also fascinated Leonard Bernstein.

At the time Kohut wrote that the pleasures of music are rooted in early oral gratification, another analyst, Ralph Greenson (1954), theorized, in a similar vein, in his paper, On the Meaning of the Sound 'Mm' as in the Campbell Soup Ad.

(6) Campbell Soup ad.

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Greenson speculated that this sound, "Mmm," made with closed lips, is the only sound a nursing baby can make and still keep all the milk in his mouth. Greenson supported his view by listing all the languages in which the word "mother" begins with or builds on the "Mm" sound: mama, mommy, mutter, madre, mere, and so on.

Fastforward to the 1970s. Although Greenson did not pursue the evolution of the Mm sound, and Kohut never updated his study of music according to his self psychology contributions, Leonard Bernstein took up both of these challenges. He presented his ideas in his Norton Lecture series, given at Harvard in 1976, entitled, The Unanswered Question, utilizing the title of the composition by Charles Ives. This question is, "Whither Music?" and I want to piggy-back to that, "Whither Psychoanalysis?" But, I am not asking, what can psychoanalysis teach us about music, rather, what can music teach us about psychoanalysis. Remarkably, Bernstein's ideas are quite consistent with current-day self psychology, especially as informed by contributions from empirical infant research.

Bernstein credited two major sources of influence. One source was Noam Chomsky's work on the deep structures of grammar, transformational grammar. Bernstein wanted to parallel Chomsky's work by delineating comparable deep structures, transformational processes, for music. Second, Bernstein was also influenced by his Harvard Philosophy Professor, David Presall's cross-disciplinary emphasis: the best way to know one discipline is in the context of another discipline. So, Bernstein set out to examine the structure of music in the context of poetry, linguistics, aesthetics, and physics.

On one sleepless night, Leonard Bernstein (1976) speculated about the origins of music. His speculations were similar to Greenson's but with a twist. For Greenson the sound Mm was linked to oral gratification. Bernstein, however, linked what he imagined to be primal Mm and Aa sounds to the foundation of music and to communication.

Bernstein imagined a newborn in pre-historic times trying out his new found voice, Mmmm, just like Greenson's baby. However, when hungry, Bernstein imagined an infant calling for his mother's attention with Mmmm, Mmmm, and opening his mouth to receive the nipple, Mmmm-Aaaa. Then with an intensification of hunger, or with impatience, or delight, the word is prolonged, Maaaa. And, imagined Bernstein, frm his evolutionary perspective, we are now singing. "What we seem to be getting to," he wrote, "is a hypothesis that would confirm a cliche - namely, Music is Heightened Speech" (p. 15). The cause of such heightening would be intensified emotion. However, in the remainder of the lectures, Bernstein challenged that cliche. Music is even more, much more, than heightened speech.

Greenson and Kohut were writing in the pre-empirical infant research era. Their infant made sounds, and satisfactions or rewards reinforced these sounds. Bernstein's infant however, anticipated the motivational systems theory of Joe Lichtenberg, Jim Fosshage, and me. His infant was motivated by sensuality, needs to exercise physiological functions and meet physiological requirements, by curiosity, exploration, assertion, and attachment. Thus, following Bernstein, music, communication, and infant research all share a common beginning in pre-historic times.

These speculations, however, do not yet include a responsive environment whereby infant and caregiver co-construct and interactively regulate experiences of satisfaction and frustration. The infant is still depicted as essentially shaped by, but not yet shaping his environment. Yet, Bernstein did recognize a co-construction model in the creation of the musical experience, as I will soon have him demonstrate.

Listening to music is of course complexly embedded in cultural, educational and developmental influences. It becomes an interactive process, in which we can be piqued by curiosity, delighted by novelty, enticed by the unexpected and shocked by surprises. Pleasure resides in the challenge as we follow the intricacies of the music. We crescendo with joy and decrescendo in exhaustion. But, most important, we have had to engage in a manner that co-constructs the experience of listening to music.

As in the empirical infant research, in listening to music, co-construction does not mean that each participant, composer, performer, and listener contributes similarly or equally to the experience. Rather each contributes, influences, and is influenced by the other in some manner. How composer, performer and listener co-construct music is demonstrated by Leonard Bernstein as he plays the Beethoven Sonata opus 31, #3. First a few bars of the Sonata played straight by Yehudi Wyner, then by Leonard Bernstein as he "feels them."

(7) Beethoven Piano Sonata Op. 31 #3

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From where does this yearning arise, this feeling that Bernstein expresses? Is it in the music? Is it in Bernstein as performer? Or as listener? Is it intrinsic to the "meaning" of the music? Bernstein (1976) asked, "Did Beethoven feel all that, or anything like it? Did I make up these feelings, or are they to some degree related to Beethoven's feelings transferred to me through his notes" (p. 138)? His response, is "both," and is consistent with his belief in the inherent ambiguity of music, and the power of expressivity of music.

Bernstein distinguished the expressive power of music from the meaning of music. Expressive power relies on the contributions of the listener as in the Beethoven Piano Sonata just heard. Musical meanings are different, Bernstein emphasized. Music does not mean anything literal. It is abstract, generated by a constant stream of metaphors, and transformations. Like Kohut, Bernstein draws a parallel between poetry and music.

Prose can be transformed into poetry through metaphors and various figures of speech, for example, deletions and devices such as embedding, thesis and antithesis, and repetition. Here is some prose: Juliet is a girl. Romeo’s usual temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. When Romeo stand near Juliet, his temperature is 98.8 degrees Fahrenheit. The sun is at the center of our solar system. The rays of the sun light-up and warm those parts of the earth that they touch. Here is Shakespeare’s poetic version: "Juliet is the sun." Considerable deletions of the prose are required to create the poetic metaphor, "Juliet is the sun." What Shakespeare and I have done with words, Mozart did all over the place in music. First the opening bars of Mozart's 40th Symphony and then Leonard Bernstein's version of the opening of this symphony as it would sound , unmetaphorized or deconstructed, with all the deleted connections and symmetrical repetitions spelled out.

(8) Mozart Symphony # 40

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In music, transformations are accomplished through "figures of speech" and similar devices: thesis and antithesis, opposition of consonance and dissonance, imitation, alliteration, varieties of rhythms, harmonic progressions, symmetry and repetitions. Symmetry and repetition occupy a special place. When we listen to music we are primed to expect balance, symmetry and repetition. Violations of expectations and violations of symmetry becomes the source of excitement that music evokes.

June Hadley (1989), a neurobiologist, found that primarily we are neurologically programmed to seek repetition and the novel, then to maintain arousal within tolerable limits, and then to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. Just as in early development, violations of expectations of the familiar, within certain limits, are attention grabbers. They rivet our interest and delight us.

As listeners to music, we expect the familiar and the novel. As did Leonard Bernstein when he played the Beethoven Sonata, we also impose our own shape on what we hear. Together with the performer, live or recorded, we co-construct a personal and highly abstract aesthetic experience. But repetition in music introduces a sense of time, in some ways real time. Like the ticking of a clock, repetition contains, moves, and frames the listening experience. Beethoven even included a ticking metronome sound in his Symphony # 8.

(9) Beethoven Symphony # 8

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Philosopher, Susan Langer (1953) explained that "the ticking of a clock is repetitious and regular, but not in itself rhythmic; the listeners ear hears rhythm in the succession of equal ticks" (p. 126). With Daniel Stern (1995) she holds that rhythm is our subjective way of organizing repeating units of time.

We move with rhythm and rhythm makes us, and music, move. Our experience of repetition is derived from our capacity already present at birth, to distinguish rhythms. According to infant researchers DeCasper and Carstens (1980), rhythm discrimination does not need to be learned. Stern (1995) placed repetitions and rhythm, a beat that repeats, at a critical juncture in the construction of representations and in the temporal contouring of feelings. Rhythms can be a source of familiarity and novelty as well as the scaffold for affect.

Empirical studies of the extraordinary place of rhythm have yielded a voluminous literature on vocal rhythm coordination between adult pairs, and between infants and adults. These studies were conducted by my friend and long-time co-author, Beatrice Beebe, and by Joseph Jaffe and their colleagues (Jaffe, Beebe, Feldstein, Crown, and Jasnow, 1999).

In vocal rhythm coordination, microphones are placed on the neck of each member of the dyad being studied. The microphones do not pick up the content of the dialogue; that is, they pick up the purely on-off pattern of sound and silence, the rhythm but not the words. They track variables such as vocalization, pausing, and the patterns of turn taking, how partners in a conversation negotiate when one talks then stops talking, and the other begins to talk. Vocal rhythm coordination means that each person’s rhythm is predictable from that of the other.

Adult partners in a conversation tend to coordinate with each other's vocal rhythm. Adults have two modes of speaking: adult directed speech and infant directed speech. Infants have only one mode. When adults speak with infants, they alter their pitch, rhythm, and usual manner of speech. Although they talk in "infanteze" a rhythm of turntaking is established.

(10) Beatrice conversing with an infant

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Vocal rhythm in speech is a basic ingredient of interactions and it predicts secure attachments. Vocal rhythms are interactively organized. Greenson and Bernstein could have imagined mother-infant dyads in which the infants Mm to their mothers and the mothers make sounds that approximate the baby's vocalization. Thereby the verbal-musical repertoire of the babies can increase. Similarly, as we listen to music, or to the associations of analysands, our accompanying rhythms are likely to alter, as we mold our rhythms to the rhythms of the other and they mold their rhythms to ours. In this rhythmic interaction, our own repertoire of rhythms will increase. The beat of our music and that of our analysands can be coordinated, or syncopated, but hopefully, we do not get too far off the beat.

Coordinating one's own vocal timing with that of the partner, whether infant or adult, is crucial for the infant's social development as well as for adult relationships. This molding or coordination occurs outside of awareness. It belongs to the realm of procedural memory, to skills or action sequences that are encoded nonsymbolically. Over time these procedures become automatic and influence processes that guide behavior. In adults, procedural memories are content-free, in the sense that they entail the learning of processes rather than information. Procedural memories guide the way in which we engage in a dialogue. When Dizzy Gillespie and his friends improvise, they converse with each other and with their listeners.

(11) Jazz Improvisation

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People talking, jazz musicians improvising, soloists, duetists or soloist and orchestra playing, are all engaged in dialogues. The dialogue may be abstract and ambiguous, but some degree of turn taking still prevails. Compare the infant-adult proto-conversation we heard, which already has the structure of two people talking, with this dialogue between the piano and the basses from Beethoven's Piano Concerto #4

(12) Beethoven's Piano Concerto #4

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After some respectful turn taking, like two excited conversationalists, the piano or the bass sections begin before the other has completed its phrase. The last notes of one phrase overlap with or become the first notes of the next phrase. The ambiguity created resembles dream images, where one image fits equally well into two or more contexts.

We are born with an orientation toward rhythmically coordinated interpersonal interactions, a sharing of our pulses (Schogler, 1999), and our heartbeats. In fact, Bach scholar Russell Miles claimed that the beat of Baroque music, the beat of Bach’s music, was the beat of the human heart. The harmonic series in derived from physics; but rhythms are derived from biology.

Rhythm and time, the regularity of beats, and the spacing of beats into a time frame, are basic organizations that hold together dialogues between infant and caretaker, between conversationalists, and between musician and listener. When these repetitive organizing patterns were loosened in music, euphemistically referred to as "freed from their constraints" or "deconstructed," there developed a crisis in music. How far can we deconstruct music? Psychoanalysis is in a similar crisis of deconstruction. How far can we deconstruct psychoanalysis?

The evolution of music from its origins in Mm, Ah, and Ma, to the time of Bach took many centuries. However, coexisting with all the transformations that characterized musical history tonality retained its hold. After all, as Leonard Bernstein demonstrated, it derived from, a fundamental physical principle, a universal. Tonality began to be undermined in 19th Century music. It crumbled in the beginning of the 20th Century. The door to chaos in music was opened by the operas of Richard Wagner and later the impressionistic works of Claude Debussy. In different ways for each, chromaticism gained the upper hand over diatonism. Recall the unsettling opening chords of Tristan and Isolde. Nevertheless, both Wagner and Debussy still retained a hold on form. In spite of their tonal revolutions, their studied ambiguities, their compositions retained an impeccable structure. But the die was cast, and in the early 20th Century, composers made concerted efforts to break the mold of tonal music. Foremost among these renegades was Arnold Schoenberg. He devised a system of music called Twelve Tone; no note could be repeated until all the other 11 notes had been used. Theodor Adorno in The Philosophy of Modern Music passionately defended Schoenberg, considering his work totally sincere, all truth and beauty, as opposed to what he considered to be the epitome of insincere music, the evil Igor Stravinsky.

Though admiring of Schoenberg, Leonard Bernstein weighed in on the side of Stravinsky. He summed it up as follows: "Stravinsky and Schoenberg were after the same thing in different ways. Stravinsky tried to keep musical progress on the move by driving tonal and structural ambiguities on and on to a point of no return. Schoenberg, foreseeing this point of no return, and taking his cue from the Expressionist movement in the other arts, initiated a clean, total break with tonality altogether, as well as with symmetry" (1976, p. 271).

The point of no-return is the point at which there is no more tonality, no more home key, and a break with the past. It is a point toward which Stravinsky moved, but never reached. Yet even in twelve-tone music there is organization of sorts but not the anchor provided by tonality. Bernstein's Harvard lectures were a plea for a measure of tonality. His argument resembled Kohut’s reference to the astronauts in orbit. At a possible point of no return for them, they voiced a preference for crashing into the earth, returning home, rather than spinning off into space.

Adorno's arguments have a familiar ring to followers of the controversies in the psychoanalytic literature. Adorno described Schoenberg’s music as sincere and authentic, whereas Stravinsky’s music was insincere and inauthentic. Schoenberg's work was stark, quite ingenious, deeply personal and subjective. Stravinsky's work was detached, objective, and regressive, which meant that he maintained a connection with the past. However, to some listeners Schoenberg sounds mechanical and Stravinsky sounds serious, yet with humor, irony and whimsy. A twelve-tone piece and, having played a bit of a Viennese Waltz at the start of my talk, another waltz, this one by Stravinsky, will illustrate my bias.

(13) A twelve-tone piece...

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...followed by Stravinsky waltz

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The survival of music, in the face of renegades and fads, following Bernstein, is based on the recognition and acceptance of certain "universals." Tonality is deeply rooted in us. It is like a container. It provides continuity and a "fence" around musical excursions, variations, adventures, and experiments. We are bound to tonality and rhythm not only by conventions, traditions, and education, but by the universal of the harmonic series and our beating hearts.

I set out to position psychoanalysis in the realms of poetry and music, an area defined by ambiguity and abstraction. In psychoanalytic discourse, as in music, there is an ambiguity where the meanings of one overlap with the meanings of the other. These are our procedures, where our rhythms and communications interface.

Like Kohut in his "Semicircle of Mental Health" paper, Bernstein, envisioned the rediscovery and reacceptance of tonality in the latter part of 20th Century as furthering musical progress in "friendly competition." Like Kohut, Bernstein envisioned intergenerational mentoring as triumphing over Oedipal rivalries. Progress in music is built on two interconnected universals: the harmonic series assuring the survival of tonality, and a musical syntax which, like poetry, utilizes metaphors, and recognizes the appeal of symmetry and repetition as well as violations of expectations. This was Bernstein's answer to the question, "whither music?"

And, "whither psychoanalysis?" Universals tend to give psychoanalysts indigestion. We don't trust them because we value the infinite variety of human nature. But, let us consider psychoanalysis an art form like poetry and music. From this vantage point psychoanalysis is not a branch of philosophy, not a branch of a natural or even humanistic science, not a branch biology or physics. But it is an art that may share some perspectives with philosophy and science, but grows out of our shared rhythms of communication. Analyst and analysand are both performers and listeners, co-composing an analytic interlude to celebrate the unique individuality we prize: our dissonant natures, our chromatic emotions, and our atonal self-states. In the improvisational duet of analysis, faint voices get amplified, and blaring, strident voices get muted, inner voices become themes, and themes modulate into other themes. Rhythms are shared and syncopated. Music emerges, previously unheard by either participant.

Like analysts, as we listen to music we are far more actively engaged than had been previously recognized. Rather than reducing music to a psychological function, such as tension relief or heightened speech, we can raise psychoanalysis to that ambiguous, abstract realm along-side music, where it will not wither. With a grip on our tonality, we can proclaim, I sing therefore I am.

Send a message to Frank Lachmann with your thoughts on this essay.

References

Bernstein, L. (1976). The Unanswered Question. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bernstein, L. (1982). Findings. New York NY: Simon and Schuster.

Coriat, I. H. (1945). Some aspects of psychoanalytic interpretation of music. Psychoanal. Review, 32, 408-418.

DeCasper, A. & Carstens, A. (1980). Contingencies of stimulation: Effects on learning and emotions in neonates. Infant Behavior and Development, 9, 19-36.

Greenson, R. R. (1954). About the sound 'Mm...'. Psychoanal. Quart., 23, 234-239.

Hadley, J. (1989). The neurobiology of motivational systems. In J. Lichtenberg, Psychoanalysis and Motivation. Hillsdale NJ: The Analytic Press. pp.227-372

Kohut, H. (1957). Observations on the psychological functions of music. In P. Ornstein (ed.). The Search for the Self, Vol. I, 1978, New York NY: International Universities Press. pp. 233-254.

Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York NY: International Universities Press.

Kohut, H. & Levarie, S. (1950). On the enjoyment of listening to music. In P. Ornstein (ed.). The Search for the Self, Vol. I, 1978, New York NY: International Universities Press. pp. 135-158.

Langer, S. (1953). Feeling and Form. New York NY: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Stern, D. (1995). The Motherhood Constellation. New York NY: Basic Books.