Where Are We When We Listen to Music?

Abstract

Adopting the perspective of Langer’s understanding of music as a presentational symbol, the author questions what is symbolized in music. He argues that music symbolizes a state of “oneness” that Sandler describes as a confusion of self- and object-representations. Akin to substitutive formation, in whose guise we experience and recognize mystified what we have excluded from our consciousness, we consciously experience and recognize in music in a mystified manner this phenomenon that never entered into consciousness. Like the relation between the substitute and the substituted unconscious, which have a tertium comparationis (Freud), this phenomenon of our inner life is symbolized in music by common elements. As a result of its structural identity with bodily registered sensory experiences of our former “audio-phonic skin” (Anzieu) wrapping us in our intrauterine situation, music can also revive this envelope by its sound, tonal configurations, and rhythm, thus allowing us to remember this situation somatically and to recognize our former state of “oneness” in its guise. The feelings that we experience when listening to music that we like relate to this state. They are nameless because there is no subject who could “mentalize” them.