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Freud's Lost Chord: Discovering Jazz in the Resonant Psyche

Author(s) : Daniel Sapen

Customer Reviews

Our customers have given this title an average rating of 5 out of 5 from 2 review(s), add your own review for this title.

Rachel Edelson, Professor, U of California, Davis on 28/05/2017 19:48:19

(5 out of 5)

As a PhD student fascinated by Freud, improvisation, a transdisciplinary and jargon-free approach to many facets of depth psychology, I felt I'd entered intellectual heaven when reading Sapen's brilliant Freud's Lost Chord: Discovering Jazz in the Resonant Psyche. Sapen's intellectual grasp and his compelling, indirect, erudite style is comparable to that of the dazzling Adam Phillips: to read either of them is to encounter a mind that has deeply integrated numerous complex ideas and is presenting them in such a way as to show how these ideas illuminate and reflect off each other.

Particularly impressive is Sapen's re-framing of Freud's psychodynamic views, not iconoclastically, but broadening them within the context of Jazz, with its multiple layers of resonance of meaning, of interplay of voices, within the psyche. And doing so with a style that is perhaps even more poetically thrilling than it is academically erudite. As examples: chapters entitled Resonant Space for Dreaming and Musical Metapsychology; and phrases such as these: "With the structural theory, Freud called attention to the mind not into regions, but rather agencies in tensile, complementary relationships. Seen as mythology, all these agencies are quasi-dieties, standing in for epitomies of chaotic appetite, authority and negotiation," and "this transitive and transcendent nature of symbolization - the passing of conceptions through a figurative membrane into consciousness - also describes the permeating resonance which is music." A style such as this invites the reader to ponder, to reflect, to muse - rather than to struggle or to be impressed.

I've read a great deal of the literature on Freud, and I do know that it is often narrow in its scope, whether in praise or in calumny. Sapen, however, brings the reader to Freud within a multiverse of Bion, Kristeva, Jung, Knoblach, Rycroft, quantum physics, and the god Mercury. He ends his book with an enthralling account of a complex, aging, despairing, lonely and witty woman whom he saw in therapy - describing in musical detail her body language and the range of resonant responses she evoked from him.

I predict that this recent book will prove to be not only a ground-breaker but an important classic work in psychoanalytic literature - in part through offering not only clinicians but writers in the field a new paradigm of approach to human experience, a paradigm that is equally creative and academic.

Rachel Edelson, Professor, U of California, Davis on 25/06/2016 09:18:08

(5 out of 5)

As a PhD student fascinated by Freud, improvisation, a transdisciplinary and jargon-free approach to many facets of depth psychology, I felt I'd entered intellectual heaven when reading Sapen's brilliant Freud's Lost Chord: Discovering Jazz in the Resonant Psyche. Sapen's intellectual grasp and his compelling, indirect, erudite style is comparable to that of the dazzling Adam Phillips: to read either of them is to encounter a mind that has deeply integrated numerous complex ideas and is presenting them in such a way as to show how these ideas illuminate and reflect off each other.

Particularly impressive is Sapen's re-framing of Freud's psychodynamic views, not iconoclastically, but broadening them within the context of Jazz, with its multiple layers of resonance of meaning, of interplay of voices, within the psyche. And doing so with a style that is perhaps even more poetically thrilling than it is academically erudite. As examples: chapters entitled Resonant Space for Dreaming and Musical Metapsychology; and phrases such as these: "With the structural theory, Freud called attention to the mind not into regions, but rather agencies in tensile, complementary relationships. Seen as mythology, all these agencies are quasi-dieties, standing in for epitomies of chaotic appetite, authority and negotiation," and "this transitive and transcendent nature of symbolization - the passing of conceptions through a figurative membrane into consciousness - also describes the permeating resonance which is music." A style such as this invites the reader to ponder, to reflect, to muse - rather than to struggle or to be impressed.

I've not read a great deal of the literature on Freud, but I do know that it is often narrow in its scope, whether in praise or in calumny. Sapen, however, brings the reader to Freud within a multiverse of Bion, Kristeva, Jung, Knoblach, Rycroft, quantum physics, and the god Mercury. He ends his book with an enthralling account of a complex, aging, despairing, lonely and witty woman whom he saw in therapy – describing in musical detail her body language and the range of resonant responses she evoked from him.

I predict that this recent book will prove to be not only a ground-breaker but an important classic work in psychoanalytic literature - in part through offering not only clinicians but writers in the field a new paradigm of approach to human experience, a paradigm that is equally creative and academic.