Dr Rachel Darnley-Smith and I will be convening a conference on music, psychoanalysis, and music therapy at the Institute of Musical Research on Saturday 19th May 2018.
We have released our Call for Papers (deadline 26th November), which you can read in full here. The basic rationale for the conference is as follows:
A number of scholars in music studies have recently drawn on psychoanalytic ideas to make sense of musical experiences and meaning. At the same time, there are long-established links between music therapy and psychoanalysis; a large number of psychoanalysts, analytic psychotherapists and others working in this ‘talking’ tradition have themselves considered what music might mean in light of their clinical practice. However, despite influencing one another, these disciplines tend to operate independently, with practitioners of each rarely directly engaging those across the disciplinary divides. Musicologists, music therapists, and psychoanalysts have talked about music, but rarely do they speak to one another about music. This IMR research day addresses the need for interdisciplinary dialogue by asking: what can we learn about music when these disciplines begin to speak and listen to one another?
Samuel Wilson 