Music & Adolescence.
Listening young Patients through Sounds and Songs.

di Caterina Olivotto, Anna Cordioli, Cristiano Lombardo e Massimo De Mari

A collaborative platform for collective reflection

Our psychoanalytic center is undertaking a project to enhance the reach of psychoanalysis through online platforms.

This project is titled KnotGarden.

The name evokes the small gardens designed for leisurely strolls along an intricate network of pathways (Campanile, 2022).

KnotGarden is a registered Open Online Journal (part of a wider publishing platform) that facilitates the creation and dissemination of high-quality contents, organised in monographic issues.

In addition to analysts from Centro Veneto di Psicoanalisi, colleagues and experts from across Italy and internationally are also invited to participate.

All works are available free of charge both online and as PDF attachments.

—

We have not yet opted for a formal translation of the Italian texts (e.g. into English), but we do not rule out doing so in the future.

Articles originally written in a language other than Italian also appear in their original form.

The website of the “Centro Veneto di Psicoanalisi” and KnotGarden have chosen to adopt a Creative Commons license. This makes it possible to quote and reproduce articles, citing the source.

In the past, we have received requests to republish articles in print publications and, obviously in agreement with the author, Knotgarden journal has granted permission with the sole request that the source be cited.

The language of publication is Italian, but the choice of the Online formula allows colleagues to read the various issues using system translators.

Digital translations are never as accurate as those done by bilingual colleagues (remember that psychoanalytic language is incredibly nuanced and specific), but while waiting for official translations, they make it possible to appreciate the richness of those who do not write only in English.
We therefore invite you to use them to explore writings in other languages, taking care to contact the author if you wish to translate a passage for quotation.

At the end of each article, you will find the authors’ email addresses.
To contact the CVP staff and the editor encharged please use the following email address: cvp@centrovenetodipsicoanalisi.it

Music & Psychoanalysis Study Group

A collaborative platform for collective reflection

The publication “Music and Adolescence,” released in 2024, originated from a specialized initiative, specifically a study group.

For over a year, 13 analysts convened to discuss music, psychoanalysis, and clinical practice.

The group provided the container in which all our reflections were collected and acted as a sounding board allowing new elaborations that resulted in 13 works that recount our personal answers to the questions we initially posed.

The group’s work resulted in a monographic issue of the journal KnotGarden, comprising more than 300 pages. It is an extremely rich volume, carefully edited both in terms of psychoanalytic sources and strictly musical and historical aspects.

Index of of contents (translated titles, articles in original language)

LATO A – la musica dell’adolescenza

LATO B – l’adolescenza attraverso la musica

Ghost Track

Main Themes of the Issue about Music in psychonalysis

Acoustic Reverie and Tuning

Freud (1895) made us more attentive to the non-verbal chanels and “communication” (Verständigung) is, after all, an original internal tuning.

The study of the sound tunings of communication is linked to early life experiences. Anzieu (1978) called “sound bath” the experience of the child immersed in the preverbal, asymbolic experiences deposited in memory and body.

Di Benedetto (1996) discusses Acoustic Rêverie, which is “that form of imagination, specifically acoustic, that contributes to the elaboration of the precursors of verbal language and which exists alongside the visual and narrative imagination, privileged so-far by psychoanalytic theory.”

Psychic representativeness

In adolescence, an important game is played to establish one’s identity through previous and new identifications that intertwine and strengthen in different ways. Music (not only rock music) helps this delicate evolutionary process by providing a framework capable of shaping the elaboration of the Oedipal vicissitudes.

Psychic Rappresentativeness grows through the rebellion expressed and contained in the lyrics of songs and “acted out” through the sound of instruments that lend themselves well to express the voice of the soul.

Defenses and trauma processing

Noy (1969) observed that sounds can evoke a reaction in the listener in a manner that is concordant and isomorphic with their deep-seated emotions..

However, Sounds can also evoke discordant emotions that result from defensive activities triggered by the auditory stimulus.

If the isomorphic mode refers to an immanent and almost symbiotic contact between sender and receiver, the reactive mode reflects a psyche actively responding and expanding differences.

This, thus, opens up a whole range of experiences that each person has excluded from auditory listening due to more or less massive defensive mechanisms and traumas. The analyst’s work is not only to be aware of the patient’s forms of the “un-heard”, but also to explore their own forms of deafness.

In the more than 300 pages of articles created during this research, there are, of course, many more themes covered, which we invite you to discover.

A quick read on the topics covered in realation with adolescence (in case you are interested in exploring any particular topic)