Listening To The Melody Of The Mind

Psychotherapy has been described humorously as the art of practicing a science which doesn't exist. Brauer and Faris submit that the practice of psychodynamic psychotherapy draws on both art and science and should be conducted only by those who are properly trained with sufficient experience and steeped in the empirical literature based on solid research. Insightful and well-trained therapists should, therefore, draw heavily from the scientific disciplines of child development, medical science, biology, neuroscience, psychology, and sociology. To tap into the great body of research in such areas means the well-read psychotherapist must be able to assimilate contributions from a rather broad array of specialties. This is a daunting task and is not for the intellectually faint of heart. Listening to the Melody of the Mind attempts to provide a comprehensive exploration of the person who is the therapist.

What can psychoanalysis learn from music? What can music learn from psychoanalysis? Can the analysis of music itself provide a primary source of psychological data? Drawing on Freud's concept of the oral road to the unconscious, Melodies of the Mind invites the reader to take a journey on an aural and oral road that explores both music and emotion, and their links to the unconscious. In this book, Julie Jaffee Nagel discusses how musical and psychoanalytic concepts inform each other, showing the ways that music itself provides an exceptional non-verbal pathway to emotion – a source of 'quasi' psychoanalytical clinical data. The interdisciplinary synthesis of music and psychoanalytic knowledge provides a schema for understanding the complexity of an individual's inner world as that world interacts with social 'reality'. There are three main areas explored: The Aural Road Moods and Melodies The Aural/Oral Road Less Travelled Melodies of the Mind is an exploration of the power of music to move us when words fall short. It suggests the value of using music and ideas of the mind to better understand and address psychological, social, and educational issues that are relevant in everyday life. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists, music therapists, musicians, music teachers, music students, social workers, educators, professionals in the humanities and social services as well as music lovers. Julie Jaffee Nagel is a graduate of The Juilliard School, The University of Michigan, and The Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. She is on the faculty of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute and is in private practice in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In this book, Nagel invites us to take a journey on an aural and oral road that explores music and emotion, and their links to the unconscious.

Using musical examples from Bach to the Beatles, Levitin reveals the role of music in human evolution, shows how our musical preferences begin to form even before we are born and explains why music can offer such an emotional experience. Music is an obsession at the heart of human nature, even more fundamental to our species than language. In This Is Your Brain On Music Levitin offers nothing less than a new way to understand it, and its role in human life

Following her distinguished earlier career as a concert pianist and later as a music theorist, Jeanne Bamberger conducted countless case studies analysing musical development and creativity within the classroom environment. 'Discovering the musical mind' draws together these classic studies, and offers the chance to revisit and reconsider some of the conclusions she drew at the time.

On Repeat offers an in-depth inquiry into music's repetitive nature. Drawing on a diverse array of fields, it sheds light on a range of issues from repetition's use as a compositional tool to its role in characterizing our behavior as listeners, and considers related implications for repetition in language, learning, and communication.

How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of disciplines, however, there is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioural expressions in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Shaun Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the formulation of that common vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework that will avoid both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states. Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience, and specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we find in the content of our experience. If throughout conscious experience there is a constant reference to one's own body, even if this is a recessive or marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a structural feature of the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a framework that is likely to determine or influence all other aspects of experience. The second set of questions concerns aspects of the structure of experience that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before we know it. They do not normally enter into the content of experience in an explicit way, and are often inaccessible to reflective consciousness. To what extent, and in what ways, are consciousness and cognitive processes, which include experiences related to perception, memory, imagination, belief, judgement, and so forth, shaped or structured by the fact that they are embodied in this way?