Musical pleasure.

Abstract

Music reactivates foetal experiences of pleasure connected with auditory contact with the mother. Subject to an appropriate setting, the porosity of the skin-ego is increased, permitting bidirectional traffic between inside and outside. Kristeva uses the word significance to denote the meaning occurring along the spectrum from the infralinguistic level (the semiotics of affects) to language. The infralinguistic level (sonic, rhythmic, visual etc. traces) is that on which music develops, music here being presented as the carrier of nebulous 'fantasies' of fusion with the idealised mother of the foetal era. Primitive musical interchanges are illustrated by a clinical vignette. The paper develops the hypothesis that the pleasure of music revives the primitive auditory fusion with the mother; it points out the relations between aesthetics and musical pleasure and between musical forms and the production of pleasure in the unconscious.