Abstract

Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, early on, neglected music's theoretical value in favor of painting's. Later, however, he found that it is the transience of music that speaks to the phenomenological experience of Being. This transition from painting to music presents the possibility of an ontological understanding of music for psychoanalysis. For Freud, music and morality were both from a “beyond” that was an effect of neurosis. Drawing on psychoanalyst Bion's idea of container–contained, and his disciple Meltzer's application of this to art, as well as Bion's later innovation of the unknowable O, I apply Merleau-Ponty's distinction between painting and music to the therapeutic nature of art in order to see what sort of psychoanalytically significant revelation is obtained through music.