The Personal Idiom in Music and Literature

In choosing particular musical genres and pieces of literature, patients can accomplish a number of emotional tasks relevant to psychoanalytic inquiry. They can shape their subjective experience in various ways, seeking to enhance or numb specific affects, facilitate the emergence of desired self-states, or cultivate valued fantasies. This article presents my attempts, using a variant of Sullivanian detailed inquiry, to explore patients' embrace of the aural and the literary and to integrate the phenomenological and narrative data thereby gleaned with the dyadic material that occupies the core of contemporary psychoanalytic exploration. Two clinical vignettes are presented that demonstrate the ways in which the analyst can employ these sources to more deeply grasp what Bollas (1992) has termed the patient's “personal idiom.”