
BACK INTO THE OCEAN:
Music, Identification, and the Oceanic Feeling
All his sea dreams
Come to me
Joni Mitchell, “The Dawntreader”
What might the oceanic feeling have to do with music? One answer is that Freud claimed to feel neither of them, a biographical detail that is often attributed to his anxiety about undifferentiation, a fear of sameness, literal homophobia. This program resumes a Freudian voyage potentiated by his sea-change theory of sexuality using contemporary cultural objects including William Finnegan’s surfing memoir, Barbarian Days; John Luther Adams’ environmentalist composition for orchestra, “Become Ocean”; and Frank Ocean’s Blonde trilogy to explore and contrast the erotics of identification (based on shared experience) with sexual complementarity (based on difference) through the work of Adam Phillips, Harold Boris, Leo Bersani, and Jean Laplanche.
At the end of this event participants will be able to:
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Describe history of the concept of “oceanic feeling” in psychoanalytic work.
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Demonstrate the effect of musical experience in cultivating contact between patient and therapist.
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Compare the concept of homoerotic identification with heterosexual complementarity.
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Westen, D. (1998). The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 333-371.
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Phillips, A. (2014). Becoming Freud: The making of a psychoanalyst (Jewish Lives). New Haven : Yale University Press.
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Goldberg, P. (2012). Active perception and the search for sensory symbiosis. JAPA, 60/4. 791-812
Adam Blum, Psy.D., has written about psychoanalysis and the music of Björk, Kendrick Lamar, Talking Heads, Radiohead, Sondheim, Copland, and Michael Jackson. He has a private practice in San Francisco.
Francisco J. González, MD, is a psychoanalyst and writer whose work focuses on the necessity of community psychoanalysis as a necessary movement and on the complex articulation of the sociopolitical as an intrinsic element of individual and collective psychic life. He is the Co-Director of the Community Psychoanalysis Track at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. He served on the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis, and practices privately in San Francisco and Oakland and in the public domain at Instituto Familiar de la Raza in San Francisco.

