Music and Primary Process: Proposal for a Preliminary Experiment

Most psychoanalytic authors assume that the primary processes play a vital role in the listening, performance, and creation of music. Behind this agreement, however, lies an important if tacit disagreement regarding the nature of the primary processes, with some theorists linking them to the primitive, conflicted, and pathological and others regarding the primary processes as special, creative, even transcendent. Both groups have lacked empirical tests that might provide evidence for one position on primary process in music over another. Here, after the background issues are briefly reviewed, a preliminary empirical experiment is proposed in some detail—an experiment that could, if performed, provide evidence for a particular view of the role of primary process in music listening, and differentiate among competing views.