Biology & Psychoanalysis on Music

Chairs: Dr Dimitris Kyriazis and Dr Athanasios Dritsas

Participants: Prof. Christodoulos Flordellis, Eleni Philippachi PhD, Prof. Yannis Stavrakakis 

In his presentation, Prof. Flordellis will describe the radical plasticity of the brain: its ability to change with experience at the synaptic, chromatin, neuronal circuit, and whole-brain levels. And he will refer to how neuroplasticity serves, among others, the musical dimension in the communication of the unconscious.

Recently, analytic listening has been re-described to include listening not just to semantic content but to other aspects of verbal and non-verbal communication between patient and analyst: the musicality of analytic prose, the material qualities of the voice, the varied meanings of silence express the transferential and counter-transferential responses to the analytic condition and are considered essential to the therapeutic process. Eleni Philippachi will focus primarily on the multiple functions of the voice in the oral/aural exchange between patient and therapist. She is suggesting that paying attention to the expressive and performative qualities of the voice allows an imaginative access to unconscious, pre-discursive mental content that otherwise may not be graspable by either patient or analyst.