Book Review: Roger Kennedy, The Power of Music: Psychoanalytic Explorations

Abstract

This is a remarkable book. It appears relatively brief, at 148 pages of text, but it is richly packed with references and with allusions to a range of music, which inform the author's fascinating speculative thinking.Roger Kennedy has a distinguished background in child and adolescent psychiatry and in psychoanalysis. What is most apparent throughout this book, however, is that he also has a deep and loving relationship with music, and it is the nature of that relationship, and above all of the emotional power of music, that he sets out to explore.The book is rather 'classically' structured (in some ways, a clue to what is to come). The opening and closing chapters are entitled 'Overture' and 'Finale' respectively, with chapters in between attending to preverbal experience, historical observations on music's place in human evolution and, most importantly, the question of music and emotion. I draw attention to this because it reflects, perhaps, some sort of movement from initial enquiry to tentative formulation, which might mirror something of the analytic process. It also reflects the spirit of the book, which, although it offers historical