First Notes on a Psychoanalytic Approach to the Functions of Music

The paper presents a psychoanalytic interpretation of some functions of music based on the theory of transitional objects and phenomena proposed by D. W. Winnicott and extended to the analysis of lullabies and nursery rhymes by Renata De Benedetti Gaddini. The role played by music in the process of reassuring the child and helping him in falling into sleep is compared by the author to the role played in other critical moments in the life of individuals within social communities: laments for the death, music in the rites of passage, possession trance. In all these situations the music mediates between the individual and the social environment and helps to reorganize personal identities. Taking into account some classical studies such as the one by Gilbert Rouget on music and trance or the one by Gerhard Kubik on initiation schools in Angola, the author suggests that in all these contexts the music works in a way that can be considered as rooted in the early psychological experience of transitional objects and phenomena.