(i)
“Thus, music may acquire the specific function of a ‘transitional’ object‘, of an object that is, by its specific acoustic qualities, dynamical features and structure, representing, in an illusionary space and manner, the ‘object’ that is absent or frustating by its being or having to be recognized and acknowledged as separate and different. This musical transitional object may then be ‘used’ within the realms and boundaries of intermediary space in just the same manner as any other transitional object may be used on any other sensual quality. The lullaby, the humming, the reproduction of a sound or a sequence of sound having acquired a specific ‘meaning’ will then be used to represent the absent. This ‘transitional’ representation of the absent has a unique quality between reality and not-reality, in a simultaneous is and is not.”
(ii)
Thus, the conceptualization of ‘music as an objectless art’ that if often found in the not very extensive psychoanalytical literature on music, fails to grasp the specificity of the ‘object’ character that music in fact does have.
(iii)
Affects
… aside from the well-known categorial affects like joy, sadness, anxiety, anger, disgust, surprise and interest that are probably inborn,,, there are other forms of affective interchange that are just as or even more important in the process of formation of self and object representations in development. These vitality affects as they were termed by D. Stern are dynamic-kinetic processes of a specific kind including movement, expressive and gestural patterns like upsurging, fading, ‘Klang’ and change of ‘Klang’, the dialogue with differing ‘Klang’ and colouring of ‘Klang’, exploding, crescendo, decrescendo etc. Such bodily enactec and represented dynamic processes tendo to be connected and related to each other in manners like short-long, up-down, rhythmically discontinuos-continuos, flowing, slowing down and accelerating, etc.
(iv)
Musical and affective semantics are thus, being born from the same matrix, intimately related to each other so that, music may well acquire, by its specific sensual structure and quality, the dynamic quality and function of an ‘object’, by representing within and through its specific semantic structures of ikonical, indexical and symbolical qualities the specific affective semantical structures and qualities of the dynamical mutual interchange between the evolving self and object.
My comment: All these aspects make the approach of Ludwig Haesler extremely important for the research of music as an aesthetic/libidinal/cognitive object. Recent research on mental schemas or imagetic schemas in music (for instance, Candace Brower) confirms the importance of what Haesler described more than twenty years ago.
(Ludwig Haesler, Bulletin of the British Psychoanalytic Society, 1992, pp. 16-20)
Colloquium: Contemporary Brazilian Music and Thought 