Leaving Home: Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf”

ABSTRACT

This article will explore some of the ways I conceptualize music as it pertains to the concept of “home,” and specifically here, about leaving home. Using composer Sergei Prokofiev’s music in his well-known beloved composition, Peter and the Wolf, I will illustrate the gradual integration and consolidation of identity in the eponymous character, Peter, as he left his childhood garden home. Thus, the analysis of music itself as a primary source of psychoanalytic data is the distinctive method of analysis that I bring to my interdisciplinary explorations. Prokofiev’s masterpiece Peter and the Wolf pertains to the following overdetermined themes: Music and psychoanalytic concepts hold enduring value as each informs and enriches the other. Music serves as an important entry into affect and unconscious processes. Music and psychoanalytic principles are relevant both inside and beyond the concert hall and consulting room and contribute to a nuanced understanding of our inner lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychological development
• Erik Erikson
• individuation
• musical themes
• affects
• instrumentation
• orchestration
• Prokofiev
• Peter and the Wolf

Acknowledgments

This paper is dedicated both to my oldest granddaughter, Sarah Esther Lewis, who just left home to become a college freshman as I was writing this article, and to our youngest granddaughter, Rachel Jordana Lewis, who is about to leave home to begin college as this paper is completed.

Disclosure statement

This article is a revised version of my chapter “Animals, Music, and Psychoanalysis” in The Cultural Zoo (S. Akhtar and V. Volkan, Eds.), 2005, International University Press (no longer publishing), and in the revised chapter, “Self Esteem – Peter and the Wolf” which was published in my book Melodies of the Mind, 2013, Routledge.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie Jaffee Nagel

Julie Jaffee Nagel, Ph.D., is a graduate of The Juilliard School, The University of Michigan, and The Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. She is the author of Melodies of the Mind (Routledge Press), Managing Stage Fright: A Guide for Musicians and Music Teachers (Oxford University Press), and the just published Career Choices in Music Beyond the Pandemic: Musical and Psychological Perspectives (Rowman and Littlefield) as well as publications in major psychoanalytic journals. She has presented her work nationally and internationally. Dr. Nagel has a private practice in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Ann Arbor, Michigan.