How to Surf the Oceanic Feeling

ABSTRACT

This paper affords a central place to musical experience in our psychoanalytic understanding of identification. Attending to the “oceanic feeling” as it appeared in Freud’s writing, as well as the oceanic writing of the journalist William Finnegan and musical works by John Luther Adams and Frank Ocean, a rich and vital function of identification is presented and developed. This identification is not a reaction to differentiation or loss, but rather is generated through experiences of sameness and animated through the homo-erotics of being like one another (as distinguished from problems with identification, resulting in narcissism). The implications of a reclaimed concept of identification for how and what we attend to in listening and living musically is elaborated.

This article is referred to by:

Surf Time with Adam: Five Waves Make the Set

Sea Dreams: On Adam Blum’s “How to Surf the Oceanic Feeling”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Blum

Adam Blum is coauthor of the forthcoming book Here I’m Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2023) with Peter Goldberg and Michael Levin. Other recent projects include “Remembering, Repeating, and Something New: Robert Glasper’s Black Radio 3” (2022) in fort da; “Music, Sensory Communion, and the Weaving of Collective Embodiment,” presented with Goldberg and Levin at the 2020 APsaA Meeting in New York; and “Getting Home: Discussion of Henry Markman’s ‘Accompaniment in Jazz and Psychoanalysis’” (2020) in Psychoanalytic Dialogues. He has written and presented on psychoanalysis and the music of Björk, Kendrick Lamar, Stephen Sondheim, Michael Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. He is in private practice in San Francisco.