Each Night in Rapture: The Silent Sound of Shame

Abstract

Illustrating a point of intersection between music (as represented in a film soundtrack) and psychoanalytic theory, the author contrasts two uses of silence: the silence of a deadening, collapsing “no thing” (Bion, 1962) and that of an unformulated, experiential “boredom” in which desire crystallizes (Phillips, 1993). The silences and sounds of Steve McQueen’s (2011) film Shame are described with respect to the development of these musical and psychical phenomena with an emphasis on sexualized suffering as a result of an impaired capacity to tolerate and use silences generatively. The film’s soundtrack and narrative, as well as links to the clinical situation, are discussed with respect to the dialectical tension between these expulsive and potentiating uses of silence.

Notes

¹ Other varieties might include a third type of silence, the deliberate silence of some psychoanalytic yesteryear intended to frustrate the patient into speaking; a fourth, the silence of everything that isn’t making the sound you can hear, in which case “the music we hear [is] but one facet of the silence it comes out of” (Guerreri, 2012, p. 13); a fifth, the silence of unimaginable sound, as in the notation of unplayable music in Schumann (Žižek, 1997).

² Therein lies the double effect of Fassbender’s magnetism as a performer; as his eyes reach out with exacting certainty, their unbreakable silence draws near. (McQueen, the director, also capitalizes on this particular phenomenon in 12 Years a Slave [2013] where this gaze becomes a kind of vanishing point on the horizon of the literally unspeakable cruelty of its owner, the slavemaster played by Fassbender. In Frank [2014], this Fassbender effect is manually overridden—to powerful, negatively capable effect—by having him wear a plaster head over his face for the majority of the film.)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Blum

Adam Blum, Psy.D., is a psychotherapist in private practice in San Francisco and Berkeley. His paper “‘This Must Be the Place’: Thinking Psychical Life with Music” received the 2014 Stephen Mitchell Award from Division 39 of the American Psychological Association. He is a staff psychologist at California Pacific Medical Center.