Rhythm Nation

ABSTRACT

Bion’s remarks about music were few but fascinating. This paper provides a close reading of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (2015), an album that has been embraced as the musical centerpiece of the Black Lives Matter movement in terms of Bion’s profound comments on the power of rhythmic speech to engage other minds and bodies in otherwise noncommunicable aspects of experience. Bion’s observations about rhythm are elaborated with respect to the French psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham’s notion of “rhythmizing perception” and Freud’s fundamental rule of psychoanalysis.

Notes

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-48u_uWMHY

² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZTYgq4EoRo

³ As in Bion’s (1962) logic of container/contained, the music and lyrics of “For Free?”—like psychoanalysis, in all of its musical lyricism, its spoken words—structure a relationship to an infinitely recursive dynamic between the unspoken and the unspeakable, creating a rhythm that is not locatable at one pole of this continuum or the other but emergent out of the very motion between them.

⁴ Transcending “caesura,” the musical term for these pauses, was central to Bion’s model of psychoanalytic cure (Civitarese, 2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Blum

Adam Blum, Psy.D., writes about music and psychoanalysis. His papers include “This Must Be the Place: Thinking Psychical Life with Music” (2016) in the Psychoanalytic Psychology special issue on “Psychoanalysis and the Humanities” and “How Lives Matter” (2015) on the Psychoanalytic Dialogues Blog, which infuses written text with music samples to illustrate psychoanalytic phenomena. He is in private practice in San Francisco and Berkeley.