Here I'm Alive

Here I’m Alive explores the musical foundation of being human from a psychoanalytic perspective.Writing in collaboration, three psychoanalytic clinicians develop a fresh vision of the essential role of music in psychical life. Through an interdisciplinary exploration, Here I’m Alive shows how music is fundamental to becoming human, establishing our embodied sense of membership and participation in a shared world through the fabric of culture. With one authorial voice, these pages resonate with the musical forms of living that make possible any individual style of conduct or shape of desire and without which we are forever lost in the noise.

Showing us that music is at the heart of human development, of sociability, of love and desire—at the heart of most of what matters to us—this book shows us what many of us have always somehow thought but have never been able to know with such clarity and vision. Not simply one of the most fascinating books written about psychoanalysis, Here I’m Alive is, more importantly, about just how musical our lives are and can be. It is a unique and remarkable book., The phrase 'music lover' always rankled me, and this wild, beautiful, polyphonic book shows why: music is not just loved; music is love, is everywhere, is everything. Far from being a book just about music and psychoanalysis, Here I’m Alive is an experiment in eros. Its venerable concepts—the unconscious, the drives, rhythm, harmony—become a loom that weaves a world-sized tapestry., Here I’m Alive is quietly revolutionary in the way it proposes that we as psychoanalysts are in the business of reuniting our patients with the musical dimension of life through which they become more fully human, more fully themselves. These essays illustrate the role of music in the very fabric of life.

Adam Blum, Peter Goldberg, and Michael Levin are members of the Bay Area psychoanalytic community.