NEUROPSYCHOANALYSIS · MUSIC · TRAUMA

Active Music-Making, Traumatic Memory, and Dissociation

A Neuropsychoanalytic Model of Containment, Symbolization, and Autobiographical Integration

Sarvin Sabet · Adler University, Chicago, Illinois, USA

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THE QUESTION

How can experience become thinkable before it becomes fully verbal?

Traumatic experience may leave emotional, bodily, contextual, autobiographical, and self-related information psychologically active while insufficiently connected to conscious meaning and identity.

This paper proposes that active music-making may offer an organized, embodied, and agentic context in which sensory, motor, cognitive, and affective processes repeatedly occur together.

Drawing on Bionian containment and Lacanian symbolization and signification, the model considers how difficult affect might become tolerable enough to remain psychologically available, acquire representational form, develop associations, enter language, and contribute to autobiographical meaning.

THE INTEGRATIVE MODEL

From disrupted integration to autobiographical meaning

Traumatic experience→ Disrupted integration→ Active music-making→ Organization & agency→ Containment→ Expression→ Association→ Symbolization & language→ Autobiographical meaning→ Integration

This is a theoretical, hypothesis-generating model. It does not claim that music directly repairs trauma-related neural systems or constitutes an established treatment for PTSD or dissociation.

Organization & agency

Playing an instrument requires action, timing, prediction, sensory feedback, attention, error correction, and voluntary control to operate together.

Containment

Difficult affect may first need to become sufficiently tolerable to remain psychologically present and available for reflection.

Expression

Musical activity may give an internal state a perceptible form without assigning it a predetermined meaning.

Meaning

Associations, language, relationships, memory, and the symbolic world may gradually connect experience with autobiographical significance.

Music does not bypass meaning; it may help create the conditions through which meaning can gradually emerge.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarvin Sabet

Adler University · Chicago, Illinois, USA

The theoretical question developed partly from returning to the sitar several decades after first playing it in adolescence. Re-engaging with a familiar embodied musical practice raised questions about continuity of self, autobiographical memory, and the relationship among bodily, emotional, and symbolic experience across time.

This personal experience is presented as the experiential starting point of the question, not as evidence for the model.

sarvin@sabetclinic.com

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