The desire to learn music: a psychoanalytic approach

uma abordagem psicanalítica

Abstract

The article is the result of research carried out in a music school, in undergraduate courses. The main objective was to know which desire sustains music teachers and students in the process of teaching and learning music. The concept of psychoanalysis desire was transversal to that of music education to deal with the theme. In the literature review, few publications were found on the theme of psychoanalysis and music education. Three professors and three students were interviewed, individually and collectively, through the Clinical Method of Psychoanalytic Orientation and Conversation, derived from this method. All interviews focused on the online format, due to the isolation forced by the Covid 19 pandemic. At first, we tried to locate in each interviewee the symptoms and significant present in the relationship with music in the family environment and then in the music schools. The following conclusions were reached: the traditional “family support” for the study of music did not necessarily mean support for desire, but its demand. The desire, as Lacanian psychoanalysis understands, was located more in presenting itself to the other as a musician, seeking the feeling of belonging, than in the interest in music as a language or aesthetic object. In this demand for music, as a way of rescuing a social bond, there as a real desire, the account that most appeared at the end of the interviews was the “fear of the stage”, as a symptom of a dialectic between demand and desire for music.