Francis Grier is editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and a Training Analyst and Supervisor of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is also a couple psychotherapist. He works in private practice in London. He leads a seminar for the psychotherapists in the Fitzjohn’s Unit of the Tavistock Clinic, which specializes in working psychoanalytically with patients who would not normally have access to psychoanalytic treatment. He has written and edited papers, chapters and two books on couple psychotherapy, including Oedipus and the Couple (2005) and papers for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis on two Verdi operas (Rigoletto and La Traviata), on a gendered approach to Beethoven, on musicality in the consulting room, on the music of the drives and perversions, and on illusory and evanescent qualities in both music and psychoanalysis. Before training psychoanalytically, he was a professional musician. He gave the first ever solo recital at a Royal Albert Hall Proms concert in 1985, and in 2012 was awarded a British Composer Award. In 2023 new compositions have been recorded by the Choir of the Chapel Royal, Hampton Court, and in 2024 a disc of new organ compositions has been released.
Illusion, Musicality, and Evanescence
I explore some similarities between experiences of music and of analytic sessions. I focus on qualities of evanescence, the way that music – in contrast to many other arts – in one perspective only lasts as long as it is actually being played. Then it’s over. Similarly, the analyst-patient discussion in a session. Yet the psychic reverberations of some transient, fugitive moments may last a lifetime. And even when no verbally profound understanding is occurring, nevertheless the patient-analyst encounter is emotionally significant. I illustrate this with a clinical example. I explore transference as illusion, and the relationship between truth and illusion in terms of Bion’s O. I end with thoughts about the paradoxical value of the illusoriness of aesthetics and nature as considered by Freud in his short paper “On Transience” (1916), and the grin of Lewis Carol’s Cheshire Cat, left hanging in the air.
