EBOR 2025 Recordings

Plenary 1: The Music of Theory (and What Love's Got To Do With It)

This opening plenary redefines how psychoanalysis can sound, feel, and move. In a talk that blends musical insight with clinical depth, Adam Blum traces the shared rhythms of music and analytic work — how both rely on attention, resonance, and finding a frame we can actually live inside. Moving between Freud, Laplanche, Winnicott, and the communal experience of listening, he shows how analysts shape their own “sound,” evolve their theory, and navigate what he and his co-authors call the weave: the collective, animating fabric that holds us in relation. His presentation is followed by brief commentaries from Michael Levin and Peter Goldberg. The result is something quietly luminous — a reminder that theory, like music, matters most when it moves us.

Plenary 2: The Living Frame: Winnicott and Laplanche in Stereo

In this plenary, the frame itself becomes a living instrument. Drawing from Chapter 5 of their book Here I’m Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis, Peter Goldberg gives voice to Winnicott’s vision of holding and care — what he and his co-authors call induction, the rhythmic groundwork that brings a person into the weave of shared experience. In counterpoint, Michael Levin brings Laplanche into the room, showing how those same gestures of care are inevitably seductive, charged with the adult unconscious that unsettles as much as it sustains. Together, their dialogue — moderated by Adam Blum — reveals how the analytic frame conducts these two forces — steadying and disruptive — into something workable, creative, and alive. The session closes with an extended audience exchange, letting the room feel the living frame in action.

Plenary 3:  A Psychoanalytic Playlist (Live Demo)

The closing plenary transforms the conference hall into a communal listening space. One by one, presenters bring a song selected for the occasion, offer a brief introduction, play it for the room, and then open the floor to quickfire associations before responding and passing the cue. Five songs become five windows into the weave of analytic imagination. Designed as both performance and template, this session showcases a practice that any analytic community can bring home — for supervision groups, teaching, committee work, or simply thinking together in a different key. It’s an elegant, energizing way to explore how music creates shared time, shared meaning, and shared surprise. With special guests Alice Huang and Adam Rodriguez.