What can psychoanalysis, a practice grounded in language, learn from music, which moves us precisely because it escapes meaning? What can psychoanalysis, a practice grounded in language, learn from music, which moves us precisely because it escapes meaning?
This talk explores the resonances between analytic listening and musical improvisation, proposing that certain psychic structures—especially melancholy—are best understood not as fixed pathologies but as rhythms of relation.
Drawing inspiration from free jazz, where multiplicity and dissonance give rise to a shared discourse, Silvia Lippi develops a conception of melancholy that departs from the logic of loss and compensation. Instead, melancholy becomes a creative process through which new social bonds and subjectivities can emerge.
Through clinical reflection and theoretical insight, Lippi shows that the work of psychoanalysis, particularly in the field of psychosis, is less about repair than invention—a practice attuned to rhythm and resonance. Psychosis thus emerges as a paradigm for resisting centralized power—for improvising, against the paternal and paternalistic figures that structure our world, offering new modes of subjectivity and relation.
Silvia Lippi is a psychoanalyst and philosopher. She holds a PhD in psychology from Université Paris-Diderot and works as a hospital psychologist at the Établissement Public de Santé Barthélémy Durand in Étampes. She is also a research associate at Université Paris-Nanterre.
Her books include Freud, the Ungovernable (Stilus, 2025), Soeurs. Pour une psychanalyse féministe (with Patrice Maniglier, Seuil, 2023), Rythme et mélancolie (Érès, 2019), La décision du désir (Érès, 2013), and Transgressions. Bataille, Lacan (Érès, 2008). She also co-edited Marx, Lacan: l’acte révolutionnaire, l’acte analytique (Érès, 2013).
Lippi’s work has been translated into Italian, English (The Decision of Desire, University of Minnesota Press, 2020), German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Greek. Her psychoanalytic approach is distinguished by a deep attentiveness to psychotic experience and to the questions raised by contemporary minority subjects.