Musical Creativity in the Line of Fire

Presenter: Francis Grier

“When faced with huge hostility, violence, and aggression within war, how is it that the creative artistic drive produces musical masterpieces?”

Renowned composer, performer, and psychoanalyst Francis Grier delves into the musical responses of composers to past wars, offering psychoanalytic examinations of these works. Grier explores how music can be a powerful tool for confronting the horrors and threats of our time and their impact on the internal and external world. Through audiovisual musical excerpts, he illuminates these themes and invites participants to reflect on their implications for contemporary psychoanalytic practice.

Grier examines two masterpieces of Western classical music composed in response to World War II: Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols (1942), written amidst the perils of a U-boat attack, and Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (1941), composed and premiered in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Grier unpacks the composers’ experiences and the profound emotions embedded within these works. He also discusses W.R. Bion’s wartime experiences.

Grier further explores themes of Oedipal conflict, such as the biblical lament of David for the killing of his son Absalom. This story has inspired countless musical compositions throughout history and continues to resonate with contemporary composers. He also analyzes Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1962), highlighting its avoidance of pomp and emphasis on ambivalence and ambiguity. Grier lends his musical ear and analytic mind, showing how music can reveal what has been lost and move the listener toward meaningful reparation.

Francis Grier (Presenter) is Editor-In-Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and a Training Analyst and Supervisor of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Before training psychoanalytically, he was a professional musician. He gave the first-ever solo recital at a Royal Albert Hall Proms concert in 1985. His setting in 2006 of The Passion for King’s College Cambridge was reviewed as “a work of vital attack, shivering beauty and compelling power.” At its US premiere in Minneapolis, it was hailed as “a modern masterpiece”. In 2012 Grier was awarded a British Composer Award. For 2025 he is writing new works for Clare College, Cambridge and for Bath Abbey. He has written a series of papers on operas, a gendered approach to Beethoven, and also on the music of the consulting room, mainly published in the IJP.

Susan N Finkelstein (Moderator) is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Contemporary Freudian Society, Fellow at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, Director of Understanding Primitive Mental States (NYC), Associate Member of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, co-editor with Professor Heinz Weiss of The Claustro-Agoraphobic Dilemma: Fear of Madness, Routledge (2022), and is in private practice in NYC in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, supervision and couple therapy.