Still trying to figure out what happened: Music as a selfobject experience in late adolescence and early adulthood

This paper asks why a small number of live musical performances become enduring internal companions across early adulthood, while we forget thousands of comparable events almost at once. Building on Lachmann’s (2022) account of the self-restorative power of music, I examine several personal concert experiences that produced a felt reorganization of self rather than mere emotional arousal. Nostalgia, episodic memory, peak experience, aesthetic psychology, and music neuroscience each explain part of the phenomenon, but none reaches its phenomenological and developmental core. I propose a self-psychological perspective to account for that missing piece: Certain performances endure because they function as selfobjects that regulate affect, restore vitality, provide twinship, evoke idealization, and even facilitate mourning. Such performances transiently reorganize the relative salience of the motivational systems described by Lichtenberg et al. (2011), so that the listener leaves not simply feeling different but newly self-organized. These transformative moments share certain features, authenticity over virtuosity, emergence within an intersubjective field and mutual regulation, and those features bear on what every psychotherapy finally seeks: to help the patient feel fully alive, present, intentional, and in charge of engaging the world.