Malvina Reynolds Sings the Truth: : Psychoanalytic Truth, the Post-Truth Era, and History as a Series of Psychoanalytic Sessions

Nathan Fleshner

doi:10.35684/JLCI.2022.8203

Authors

Nathan Fleshner Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Tennessee, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35684/JLCI.2022.8203

Keywords:

psychoanalysis, music, cultural pathology, Malvina Reynolds, trauma

Abstract

This article showcases a psychoanalytic context for the idea of historical truth as presented in Malvina Reynolds’s album, Malvina Reynolds Sings the Truth (1967). It highlights music’s role as a narrative record of traumatic experiences and its importance within a therapeutic experience at the societal level. The album itself serves as a case study for socio-political topics such as climate change, racism, anti-intellectualism, and religious extremism—issues as critical today as they were in the 1960s. The article highlights music analysis’s dialogue with the psychoanalytic literature, interprets the album as an analytic construction from a single cultural psychoanalytic session, and locates it within a longitudinal study of cultural pathologies manifest in different eras. It demonstrates music’s importance in society’s healing process from traumatic experiences and concludes that music, popular music in particular, seems to have progressed toward more truth-telling and direct engagement with traumatic historical and cultural experiences. Songs as truth-seeking, historical, and narrative records are certainly not new, but their acceptance in popular circles has increased, pointing toward more potential for society to grapple with some of these psychoanalytic issues.

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Author Biography

Nathan Fleshner, Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Tennessee, USA

Nathan Fleshner (Ph.D., Eastman) is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Tennessee, USA. His research focuses on trauma, mental health, and the therapeutic process in music but also includes popular music and musical iPad apps. His research has been published in multiple journals and edited volumes, including Music Video Games: Performance, Politics, and Play, The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Studies, and For the Sake of the Song: Essays on Townes Van Zandt. He also writes on music and the medical humanities for the website, The Polyphony, associated with the Institute for the Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK. His column explores musicians and their music through the lens of mental health and the broader field of medicine, including analyses of specific works, interviews with musicians and health professionals, and other columns on connections between fields of music and medicine.