Psychoanalysis is as embarrassed to deal with music as a bear is to deal with a whale. Interpretation in music is without meaning. Thus, if we do not stick to the cipher, or to the string, writing about music amounts to delusionally filling the lack in the symbolic. Thus, two points: the string, and the hole in language. The string? It's the origin of music as a numerical writing. Pythagoras, thanks to a sonometer,¹ was the first to discover the numerical relationships that govern the science of acoustics. The hole is a rock of structure, insurmountable for those who are oriented by the ethics of psychoanalysis.
By way of a wager and through the harmony of the spheres, ancient science attempted to fill the hole. Lacan recalls it thus: "all of so-called ancient science consisted in betting that the places where something was missing would be reduced someday, in the eyes of the sage, to constitutive intervals of a kind of musical harmony."² This ancient and medieval wager, in which the symbolic is arranged according to the real, is the opposite of that of modern science. Its advent took place in the 17th century and made the hole in language a logical factor: "that, which does not deceive," which for Lacan is the "leap of faith"³ of experimental science.
In music, Jean-Philippe Rameau formalized the brilliant invention of tonal harmony as we still study it today. This system, which he wanted to be "natural"⁴ because it was based on the physical division of the string, makes music a symbolic apparatus for all, capable of autonomy from language and therefore capable of veiling the horror of the original misunderstanding.
The music of the 20th and 21st centuries, which has broken free from the tonal era, places the non-relation at the origin of writing: each composer develops his own solution, reducing the very notion of system to a precarious and continually renewed invention. Once more, this invention is not without the string, a "corps-de,"⁵ a consistency in which a singular symbolic coding is woven in the service of resonance, reminiscent of the Borromean knot.
Thus, for Lacan, the string becomes, "the symptom of what the symbolic consists."⁶ And if music is the symptom of psychoanalysis, as Marie-Hélène Brousse suggests,⁷ it is because, as Lacan argues, there is no sexual relation.

^[1] [EN: A sonometer is a tool for delineating the points on a string where it must be stopped to produce certain notes. The sonometer would not have existed during Pythagoras' time, but a tool called a monochord, which belongs to the class of tools known as sonometers, would have. See digitalheritagelab.eu.] ^[2] Lacan, J., The Seminar, of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI, From an Other to the other, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, Cambridge: Polity, 2023, p. 256.
^[3] Cf. Lacan, J., The Seminar, of Jacques Lacan, Book III, The Psychoses, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. R. Grigg, London & New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997, p. 77.
^[4] Cf. Rameau, J.-P., Treatise on Harmony Reduced to Its Natural Principles, trans. P. Gossett, New York: Dover, 1971, p. 27.
^[5] Lacan J., The Seminar, "L'insu que sait de l'une bévue s'aile à mourre," lesson of February 15, 1977, unpublished.
^[6] Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book XXII, RSI, lesson of January 21, 1975, in Ornicar?, No. 3, May 1975, p. 104. Unpublished in English.
^[7] Cf. Brousse, M.-H., "Le son et la note, pas sans la voix," La Cause du désir, special issue, Digital edition, 2016, p. 4. Unpublished in English.