What My Vinyl Collection Taught Me About Memory, Regulation, and Meaning
This post uses my vinyl collection as a reflective lens on psychodynamic ideas about memory, emotional regulation, and psychological capacity. Rather than organising music by genre, I began organising it by function: what activates or settles the nervous system, what carries meaning over time, and what is still forming. The result mirrors how therapy works at its best, allowing experience to arrive without pressure, building capacity through regulation (our nervous systems ability to stay within a tolerable range), and letting meaning emerge when the mind is ready.
Part of my vinyl collection organised by psychological function rather than genre, with records that carry long-term memory and meaning grouped as Life Arcs.
Assumptions…
There may be an assumption that organising a vinyl collection is typically about taste, genre, or nostalgia.
For a long time, I assumed that too.
What I eventually realised was that I wasn’t organising music at all. I was organising relationships to experience, how things arrive, how they stay, how they regulate us, and how they come to carry meaning over time.
That realisation turned a practical task into a quietly revealing exercise in psychodynamic thinking.
From categorising objects to understanding function
Psychodynamic psychotherapy is concerned less with what we think and more with how experiences are held, used, avoided, or returned to over time.
When I stopped organising records by genre or chronology and instead asked what function this album serves, the system began to reorganise itself.
The questions became familiar ones:
Does this help regulate (How long can I stay with it) or does this album lead to boredom, endurance? overwhelm?, something else? Essentially, getting down to how does this album make me feel?
Does the album hold me in some kind of a ‘state’?
Does this carry memory, or does it belong to the present?
Which ones do I keep coming back to right now?
Is this about expression, observation, or containment?
Is this still forming, or has it settled?
Arrival without pressure
Every new record now enters a section I call Explore.
Nothing here has to mean anything yet. This is where new material is allowed to arrive without being forced into identity or narrative. In therapeutic terms, it’s a space without premature interpretation.
Next to it sits Transitional Adult. These are records that feel current, alive, still being tested. Some will fade. Some will deepen. A few will integrate.
This pairing mirrors a core psychodynamic idea: experience needs time before it can be understood.
What endures
Only after that time does anything move into Life Arcs.
These are records that stayed. Organised by when they entered my life and how long they remained emotionally active. Records that mark significant events and experiences in my life, whether they be good, bad, or somewhat indifferent.
In therapy, we often distinguish between experiences that pass through us and those that become part of our internal world. Life Arcs are the latter.
Music as regulation, in contrast to expression
One of the most revealing sections to emerge is the section I came to simply call States.
These records are not autobiographical and not expressive. They function as environments, albums used to settle, suspend, or ‘do something’ to the nervous system.
They are ordered by emotional flow rather than meaning:
entry → immersion → pressure →fracture → release → after-state.
This distinction matters clinically. Not all experience is symbolic. Some experience is regulatory, and trying to turn it into narrative too quickly is a mistake, in therapy and elsewhere.
Meaning and voice
Only after regulation (or being in a state!) does the collection move into meaning-making:
Concept Albums, where ideas are constructed and sustained
Thematic – Declarative, where voice is projected outward, records that speak, take a stance and announce themselves
Thematic – Observational, where the world is watched, seen and observed rather than confronted
Thematic – Inward, where expression becomes intimate and relational
This sequence reflects a psychodynamic truth: voice lands differently depending on what comes before it.
Interpretation without regulation overwhelms and expression without containment collapses.
Digital memory and liminal space
Late in the system sits electronic, synthwave, and vaporwave, music shaped by loops, repetition, and internet culture.
This material feels less like autobiography and more like ambient memory. Not specific recollection, but atmosphere. Echo. Familiarity without a clear origin.
Clinically, this is interesting territory. It resembles how early or dissociated material can appear: sensed rather than narrated.
Where the system ends
The collection ends with something I do not reinterpret.
My Pink Floyd records sit together, in order, as they are. They are tied to childhood holidays, to my late uncle, to summers spent visiting him in Barmouth.
These records are not provisional or symbolic exercises. They are simply a memory as felt continuity.
In psychodynamic terms, they function as a secure ending point.
Why this matters clinically
What surprised me wasn’t how organised the collection became. It was actually how ‘calm’ it felt.
Nothing had to justify itself. New material could arrive without pressure. Old material didn’t need to be constantly reinterpreted. The system could hold change without collapsing.
The shelves now quietly tell a story without me narrating it:
Things arrive
Some stay
Some matter
Some help you breathe
And at the end, there is home.
That’s when I knew the system was finished.
Not to explain everything. But to create enough structure that experience can move, settle, and mean something when it’s ready.
That is also the aim of good therapy.
If this reflection resonated, you might explore:
The Song That Saves You: What Johnny Cash Can Teach Us About Authenticity in Therapy
From Pain to Possibility: What Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral Teaches Us About Being Human
Each explores the tension between what we show the world and what we hold inside, a containment battle that therapy helps us understand and soften.
Explore more psychotherapy in the media
