"The scream is so intimately linked to pain that most adjectives describing it belong to the register of resonant space: one speaks of a “shrill scream,”“an acute pain”; one speaks of an insistent scream, an insistent pain. But what is a scream? Are we even sure that a scream is only a sound? We encounter here the same difficulty that we did when we approached the question of pain" 

.....

"Why not imagine the scream as a flux of energy gushing through the hole of the mouth considered as an erogenous ring? If we accept that the mouth is a libidinal orifice, we can consider that the flux of energy that runs through its center is a force defined in relation to another flux, to another force that runs along the lips. In other words, there would be a relation between the energy that passes through the center of the hole and the energy circulating around its edges. This relation between the scream and the erogenous edges of the mouth—between the gushing flux of the hole and the circulating flux on the border of the hole, between the surface (that is the void of the hole) and the orificial edge—was established by Stockes’s theorem in electromagnetic physics. With the aid of this theorem, we can con-clude that the flux flowing through the hole is equal to the flux running along the edge of the hole. Thus, there would be an equivalence between the energy of the scream and the sexual pleasure of the erogenous lips."


The Book of Love and Pain  -  Juan David Nasio

"The real Primal Scream is unmistakable. It has its own quality of something deep, rattling and involuntary. When the therapist suddenly removes any portion of defence and the patient is left naked with his Pain, he screams because he is wide open to the truth. Though the scream is the most usual reaction, it is neither the sole nor the perennial response to the sudden vulnerability to Pain. Some people moan, groan, writhe and thrash about. The results are the same. What comes out when the person screams is a single feeling that may underlie thousands of previous experiences....Sometimes the patient just needs to scream at first. He screams for the hundreds of shushes, ridicules, humiliations and beatings. He screams now because often he was wounded and wasn't allowed the luxury of bleeding. It's as though someone kept jabbing him with a small pin and could never once yell 'Ouch!'"   

- Arthur Janov 

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“there, manifest and stubborn (one  hears only that) beyond (or before) the meaning of the words, their form…something which is directly the cantor's body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages...The 'grain' is that" 

- Roland Barthes

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“...from the most troubled of such dreams we awake with a shriek, a cry, in which the affrighted Will expresses itself most immediately, and thus enters at once and definitely, through the cry, into the world of sound, in order to manifest itself outwards”
 
-Richard Wagner

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"The struggle with the shadow is the only real struggle. When the visual sensation confronts the invisible force that conditions it, it releases a force that is capable of vanquishing the invisible force or even befriending it. Life screams at death, but death is no longer this all-too-visible thing that makes us faint; it is this invisible force that life detects, flushes out, and makes visible through the scream" 

- Gilles Deleuze

"Do you really hear nothing? Do you not hear the terrible voice screaming around us on every side, the voice known commonly as silence? Since I came to this silent valley I have heard it all the time, it won’t let me sleep, oh yes, Reverend, if only I could sleep again." 

-- Georg Büchner - Lenz

Edward Munch - Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature)

PJ Harvey and John Parish - Pig Will Not

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

"It was no sigh, no moan; it was a real scream. She screamed so hard that Tomas had to turn away from her face, afraid that her voice so close to his ear would rupture his eardrum. The scream was not an expression of sensuality. Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound. But her scream aimed at crippling the senses, preventing all seeing and hearing. What was screaming in fact was the naive idealism of her love trying to banish all contradictions, banish the duality of body and soul, banish perhaps even time..."

https://soundcloud.com/ros-steer/kundrys-scream

Sergei Eisentein's work was an inspiration to the artist Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

 "Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X"  (1953)

"...while people continue to laugh throughout their lives, they do not generally feel comfortable screaming beyond a certain age"

- Howard Suber

 Image from Battleship Potemkin (1925) by Sergei Eisenstein