Psychology of Music and Musicians: Two Clinical Examples

“If Music be the food of love …”

In a long series of papers and in several books, (1) Edmund Bergler has offered, together with supporting clinical evidence, a theory of the psychology of the creative process. The bulk of his data relates to writers and literary productions; little is adduced specifically pertaining to music and musicians. This paper will attempt to begin to fill this gap in our scientific literature.

According to Bergler's thesis there are two main tributaries to all creative process: — 1. an autarchic defense within the framework of oral regression (with the artist playing both role of mother and child in mechanism of positive magic gesture); and 2. sublimatory transformations of original infantile voyeuristic impulses. The material of this paper will relate to the autarchic defense element in the psychology of music and musicians; scoptophilic conflicts play an important role but will not be considered in any detail in this particular paper. In his studies on writers, Bergler has shown how the creative individual works toward a partly successful solution of an oral masochistic conflict by symbolically ‘feeding’ himself beautiful words. Schematically, one may delineate the five layer structure as follows:— 1. Unconscious masochistic wish to be starved by ‘bad’ (preoedipal) mother figure; 2. Superego objection to libidinal (unconscious pleasure) element in repressed masochistic wish; 3. Primary ego defense of retaliatory anger (pseudo-aggression) directed against mother or mother substitute;