On Beethoven's Deafness

During his childhood, Beethoven often wrapped himself in a cloak of silence as a shield against both the vicissitudes of external reality and the traumatic events within his family constellation. The reports of contemporaries who knew him towards the end of his first decade repeatedly describe his withdrawal into a world of fantasy, his penchant for isolation, his monosyllabic replies to adult questioners, his happiness at being left alone by his parents, his “deafness” when a young neighbor tried to disturb his daydreams (Solomon, 1977, pp. 19-21). Silence and solitude had great utility to this lonely young genius, permitting a condition of “wakeful dreaming” within a noiseless protective world woven of his own rich fantasies (or filled with music of his own creation). In Abraham's formulation, the individual “withdraws into the depth of the night in order to know nothing of the external world, that is, in order to be alone with himself and his phantasies” (Abraham, 1913, p. 203). This region of “magical-hallucinatory omnipotence” (Ferenczi, 1913, p. 189) served another purpose as well: to isolate Beethoven from the reach of external commands and injunctions as well as from fearful sounds overheard or imagined. For the auditory sphere is “the nucleus of the super-ego” (, p. 346), a zone of conscience accessible to the verbal prohibitions and imperatives of parental and social authority. In Knapp's words, the auditory mechanism “keeps us oriented in the world of conduct” (Knapp, 1953, p. 185).

This aspect of the function of hearing was long ago perceived by Protestant theologians: they avowed that the benevolent God dwells within the heart whereas the God of wrath enters through the “open,” “receptive” sense of hearing. Luther, who (like Beethoven) suffered from a tormenting buzzing in the ears, wrote: “In the Church of God nothing is demanded but hearing.” Perhaps this is why Ludwig Feuerbach called the ear “the organ of terror” and asserted that “if man had only ey