Preface

By comparison with literature and the visual arts, music has almost always come in a distant third in the paragone or friendly rivalry among fields of “applied analysis.” Freud's notorious insensibility to music is doubtless partly responsible for this state of affairs. That music, by comparison with the other arts, is essentially nonrepresentational likewise renders it unamenable to the content-based exegesis that has been the stock in trade of most psychoanalytic critics. It has, to be sure, been possible to do thematic studies of operas and song cycles, as well as to investigate the lives of composers no less than of other creative artists, and these labors have often yielded impressive results. Still, it is impossible to deny that music rarely receives the attention it deserves from the majority of scholars or clinicians of psychoanalysis.

In this issue of American Imago, which owes not simply its title but its very existence to the energy and talents of Julie Jaffee Nagel, our contributors aim to conduct readers down an “aural road” to the understanding of the unconscious mind. Their collective descant is dedicated to the memory of Stuart Feder, who both by his life's work and by his unstinting generosity of spirit helped to nurture an entire generation of psychoanalytic musicologists.

It is a source of personal pleasure for me that our first essay should be by Maynard Solomon, a trusted advisor to editors of this journal since the days of Harry Slochower. As a custodian of the “orphan genre” of music biography, Solomon in “Taboo and Biographical Innovation: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert” reflects on a curious experience he had in writing his magisterial books and essays on these three giants. In pursuing his research, Solomon regularly found materials that “had long been available quite on the surface of the documentary record,” but the obvious conclusions of which had been overlooked by previous scholars. Whether the topic be lies told by Mozart and his father, t