Unconsciously Induced Song Recall: The Process of Unintentional Rather than so-Called Spontaneous Evocations of Music

The Induced Song Recall technique, previously presented and discussed in this Journal in 1990, essentially requires that therapists (a generic term including psychoanalysts) focus on a particular patient and then mentally ask themselves: What song comes to mind? Two research studies with follow-ups as well as private cases amply demonstrated that analysis of manifest and latent contents of the induced music facilitated detection of transference-countertransference states influencing treatment at the time of the evocations. In all the published papers on this technique to date, consciously induced music has been contrasted with spontaneous musical evocations—a term traditionally used in the psychoanalytic literature (Diaz de Chumaceiro, 1987, 1988, 1990a, b; 1992a, b; 1993a, b).

However, when writing a paper on integrating this technique with another previous one tailormade for psychodrama graduate students (Díaz de Chumaceiro, 1985a, b), a past incident suddenly came to mind. A few years ago, while doing research for an article on Freud and Wagner (Diaz de Chumaceiro, 1993c), I had read an intriguing short statement that was not pertinent to that topic and was therefore temporarily forgotten. The recalled data were as follows:

In the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Nunberg and Federn, 1967), Otto Rank reported on the meeting (No. 68) of February 10, 1909: GRAF tells about his self-analysis of so-called “spontaneously emerging melodies” which he regularly found to be associatively linked with the text [italics added]. (PROF. FREUD comments that one should perhaps make a distinction between associations that are connected with the wording of the text, with the context, or with the situation.) (p. 151)