Induced Recall of Mozart's Requiem in Amadeus

The importance of paying attention to the recall of film music in treatment was recently discussed in this Journal and elsewhere. To additionally underscore different types of film music on each occasion, one article focused on two cases with evocations of the music theme of Exodus, which, after winning an Academy Award, was set with lyrics; another article addressed a recall of the title song of The Sound of Music, a film based on the Broadway show, the latter in revival in New York city at this writing. The subject of a third communication was a recall of the tango “Madreselva” sung by Carlos Gardel in a recording, in the foreign film Il Postino, loosely based on the life of the Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda (Díaz de Chumaceiro, ; 1998b; 1999). To continue to address different genres of film music, this article focuses on classical music included in a biographical film of a composer. A brief supervision of a patient's evocation of Mozart's Requiem in the film Amadeus is illustrative.

In the first week of December, many years ago in Latin America, I participated in an informal discussion about music evoked in treatment with a group of psychoanalysts. Unexpectedly, a seasoned psychoanalyst volunteered the following brief vignette of a case he had found “easy to interpret”:

I can only reveal that this morning, an analysand, who is in the process of termination, mentioned in his session Mozart's Requiem. He has been in analysis for approximately ten years and the termination date is two weeks before Christmas. Clearly, a requiem simply refers to the end of treatment.

The analyst asked me: “Don't you agree?” I responded that the analysand's recall of Mozart's unfinished Requiem Mass (in d minor, K. 626) at this particular time—a song of his transference (Rosenbaum, 1963)—suggested instead that he was unable to conclude on that date, just as Mozart