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In tune with the Indian way of story-telling of connecting with the past and much of psychoanalytical writings, let us begin with Freud (1914) who writes:
Nevertheless, works of art exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting. This has occasioned me, when I have been contemplating such things, to spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself to what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me. (p. 211)
Increasingly, I move to the appreciation and wisdom of the Buddhist middle path, both in my own analysis as well as in work as a therapist. Therapy as helping us to move from the swings of the psyche to the two ends of the spectrum - the grandiose self and the little-me-know-nothing self - to a somewhat middle ground.
The bringing of the unconscious center stage in the psyche by Freud destabilized the notion of “Man” as a logical rational creature in charge of his destiny and ranks next to Galileo who proclaimed that the Earth was not the center of the universe and Darwin who propounded the evolutionary theory of the origin of the species.
Diamond (2012) takes the self-confessed lack of appreciation of music of Freud to the extreme of hate in the rather vehemently titled “Why we love music and Freud hated music”. In a sense turning Freud on his head Diamond extrapolates that the “hate” indicates primal fear of the unconscious on the part of Freud! Diamond (2012) observes:
A Freudian interpretation almost certainly would conclude that the music stimulated some repressed or repudiated unconscious complex, memory or emotional content, typically sexual in nature, which the person feels compelled to avo