'Psycho-Analysis of Music.': André Michel.

The Music Review, November, 1950; extract from a book shortly to be published.

As music so far has not received much attention in the field of applied psycho-analysis, M. André Michel's attempt to relate musical expression to our psycho-analytical knowledge is to be welcomed. He mentions the various pre-genital instinctual sources behind the drive towards musical expression and discusses the complementary relationship between pre-genital fixation points and certain characteristics of the work of individual composers. This leads him to speak of oral (Chopin), anal (Stravinsky, Ravel) and phallic composers, the last being subdivided in two categories, viz. those whose work reflects a struggle to solve their Oedipal conflicts (Debussy) and those who have actually accomplished this task (J. S. Bach).

Though it is not his intention definitively to reduce any composer to a specific category, such a correlation, based as it is on a qualitative appreciation of pre-genital drives, seems to us not to explain in what way the composer's fixation to a particular stage of libidinal development would account for the high level of satisfaction which a heterogenous audience derives from his music. One would suppose that fixation, by its very nature, is more likely to act as an impediment both to the creation of any true work of art and to the enjoyment of it by others. If, to quote one of the author's examples, Ravel's music were 'anal magic' it would meet with little response from those in whose libidinal make-up anality plays only a minor part. Conversely, genital characters would find a greater affinity with their own libidinal condition in Bach's fugues (in whose polyphonic style the author sees the musical expression of a capacity for a multi-object oblative relationship) than in the music of say, Mozart (who had many infantile character traits); an assumption which lacks foundation. In the case of Mozart it is of special interest to note that it was only as a musician he w