The author presents diverse evidence for the existence of a 'correlation' between musicality and perversion. The unreality and remote-unworldly quality of music are analogous to the distance from perverse fantasies of forms of gratification to the sense of erotic reality characteristic of the genital stage. Both types of unreality may be traced aetiologically to an early developed sensitivity to sounds and vibratory stimuli. The latter may bring about a 'rent' in the body schema. That is, ego nuclei whose mode of functioning is modelled upon the sensory modality of musical apperception persist in this mode even within the integrated ego. Hermann