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Writings about the arts from a psychoanalytic perspective have appeared since the inception of psychoanalysis itself. With many of Freud's early writings, and through the weekly discussions held between 1901 and 1906 of the so-called Wednesday Society—forerunner to the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society—a door opened out of the consulting room and into the artist's studio. Countless psychoanalysts, as well as many non-clinicians schooled in psychoanalytic theory, followed, proposing that psychoanalytic conceptualizations of mental life could uniquely and profitably illuminate the artist and his creative productions. Although Freud pointedly eschewed music in favour of exploring the visual and literary arts, another of the Wednesday Society's founding members was musicologist Max Graf (known also as the father of the boy in Freud's Little Hans case). In Graf's essay on Wagner and the Flying Dutchman (1911) we have the first distinctly psychoanalytic inquiry into music and musical creativity.
Despite that auspicious beginning, relatively few psychoanalytic studies of music (and even fewer of significant merit or sophistication) were produced in the following half-century as compared to works focused on other forms of artistic expression (Sterba, 1965; Noy, 1966, 1967). Kris's (1952) groundbreaking work signalled the emergence of more sophisticated applications of Freudian ideas in the realms of art and creativity. The second half of the 20th century marked a continued shifting away from the historically dominant ‘regressive id’ model and its affiliated trend of correlating pathology and creativity. Reflective of the favoured theoretic modality of the times, writings from the mid-1950s and beyond moved toward ego-psychologically oriented formulations—conflict-free, adaptive, and less neurotically or psychotically influential factors—about the effects of music on the listener or the psychic organization of the composer. A change in the climate of psychoanalytic theorizing