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Reik defines the problem he proposes to treat as follows (p. vii): 'What does it mean when some tune … occurs … again and again, so that it becomes a haunting melody?' Ferenczi answered a related question in more specific form: 'I wonder whether there are tone associations that are not determined by verbal contents… A rhythm that corresponds to an affective state is probably sufficient to produce the associative emergence of a tune without text.'1 Freud,
quoted by Reik, also touches on the problem: 'The tunes which suddenly come into a man's head can be shown to be conditioned by some train of though to which they belong, … without his knowing anything about it… The connection with the tune is to be sought either in the words which belong to it or in the source from which it comes: I must, however, make this reservation, that I do not maintain this in the case of really musical people of whom I happen to have had no experience; in them the musical value of the tune may account for its suddenly emerging into consciousness.'2
Freud here implies three separate problems in the question of the haunting melody: 1, its emergence from the unconscious; 2, the extramusical context that lends it its obsessional significance; 3, the question whether an intrinsically musical factor, alone or combined with extramusical factors, can account for the sudden emergence of a tune.
Reik's interest embraces all three components of the problem; his major contribution, however, lies in his rich anecdotal exemplification of the first two points. 'Every analyst can contribute numerous instances that prove the unconscious motivation of the haunting melody' (p. 246); yet certainly nowhere e