Charles Ives“My Father's Song” A Psychoanalytic Biography. : By Stuart Feder. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1992. 396 pp.

This is an excellent, intriguing biography with a rich narrative. It is not only a biography of Charles Ives and of George, his father; it is also a history of Danbury, the family seat, and of the Northeast of the period. Reading the biography is a visual experience as much as it is an intellectual one, as Feder describes the bands, the movements, the town, the country, the world of Yale, and its inhabitants. Indeed George's childhood is described so vividly that it evokes the watercolors of Winslow Homer depicting country children and their games.

Feder's main theme, richly elaborated in a prose devoid of jargon, is that George and Charlie were secret sharers and that unresolved mourning was a powerful impetus to Charlie's own creative efforts. Charles Ives redeemed his father by living a rich and successful life in music and in business, thereby undoing his father's failure in these areas. This effort was in the service of maintaining an unconscious connection with the dead father who had shared creative experiences with his son in their life together. The consistent idealization of his father in Ives's extensive writings represented a defense not only against ambivalence but also against the narcissistic injury which the recognition of his father's failure would have imposed on the fantasy of the pair in Charlie's mind.

Feder emphasizes the strong identification with his father that permeated Ives's music as he resurrected his father's songs and innovative musical accomplishments. This is not to deny the fact that such identification need not issue from loss. Matisse's identification with his mother as a creative artist was not based primarily on ambivalence. He, like Ives, took on the attributes of the parent as well as the parent's vision of the world, and then creatively modified it. Feder repeatedly alludes to this kind of phenomenon as he