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Freud's view of the artist's instinctual conflicts and their resolution through sublimation led him to analyze art as he would a dream; that is, primarily by deciphering the content to arrive at an understanding of the artist's unconscious motives. He disregarded the formal elements of art just as he left the creative aspects of the manifest dream unattended to. Freud (1914) admitted his one-sided approach when he confessed that “the subject-matter of works of art has a stronger attraction for me than their formal and technical qualities” (p. 211). He added that he was “almost incapable of obtaining pleasure from music” (p. 211), which is of special interest in the light of Susan Langer's (1942) description of music as the only art medium that is pure form, its content expressed entirely and solely through its form. Unsurprisingly, therefore, music remains the art form least written about by Freud and his followers.
The present volume is the first to bring together papers by analysts undaunted by the unprecedented task of examining the relationship between psychoanalysis and music. This collection of 22 papers covers the range of psychoanalytic approaches and is