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The psychoanalytic psychology of creative art, creativity, and the personality of the artist is a branch well represented in the literature, but the share of music is a small one. Investigating music is less rewarding than other forms of art from the psychoanalytical viewpoint. Its language is abstract, and verbally difficult to grasp. It creates experiences that swiftly pass by, not allowing themselves to be caught and held, unlike those of literature and the illustrative arts.
Musical expression is nonverbal and nondiscursive. Now and then, however, it seems to be narrating something to us. All the moods and feelings that Shostakovich went through are so clearly expressed in his symphonies that the biography written by Volkov (1979) is not surprising. Mahler writes: “My whole life is contained in my two symphonies. In them, I have set down my experience and suffering, truth and poetry in words. To anyone who knows how to listen, my whole life will become clear, for my creative works and my existence are so closely interwoven that if my life flowed as peacefully as a stream through a medow, I believe I would no longer be able to compose anything” (de la Grange, 1973).
As far as the arts are concerned, the psychoanalytical approach always presents the kind of methodological problems to which clinical psychoanalytical work has no direct answers. Attempts to approach music have the following four different points of departure (Feder 1978, 1980, 1981, Friedman 1960, Mosonyi 1935, Kohut 1957, Kohut & Levarie 1950, Nass 1971, 1975, 1984, Niederland 1958, Spitz 1965, Wittenberg 1980):
(I) Introspective observation of the impressions evoked by listening to
music. What can psychoanalysis say about these experiences?
(II) Psychoanalytical biographies of musicians and composers. Autobiographies of musicians and their narratives of musical experience.
(III) Experiences derived in psychoanalytical situations concerning the occurrence of musical experience, and knowledge