So charmed are we by Freud's maxim “Before the problem of the reative writer analysis must lay down its arms” that we may be momentarily lulled into forgetting that Freud never took it seriously himself. Indeed, by the time he wrote it in 1928, he had already borne arms in the attempt to master—if not colonize—the novel, drama, literature, poetry, painting, and sculpture. Among the arts, only music eluded him. Even his term for the imaginative writer, Dichter, did not seem readily applicable to the composer or performer of music. At the Wednesday Night Meetings, Max Graf, the musicologist and critic, called for “the unriddling of the secrets of artistic creation” and presented material on musical composition using Beethoven and Wagner as examples, Nonetheless, Freud uncharacteristically could not seem to generate much interest in such matters.
Psychoanalysis had by then incorporated a visual bias into its substance, the result in good measure of the style of its inventor. It was, to be sure, the same glorious bias that gave rise to The Interpretation of Dreams and that persists in the enduring influence of that work as a core feature of psychoanalytic education as well as a formative element in the identity of the psychoanalyst.
Biographical studies suggest a resistance to auditory representation existing side by side with Freud's gift for the visual. To a degree, this personal perceptual configuration may have become institutionalized, favoring a universal psychological trend in one modality, thus constricting an exploration of the fullest range of symbolic representation. Rare considerations of auditory phenomena in Freud's writings, while significant, lack the suppleness and invention we have come to consider characteristic of his work. In the “Dreambook,” spoken words and, pari passu, other auditory elements are the instruments of the superego, which may have something to do with the limitation itself.
Yet among the few principles that have emerged in what is now close to 100 years of psychoanalytic thinking, one is fundamental to mental life in whatever form we observe it. Stated variously in different contexts, it may be put in the following way: Mental content and the forms mental content assumes are infinitely displaceable. In clinical psychoanalysis, we follow the displacements and transformations of idea, affect, body image, and comparable elements from one representation to another. Indeed, in certain ways, such displacements are its basis. Likewise for applied psychoanalysis, where we pursue displacements and transformations further into the deliberately created products of mind.
In art and in literature such explorations are well known, as are the multiple problems these endeavors engender in methodology. The field of music has proven to be more elusive because of obstacles of method, although there is no fundamental reason why this should be the case—psychic derivatives may achieve auditory as well as visual representation, and it is as possible for the appropriately gifted artist to create auditory form as to create visual form. In either instance, process and form are ineluctably linked to the facts of the artist's mental life through displacements of a different and a more elusive nature than those we are accustomed to encountering on the couch.
A case in point is the composer Gustav Mahler, who, owing to his clinical encounter with Freud in 1910, may be considered the “specimen musician” of psychoanalysis. It took an acute, if short-lived, decompensation to bring Mahler to Freud. Beyond the lifelong neurosis, the year 1901 stands out as a watershed year for the composer. Some sea change in mental life seems to have been reflected equally in the details of his private life and in the music he was writing. Mahler did most of his composing in the summer, and that summer was one of the most productive of his career.
Moreover, stylistic changes that were to become characteristic of the rest of his creative life were becoming apparent. The Fifth Symphony, which he was then composing, although still broadly programmatic, was devoid of the manifest literary connotations of earlier works and of the often heavily detailed programs. Musically, a spareness of detail prevailed despite paradoxically huge instrumental forces. Individual sections began to have a chamber music quality. There was a shift in the literary sources that had served as provenance for the Lieder texts. The last of the songs from Des Knaben Wunderhom was written that summer as Mahler turned to Friedrich Ruckert, the poet who would eventually provide him with Die Kindertotenlieder, the Songs on the Death of Children. The days of the Youth's Magic Horn were over. Childhood itself seemed to be dying for Mahler in 1901.
Mahler turned 41 that July, and suddenly the seemingly entrenched bachelor seemed eager to marry In the autumn, he met Alma Schindler and by the following March he was not only married but on his way to fatherhood. In the process, he had abandoned his devoted creative-companion of the Wunderhom years, Natalie Bauer-Lechner, a conservatory classmate. Among other limitations, she would have been biologically an elderly primagravida. At this point the normally obsessional composer seemed driven toward not only marriage but its issue. It would be for him the achievement of the common immortality of men.
What external and mental circumstances were at the root of these surprising changes in life and in art? Mahler, haunted by death in fantasy since childhood, had had an actual encounter with death earlier in the year, the night of February 24-25, 1901. The countertransferences of biography are legion, and such medical matters such as the hemorrhoids of history are often deleted as if too embarrassing a human burden for a great biographer to bear. But Mahler nearly exanguinated from an exacerbation of his chronic hemorrhoidal condition, or at least was firmly convinced that he could have. The experience revived within him longstanding fears of and wishes for death related to fratricidal as well as oedipal fantasies. (The fratricidal theme had by now long permeated his work from the brudermord, represented in Das Klagende Lied, to the brotherhood, latent in the Second Symphony.) Lying in bed following emergency surgery, he jokingly drafted his obituary: “Gustav Mahler has finally met with the fate his many crimes deserve.”
But resources for mastery were prodigious, extending far beyond humor in life and art. Two songs of the ensuing summer, germinating in the preceding months, track the mental trend. Der Tamboursg' sell (The Drummer-boy), the last of the Wunderhorn songs, was written cheek by jowl with the first of the Ruckert songs, Um Mitternacht (At Midnight). The theme to the first came to him unconsciously as he sought a symphonic idea and realized the prosody of the poem, the persona of which, the drummer-boy (represented in both word and music), is being marched off to the scaffold. The crime unspecified, we are told that the punishment is justified, some path of transgression hinted at in the line, “Had I but remained a drummmer-boy, I would not lie imprisoned.” The song ends with portentous, repeated rolls on the military drum.
In a farewell march, the singer bids adieu to life in terms of what must be the most universal of metaphors for death:night and sleep. “Gute Nacht,” he sings in turn to the mountains, the hills, the officers, the corporals, and the musketeers—one by one as if relinquishing object after object in the transitional state. Nor is this Mahler's only musical representation of the life/death, waking/sleep continuum. The concluding “Auferstehen,” choral movement of the Second Symphony (The Resurrection), opens with a representation of the moment of awakening. The composer has carefully prepared the a capella entrance, and the canny conductor will create an auditory illusion of that moment of the daily dawn of consciousness, as the listener only gradually becomes aware of the call of the music. A delicately poised shift of cathexis is accomplished from inner to outer world. It is the transitional state, here in reverse, writ large and rendered audible through music. Comparably, at the close of Das Lied Von Der Erde, an auditory representation of eternity is created in the final movement, Der Abschied, a symphonic song that is in itself a deathbed scene, a soliloquy of farewell. The last word, ewig—forever—is repeated nine times, the music lingering and, fading into silence, never actually ending.
The second of the two pivotal songs of the summer of 1901 was Urn Mitternacht—At Midnight—which is as forward looking stylistically speaking as it is portentous in terms of content. It is in every respect concerned with time: its passage, irrevocability, and objectification. A harbinger of the mature Mahler of the Fifth Symphony, which was already germinating in mind, it is the work of a middle-aged man manifestly preoccupied with death. Here God is evoked in the final section (massively portrayed in brass choir) as the singer passively yields to His hand: “At midnight I resigned all power/into Thy hand. /Lord! Over death and life/Thou keepest watch,/at midnight.”
The song notwithstanding, Mahler characteristically took matters into his own hands. He met Alma Schindler that fall, married her the following March (only days after the anniversary of Mahler's scrape with death the previous year, and prepared for the baby who was already on the way.
In the foregoing account, the point of entry into mental life is biographical, leading to a consideration of musical content and form. Applied inventively, a biographical approach to art may yield the same varieties of unexpected insight as clinical psychoanalysis.
Another case in point is the life of the American composer Charles Edward Ives. A consideration of his biography leads to matters beyond auditory representation into the nature of of the creative impulse itself and the creative span and pace of the artist.
The single most important element in the biography of Charles Ives was his relationship with his father, George Ives, a 19th- century musician. Their relationship was characterized by a complex web of identification, rivalry, and a defensive idealization in which hero worship bordered on ancestor worship. A musical collaboration initiated in early life persisted intrapsychically in the composer after his father's death. It gave rise to Charles Ives's most creative endeavors, while at the same time it served a process of mourning that was destined to be flawed and incomplete. In the end, Charles's creative impetus failed as he approached the age of George's death. At 49. the age at which George died, Charles's creativity was all but extinguished, although he lived to be close to 80. He had written his father's music. The intrapsychic posthumous collaboration had been a duty but its continuation, a transgression.
Composers such as Mahler and Ives have in common many features that not only are of specific interest to the psychoanalyst, but provide points of entry into the music itself. One characteristic is the access to the experiences of childhood that these artists retained. In Ives's case, childhood was a preoccupation. He idealized it in what amounted to a veneration of boyhood. Such psychological characteristics very likely relate to the more flexible and less decisive progression of phase development observed by Greenacre in creative people. In the music of each composer, the audible surface is sometimes marked—some may say flawed—by an extramusical element that invites interpretation. This intrusion constitutes a nonclinical analogy to the intrusion of an extraneous element into the psychoanalyst's free-floating attention, a clinical event that often leads to fruitful exploration.
In contrast, we may turn to a composer the surface of whose work is free of such elements, the “test case” that most would agree is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The musicologist Paul Henry Lang considered Mozart's music to be “untouched by the disorders of life … beyond analysis and discussion … his music does not offer an opening.” One confronts the paradox of a fascinating biography with few apparant opportunities for “points of entry” into the muisic, although several were dramatically explored by Peter Shaffer in Amadeus and approached in a recent biography
as well. Perhaps more subtle methods of exploration will have to be developed.
For example, what was the mental-life background or emotional current in Mozart's choice of particular tonalities? The key of D-minor was not a notably favorite one for Mozart, yet certain works in that tonality cluster biographically around the theme of fatherhood and aspects of Mozart's realtionship with his own father. Mozart was notating (if not composing) the String Quartet in D-minor (K424) while his wife was in labor with their first child in 1783. Two years later, in anticipation of a first visit from Leopold Mozart, a visit that was tantamount to a rapprochment for the estranged father and son, the D-minor Piano Concerto (K466) was composed. If ever an opera can be said to be “in” a key, Don Giovanni lays claim to the key of D. The ominous opening chords are the essence of D-minor; likewise the music of the accusing voice of the marble statue of the murdered father, the Commendatore, in the final act. The “happy” ending of this musical drama of libidinal profligacy, parricide, vengeance, and justice is rendered in the parallel major key of D.
Significantly, the Requiem, written in 1791, Mozart's last year of life, is also composed in the tonality of D-minor, the key that appears to be somehow entrained to a mental current whose content relates to aspects of Mozart's oedipal struggle.
A final observation relates to a vital common interest of the psychoanalyst and the musicologist—the nature of affect. As Stanley Sadie, editor of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians put it, “Musical aesthetics has been but a single theme: the nature and import of that powerful yet indeterminate emotional impact that music has or is thought to have.” To return for a moment to Freud, with notable exceptions, the theory of affect was never as fully developed as other aspects of psychoanalytic theory. Despite the writings of such authors as Jacobson and Brenner (among others), that theory remains a relatively unexplored area both clinically and theoretically. One wonders if the focus of further commerce between music and psychoanalysis might not appropriately be the focus of further commerce between music and psychoanalysis. If so, an intriguing possibility emerges: that psychoanalysis can be informed by music and music by psychoanalysis.