I had the fantasy that Freud and Mozart met on a road one day and talked about music, a topic embraced by the composer and dismissed by the psychoanalyst. As my fantasy developed, (fueled by the timelessness and unlimited possibilities of the unconscious regarding reality of birthdates, location, and topic), the two men did not find much in common, since the composer extolled non-verbal sounds called music while the psychoanalyst emphasized the importance of words, calling his theory about interpreting dreams the Royal Road to the unconscious.
Mozart shared with Freud the letter he wrote to his father in 1777: “I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician.”
Freud nodded and complimented Mozart on two of the composer's operas that he enjoyed, Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute, but sternly added the proviso he had expressed in “The Moses of Michelangelo” (S.E., 1914).
…works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often painting. This has occasioned me, when I have been contemplating such things, to spend a long time before them, trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e., to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected, and what it is that affects me.
Undaunted, Mozart suggested to Freud that on some level he must be aware of the symbolic and metaphoric properties of music since Max Graf, musicologist and father/analyst of Little Hans (who became stage director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1936), had been a member of Freud's Wednesday Night Psychoanalytic Society. In these meetings, Graf presented studies of Wagner and Beethoven which suggested that music allowed the listener to gain access to the unconscious according to the concepts of Freud's topographic theory. This thought interested the psychoanalyst, but he did not express further curiosity.
Mozart, trying to illustrate to Freud that he had indeed experienced a connection between music and affect, then recalled that in 1897 Freud wrote to his friend, Fliess, about his affective reaction to Wagner's opera, Die Meistersinger, where he commented, “I was sympathetically moved by the ‘morning dream interpretation melody’…real ideas are set to music with the tones of feeling attached…” (Masson, 1985).
Of course, it was unclear if Freud was primarily responding to the verbal aspects of the libretto and its pre-Oedipal and Oedipal themes, but it did seem apparent that the affective aural essence of music enabled some thought and/or feeling to reach the awareness of the doubting psychoanalyst since he felt “displeasure” in one instance and was “sympathetically moved…by tones of feeling” in another. Mozart tried to emphasize that Freud's emotional responses to his own and Wagner's music were stimulated, in part, by the formal structure of music itself which resonated with Freud's psychoanalytic attunement to the nuances of the tone in talk and other non-verbal exchanges that were part of psychoanalytic theory and clinical technique.
Shortly after this conversation, the musician and the psychoanalyst parted company on the road that the musician called aural and the psychoanalyst called oral.
The idea that music was a point of entry to the unconscious through affect lay dormant until Mozart and Freud crossed paths once more many years later. Mozart asked Freud if he had ever thought further about their conversation, but Freud said he had been too busy creating psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Julie Jaffee Nagel, Ph.D., is on the faculty at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute and is in private practice in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She serves on the APsaA Arts Committee, TAP Editorial Board, and University Forum. She is a Juilliard graduate.
Yet they both noticed that other psychoanalysts had begun to take the journey on the aural/oral road. Some of these people had proposed that there was a bridge between music and psychoanalysis. Included among these intrepid travelers were Heinz Kohut, Siegmund Levarie, Marjorie MacDonald, Pinchas Noy, Martin Nass, Stuart Feder, Melvin Lansky, and I.
Mozart and Freud were fascinated with some of the ideas that had been proposed. They learned that melody, tonality, rhythm, and repetition were elements and functions of music, which suggested that sounds came from both external stimuli and internal sources that had—or developed—affective significance through associations. A developmental line of thinking about the auditory realm proposed that melodies could serve as transitional objects—or transitional tunes—which had implications for parent/infant-child non-verbal communication and for maintaining contact at a distance. Music, like words, was conceptualized as representational sound that could signify a spectrum of human narratives. Also, nonverbal sound evoked in listeners elements that could be explained both by topographical and structural theory and enabled some people to deepen a clinical analytic process. For example, music permitted both temporary non-pathological regression and ego mastery in listeners. There was one analyst, Melvin Lansky, who claimed that music did not represent anything (as did the literature and art that Freud appreciated) but was an example of the “will” itself, similar to Freud's unconscious wish.
Mozart was delighted to learn that Stuart Feder examined elements of music as psychoanalytic data, in particular, the tonality of D minor in his own composition, Don Giovanni. Even Freud was impressed that an analyst had explored one of his few favorite operas. What began to surface more and more was the linkage of feeling and meaning, affect and idea, multiple function, and analysis of manifest and latent themes in the bridges between music and psychoanalysis.
In my own efforts to understand the contrapuntal complexities on the aural/oral road, I have been assisted by the musical data of Mozart in Sonata in A Minor, K. 310, Verdi in Otello, and Donizetti in Lucia di Lammermoor. Clinical material also has demonstrated the feelings evoked by music as it deepened the transference in one of my patients, Ms. B.:
I can get anxious when it is silent here…. A song in my head eases my anxiety. I never thought to talk about it, never thought to analyze it. Music is tied to memories…like old tapes of earlier times. Why am I going back there? Why now? You'll ask, “Why now?” Music is tied to times in my life. It's emotional and personal. The hard part is I don't know how to articulate it…it's a feeling. Music is tied to memories…. It makes me get shivers down my spine…. I hear sound and see and feel it like a texture…I can't reproduce it. The experience involves a lot of my senses.
I have come to believe when Freud said he was “moved” by a particular musical theme that unknowingly he was describing the importance of affect that links the tones and inherent meanings expressed in music and the talk and inherent meanings expressed in psychoanalysis. Freud approached—and then avoided—this intersection.
As Freud and Mozart continued down different avenues and my fantasy drifted into more concrete thought, I am left with the optimism that both clinical work and future interdisciplinary explorations about music and psychoanalysis can harmoniously collaborate to explore the idea that if the oral analysis of dreams paves a Royal Road to the unconscious, analysis of music provides an Aural Road to the same destination. I propose that it is the destination of the unconscious itself which is sophisticatedly attuned to both words and music and compels us to continue the journey.