Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music Review

Psychoana analyt lytic Explora lorattion ions in Music. ic.

http://w ://www ww..thefree reelib library rary..com/_ om/_/p /pri rin nt/Pri /Prin ntArtic rticle le..aspx spx?id= id=15109181 181

Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music. Auth Autho or:

Eme Emerson rson,, Isab sabelle  elle 

Article Type: Book Review  Date: Mar 1, 1994   W ords:

2171

Publication: Publication: Note Notes  s  ISSN:

0027-4380  

Third in a series of volumes dedicated to applied psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music is the first such collection on musical subjects. Research into the roles and manners of music perception, training, and especially creation may surely offer dynamic and productive pathways to a greater understanding of the workings of mind and body and thus prove beneficial to the psychoanalyst as well as the musician. But, although the idea of investigating music using psychoanalytic techniques goes back to the early years of this century, to Sigmund Freud's own Psychological Wednesday Society which included among its members the musicologist Max Graf, the editors of this anthology believe that music has not received the attention given by psychoanalytical theorists to the literary and visual arts. As Dane Harwood Harwood recently pointed p ointed out, however however,, in a review review of Jeanne Bamberger's The Mind behind the Musical Ear: How Children Develop Musical Intelligence (Notes 49 [1992--93]: 940--44), a great deal of work has been devoted during the last thirty years to the psychology of music--the processes of musical perception, learning, performance, comparison of these processes with those involved in other skills, and so on (see Harwood's excellent excellent overv overview iew of the literature, l iterature, pp. pp . 940--41). Psychoanalytic Explorations was not intended to establish a methodology for psychoanalytic applications to music. Rather, the editors have provided a compendium of essays that represent the types of work done between 1950 and 1986. The essays are organized in four categories, forming a logical progression from the perception of music by listeners through the development of musical ability and the psychology of composition/creation, to biographical studies of individual composers. The essays in the first three sections are presented in chronological order, so that the reader gains a sense of development and change in application of psychoanalytic theory. Thus earlier essays speak preponderantly of music as id-dominated, musical enjoyment resulting from a permitted regression to earlier states of development; later essays emphasize concepts of ego psychology. Many of the essays in Psychoanalytic Explorations show exciting Many exciting possibilities for achieving new understanding of the essential processes of music, both with respect to its creation and its reception. Marjorie McDonald has studied the work of the Suzuki school and suggested that music may operate for the musically sensitive child as a transitional object (like a blanket or teddy bear) during the shift from concentration on the world within to awareness of the external world. Pinchas Noy, agreeing with Freud that the latent meaning of all art reduces to basic motives and conflicts common to all humanity, concludes that the element distinguishing perfect and good art must then be form. He sets up a model for the relation of id and ego (content is to form as id is to ego, super ego, and reality) and proposes explanations of good and perfect form involving the extent and success of the ego's expression and organization of materials. In a perceptive study of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde that speaks to both musicians and psychoanalysts, Richard Chessick reviews

1d 4

29/12/2012 11 31

Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/print/PrintArticle.aspx?id=15109181

various approaches by psychologists and philosophers to Wagner's transfiguration of his love for Mathilde Wesendonck. Wagner has shown with unspeakable power the pain and rage of this passion and the suffering that must be relieved even if the only relief is death; the greatness of his work, writes Chessick, is that it produces empathy for the victims, an empathy that should carry over to the clinical situation for psychoanalysts working with such victims. Problems arise however with more specific applications of psychoanalytic methods. Noy suggests elsewhere that the threatening effect of Beethoven's famous four-note motive in the Fifth Symphony is due to its resemblance to a scolding mother --several quick repetitions usually in a high tone followed by a long, usually lower tone. Fugue is analogous to a toddler stumbling along independently followed at a short distance by its caring mother; the pleasure in hearing the fugue derives from the evocation of those early simultaneous feelings of independence and security. Stuart Feder, drawing upon musical as well as biographical data, proposes an unusually close and exclusive attachment between Charles Ives and his father George, a relationship that seems to endow the father with both materinal and paternal capabilities. Feder deduces from various written and spoken statements that "for all humanistic intents and purposes, [Ives] presents himself as if born of man]" (p. 144). The organ that makes this possible is a "shared male organ"--the ear: "In its starkest form, [Ives's] fantasy of origin was that of immaculate conception in and through this ear" (p. 148). Leaving aside the possible objection that females, too, have ears and often very musical ones, Feder pounds home his point: "The Ivesian ear is a shared, masculine organ; it is virile and potent yet tenderly receptive to its own kind. Both phallic and vaginal, it can give it, and it can take it" (p. 155). In other words, this "uniquely bisexual organ" can imagine and send (disseminate!) sound, functioning thus phallically, but, since it also receives sound, functioning vaginally as well. Feder's reasonable, often illuminating examination of Ives's constitutional gifts and environment loses credibility when it becomes overly specific, whether biographically or musically. Is, for example, Charles Ives hearing through George's ears in the Violin Sonatas as Feder claims, or is he re-creating accurately his own memories of camp meetings? Is the use of cornet and violins always an identification with George, or is it a fondness for the timbre? --a fondness that may well have its origins in childhood experiences but that does not have to be a pathological evocation of "Father." Need a reference to another style and to another early figure be "a displacement from George" (p. 166), or can it be just what it sounds like--a reference to country fiddle-playing? My criticism is not meant to lessen the importance of George Ives's influence on his son or to denigrate Feder's thorough and often penetrating work. I do wish however to point out the dangers of such overspecificity in discussing matters that must remain open to speculation. Such overspecificity in the psychoanalytic approach to music and to (dead) musicians fails in much the same way that music itself fails when attempting to be too specific--think of Franz Liszt's tone poem Mazeppa which portrays the sound of the galloping horse so accurately that with repetition it becomes ludicrous, and we the listeners, trapped in the mundane, lose sight of the grand conception. Similarly, caught up in the idea of Ives's oversexed ear, we may discount the insights offered into the make-up and creativity of this singular genius. Feder's essay exemplifies both the merits and the problems of Psychoanalytic Explorations. The desire to explain and to understand the workings of art is profoundly appealing. But at the same time such explications must be firmly grounded in verifiable evidence. Jacques Barzun has warned in Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History & History ([Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974], 45) of the dangers of permitting surmise to appear as fact, of relying on such "weasel words" as "must have," "it would seem," "may we not believe." Pointing out that psychohistorians "see others moved by unconscious forces that distort vision and compel strange behavior," he questions why their own "vision of persons and events [is] not blurred and skewed as well, and their interpretations forced upon

2d 4

29/12/2012 11 31

Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/print/PrintArticle.aspx?id=15109181

them by dark needs rather than evidential reasons" (p. 48). Careful documentation is crucial in investigations like the ones offered in Psychoanalytic Explorations--and unfortunately documentation is inconsistent and is occasionally omitted entirely. ("Many of the conversations were on music, Otto frequently provocative in his comments, Gustav [Mahler] at times lecturing" [Feder, p. 351]; this may be accurate, but no evidence is given to support the descriptions.) Some essays are excellent; a few should have been excluded. Maynard Solomon's essay on Mozart's Zoroastrian riddles, for example, is careful, insightful, and convincing. Solomon distinguishes painstakingly between fact and supposition, writing "I hypothesize" or "it seems to me," avoiding "it may have been" or "it must have been," etc. He makes the excellent point that the artist's experiences, drives, motivations are apt to be hidden in the art and be thus unavailable to anyone else; this disguise is in fact a sign of the successful work. The riddles are incomplete, unsuccessful even, sublimations, and therefore revealing. Mozart surely thought he was just having fun, but Solomon shows quite convincingly that the composer presented "free associational products of his imagination, symbols to which are bonded fragments of a hidden life" (p. 421). This is psycho-musicological detective work of high quality. The same cannot be said for Aaron Esman's 1951 study of Mozart. It relies exclusively on sources available in English (ignoring such respectable, fundamental German work as that of Otto Jahn and Hermann Abert or the German edition of Mozart's letters prepared by Ludwig Schiedermair) and is not really of much value today--historically or, I would think, psychoanalytically. He stresses Mozart's anal language but does not refer to the original German, nor does he mention that Mozart's mother also enjoyed anal vocabulary (as in her letter to her husband of 26 September 1777, "adio ben mio leb gesund, Reck den arsch zum mund, ich winsch ein guete nacht, scheiss ins beth das Kracht; see Mozart: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, vol. 2 [Kassel: Barenreiter, 1962], 14 [letter no. 333]). His finding of a productive link between creativity and castration anxiety, which can partially explain "the far greater incidence in our culture of artistic creativity among men than women" (p. 397), will be of interest to all modern women. Although two women have contributed three essays, the book is dominated by male subjects and terminology. Thus even though when Clara Wieck played a defective piano "her father functioned, in effect, as part of her instrument" (Anna Burton, p. 108), she nonetheless "functioned as an extension of her father--symbolically, as a phallic supplement" (Burton, p. 109). Wieck is the only female musician studied; most essays refer exclusively to males, and only occasionally is "he" broadened to include "she." Music, long attributed with the power of expressing emotion--woman's realm after all?--would seem an obvious and rich arena for psychoanalytical forays into investigations of gender significance. In a collection intended "to provide an up-to-date compendium of representative articles" (p. xiv), one might expect to find a broader selection: in a total of twenty-two essays by fourteen authors, six authors are represented by two articles, two authors by three. The book overall would profit by greater consistency in such matters as inclusion of summaries at the ends of essays, adherence to conventions of capitalization in various languages, cross-references. Several articles should have been vigorously edited; condensed, awkward writing improved; annoying repetitions and jargon eliminated; grammar corrected (e.g., "this data" [p. 446] and "the self and its component parts ... is" [p. 195]). Careful proofreading might have caught misspellings and even an apparently misplaced paragraph (p. 203). Misprints occur-curiously, many of them in the three essays by one of the general editors, Stuart Feder. The umlaut is particularly abused: not only is it misplaced (so that Trauerlied becomes Trauerlied [p. 205]), but it appears only sporadically in the list of references, so that the reader is treated to Hollander, Tannhauser, Walkure, Vom Musikalisch-Schonen, and may well chuckle over the entry for H. Keller's "Die Gluckliche Hand and Other Errors." Perhaps inevitably, a few musical solecisms creep in: for example, a reference to the third as the "most stable

3d 4

29/12/2012 11 31

Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/print/PrintArticle.aspx?id=15109181

configuration in music" (Schwartz, note, p. 438). Many of the authors admit the difficulties of interpreting with words an art that is nonverbal and of applying psychoanalytic interview techniques to a person who can never be spoken with directly. A major problem however in such an interdisciplinary effort is the lack of specialized knowledge of both disciplines. Ideally, the investigator should be skilled in music and in psychology. This is rarely the case. The collaboration of psychologist and musicologist would help to avoid pitfalls of misinformation, misunderstanding, and naivete. Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music is strongest when authors explore within their own expertise the processes and effects of this nonverbal art. Several authors compare Freud's recommendation concerning listening to patients--with a completely open mind and receptive to all levels of communication (e.g., literal words, subconscious meanings, body language)--to the ideal state of listening to music. Martin Nass cites Suzanne Langer's belief that the power of music lies in its ability--widely recognized in the nineteenth century--to "be 'true' to the life of feeling in a way that language cannot" (p. 40). If this be so, then perhaps the appropriate task for psychoanalysis is to examine the processes by which the message expressed by music is sent and received rather than try to translate the message. The strongest essays in this collection labor in precisely this direction. All in all, Psychoanalytic Explorations provides an instructive overview of applications to music of psychoanalytic methods; the most provocative essays indicate the possibilities for expanding through the disciplines of psychoanalysis and music our knowledge of the workings of the mind.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Music Library Association, Inc. Copyright 1994 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

4d 4

29/12/2012 11 31