Psychoanalysis and Music

Freud's ambivalent attitude towards music

Sigmund Freud’s attitude toward music was ambivalent. Freud described himself as being ‘ganz unmusikalisch’ (totally unmusical). Despite his much-protested resistance, he could enjoy certain operas such as Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro and he used musical metaphors in the context of theory and therapy. Freud seemed to feel uneasy without a guide from the more rational part. To be emotionally moved by something without knowing what was moving him or why, was an intrinsically anxious experience. The operas he listened were ‘conversational’ and ‘narrative’ forms of music, which is theorized, provided him with some kind of ‘cognitive control’ over the affective impact of the musical sounds. Cheshire (1996) argued that maybe he was jealous and feared the potential therapeutic power of music as a rival to psychoanalysis.

First ideas about music and psychoanalysis

Theodor Reik (1888-1969) was one of Freud’s earliest students. Reik took up the theme of the "haunting melody" in Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916-17 [1915-17]) to demonstrate, by contrast to Freud, that musical structure can represent feelings. In Reik's view, melody can convey emotion far better than words. Reik showed that music is the voice of the “unknown itself” that may become compulsive in its attempt to convey a secret message. Reik speculated that the reason unconscious material sometimes emerges as a melody rather than as mere thoughts may be that melody better indicates moods and unknown feelings. He did demonstrate that songs on the mind could be effectively interacted with in a psychotherapeutic fashion in a way that helped resolve repressed conflict.

Future: Psychoanalysis, neuroscience and music

Recent developments in cognitive neuroscience have led to a new way of looking at music and emotion. Neurologist Oliver Sacks states that music occupies more areas of the brain then language does, and that humans are primary musical species. Elaborating on this idea, psychoanalyst Gilbert Rose argues that our responsiveness to music begins with the nonverbal emotional rapport of the earliest infant-parent interplay. Reaching back even further, since the fetus has an active auditory system 3-4 months before birth, the rhythm of the mothers womb and the sound of her heartbeat could be the start of our responsiveness to music. Neuroscientist Damasio states that when an organism interacts with an object, nonverbal neural images map the organism, the object and the interaction between them. As psychoanalysis gives verbal insight of non-verbal emotional involvement, and recent neurosciences found that music is able to contact this non-verbal emotions, music is stated to help the unison of thinking and feeling.

References

Sources

Boyer, L.B. (1992). Roles played by music as revealed during countertransference facilitated transference regression. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 73, 55-67

Cheshire, Neil M. (1996). The empire of the ear: Freud's problem with music. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 77, 1127-1168.

Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens. New York: Harcourt Brace

Faber, M. D. (1996). The pleasures of music: a psychoanalytic note. Psychanalytic review, 83, 419-433

Freud, S. (1936) Letter to M. Bonaparte, 06.12.36. In letters of Sigmund Freud, 1873-1939.

Sacks, O. (2007). Musicophilia, tales of music and the brain. Knopf publishing group.

Reik, Theodor. (1953). The haunting melody: Psychoanalytic experiences in life and music. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young.

Roazen, P. (1975) Freud and his followers. Harmondsworth: Penguin books, 1979.

Rose, G. J. (2004).: Psychoanalysis, Music, Art and Neuroscience. New York: Brunner-Routledge