Melodies of the Mind

Connections between psychoanalysis and music

Julie Jaffee Nagel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415692786
• eBook ISBN: 9781136155987
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

What can psychoanalysis learn from music? What can music learn from psychoanalysis? Can the analysis of music itself provide a primary source of psychological data?

Drawing on Freud's concept of the oral road to the unconscious, Melodies of the Mind invites the reader to take a journey on an aural and oral road that explores both music and emotion, and their links to the unconscious. In this book, Julie Jaffee Nagel discusses how musical and psychoanalytic concepts inform each other, showing the ways that music itself provides an exceptional non-verbal pathway to emotion – a source of 'quasi' psychoanalytical clinical data. The interdisciplinary synthesis of music and psychoanalytic knowledge provides a schema for understanding the complexity of an individual's inner world as that world interacts with social 'reality'.

There are three main areas explored:

• The Aural Road
• Moods and Melodies
• The Aural/Oral Road Less Travelled

Melodies of the Mind is an exploration of the power of music to move us when words fall short. It suggests the value of using music and ideas of the mind to better understand and address psychological, social, and educational issues that are relevant in everyday life. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists, music therapists, musicians, music teachers, music students, social workers, educators, professionals in the humanities and social services as well as music lovers.

Julie Jaffee Nagel is a graduate of The Juilliard School, The University of Michigan, and The Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. She is on the faculty of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute and is in private practice in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Part I

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The aural road

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Chapter 1

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Preamble

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Music has affected me deeply and differently at various times in my life. I believe my attraction to the piano at a very young age and my immersion in music professionally were unconscious motivations that decades later contributed to my appreciation of the depth, elegance, and musicality of psychoanalytic ideas. Trained both as a musician and a psychoanalyst, I am interested in my own internal life, the emotional lives of others, as well as the inner workings of music. Particularly during my psychoanalytic training, I became curious about what resonated in me when words had limited value.

Why, for example, did Leonard Bernstein's “Age of Anxiety” comfort me immediately following the heartbreaking, untimely death of my mother? Why did I gravitate to the piano at the age of four and pursue it seriously as a career for many years? Why do I continue to be fascinated with music and, like a magnet, drawn to its intersection with affect? What was it about classical music that attracted me as an adolescent, especially when all my friends were enamored with the top ten songs of the week (although I listened to them as well, I unabashedly admit, as I navigated my teen years and my musical ambitions).

For as long as I can remember, I have always felt a resonance and a romance with “serious” music because it has provided comfort, assuaged sadness, made me feel happy, joyful, strong, and sometimes evoked a melancholy I did not understand and could not express verbally. I am now more aware of how much music helped me feel what I could not articulate. I have come to realize how music served as my companion at a time of loss and at joyous moments. I believe that one “thinks” as well as feels in music (Lipson, 2006). Music can also function as an aural transitional object, like a child's teddy bear or beloved blankie, to provide comfort when mother — or father — is not available, either physically or emotionally (McDonald, 1970). Clearly, this was the case for me and, as I have seen over many years in my clinical practice, has been so for many of my patients. Out of sight is neither out of mind nor out of earshot. I feel attuned to Pratt's (1952) proposal that “music sounds the way emotion feels” (cited in Feder et al., 1993, p. 127) and to Feder's (unpublished) belief that music, in addition to a composer's underlying motivations for expressing him or herself through an aural pathway, has the capacity to represent a “psychic semblance of inner life.”

Realizing there are multiple and differing implications for composer, performer, and listener (and for those who think and write about music and emotion), I emphasize in the pages that follow that a listener's affects and psychic processes can be evoked through music, an abstract sound-language comprised of notation, rhythm, and formal qualities, which provides a unique aural entry into mental life.

Music can provide accompaniment as well as accompany and enhance important life events such as weddings, funerals, parties, and official ceremonies. It enhances the mood in movies and is played as background noise, in varying decibels, in places such as restaurants, department or grocery stores, coffee shops, hotel lobbies, and elevators. The concert hall does not hold a monopoly on music in our lives. Music has been used as propaganda to promote or suppress political ideology, such as occurred under Stalin's dictatorship and in Nazi Germany. Music can embellish or represent a programmed story (e.g., Strauss's tone poems, “Til Eulenspiegel,” Don Juan, “Ein Heldenleben”; J. S. Bach's “Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother”; Robert Schumann's “Kreisleriana,” “Papillions”; and Dukas's “Sorcerer's Apprentice”), demonstrate and/or be inspired by a mood (e.g., Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, Debussy's Three Nocturnes: “Nuages,” “Fetes,” and “Sirnes,” and Ravel's “Jeux d'eau”), sonically illustrate a narrative (e.g., St. Saens's Carnival of the Animals, Prokofieff s Peter and the Wolf, Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra), and/or be combined with words, as in musical theater and opera. Regarding the latter categories, the words, the libretti, and prearranged narratives add ideational and/or verbal text to music and allow for additional oral and, in the case of opera or musical theater, visual pathways to unconscious processes. Yet music itself — without words or programmatic specificities — can significantly influence the listener's capacity to feel, to access affects that otherwise may be verbally inexpressible and/or emotionally unavailable.

Thus, the analysis of music itself as a primary source of psychological data is the distinctive method of analysis that I bring to my interdisciplinary exploration of mental processes and affect. In the chapters that follow, music itself will serve as the “quasi” clinical data, although I will also include clinical vignettes to illustrate both psychoanalytic and musical concepts. My approach is distinct from examining an individual's emotional response to music, to the biographical background of a composer, to cultural milieu, to psychopathology, and to the mysteries of creativity, although all of these factors are embedded to some degree in how I conceptualize music as an aural pathway to emotion and unconscious processes.

The parameters in the chapters that follow, called case-ettes, are organized around a blend of oral and aural aspects of clinical vignettes and specific music compositions. I have chosen to initiate the journey by exploring aspects of classical Freudian theory and classical Western musical tradition. The tumultuous and fertile cultural soil of fin de siècle Vienna serves as a backdrop and launch. My parameters, which both facilitate and limit my analytic/ musical range, are a function of my hybrid training in music and psychoanalysis, my fascination with Freud's disclaimers about music, the breakdown of tonal music, and the divergence and subsequent convergence of interest in music and mental life. Clearly, other psychoanalytic and musical perspectives not explored here also hold relevance for the examination of music as a point of entry into affect and unconscious processes.

With the aim of raising more questions than I can answer and encouraging cross-pollination among scholars, mental health professionals, musicologists, and music lovers, the chapters that follow explore the following overdetermined themes:

• Music and psychoanalytic concepts hold enduring value as each informs and enriches the other.

• Music serves as an important entry into affect and unconscious processes.

• Music and psychoanalytic principles are relevant both inside and beyond the concert hall and consulting room and contribute to a nuanced understanding of our contemporary educational, cultural, and social milieu.

The oral/aural road diverges

By the time Freud was immersed in developing classical psychoanalytic theory, music theory and performance practice had already claimed a history. Living and working in fin de siècle Vienna, Freud was in the midst of his discoveries about the mind as the musical tonality and harmonic vocabulary of the late Romantic period of music history were being stretched aurally and theoretically by composers such as Wagner, Strauss, and Mahler, eventually breaking down altogether into atonality.

Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), regarded by Freud as his most important work, made its debut in 1899, although the title page is dated 1900. In his two-part Dream Books (S. E., Vols IV and V), which sold only 351 copies in the six years following publication (Freud, 1953, S. E., Vol. IV, p. xx), Freud laid the foundation for a psychology of the mind based on psychic energies as distinct from purely neurophysiological/anatomical perspectives. In his own words in the preface to the first edition, “I have attempted in this volume to give an account of the interpretation of dreams; and in doing so I have not, I believe, trespassed beyond the sphere of interest covered by neuro-pathology” (Freud, S. E., Vol. IV, p. xxiii).

Freud famously labeled dreams the “royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (1900, p. 608). His leap from soma to psyche bequeathed enormous innovations for theoretical and clinical perspectives regarding mental processes: symbolic functions, manifest and latent contents, multiple determinants, displacements, and, importantly, primary and secondary processes in mental functioning. Freud's formulations about the unconscious, free association, the linkage of overtly opposing mental contents and affects, and primary and secondary processes are compatible symbolically with the concepts that I will explore in regard to selected musical paradigms. While musical innovation and psychoanalysis germinated in the same creative sociocultural soil, they subsequently diverged on oral and aural roads to the unconscious.

To give a historical anchor and a tonal orientation, in the Classical period in Western music (spanning the years approximately 1740–1800), specific rules of tonal/harmonic organization were arranged around the eight-note diatonic scale. Familiar composers from the Classical period include Franz Josef Hayden, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven, whose music formed a bridge to the Romantic period that followed. These composers utilized a system that dictated the resolution of harmonies to a tonic, or home, key. This was not only an expectation of a predictable compositional procedure, but also a matter of the listener's anticipation. Dissonance or modulation away from the home key was always followed by a return to the tonic (the home key), producing a sense of completion, satisfaction, rest, and finality. Here one might think analytically in terms of tension/release, unpleasure/pleasure, and musically of dissonance/ consonance. Further, the tones in the diatonic scale had unequal power (whole and half-tones), which contributed to tonal and aural expectations regarding resolution of harmonies.

Chronologically, the era in music history that emerged from the Classical period is known as the Romantic period (approximately 1800–1890) — although, as noted by Grout and Palisca (1996), there is more continuity than contrast in harmonic vocabulary and conventions of rhythm and form when moving from one era to the next. Differences in style were typically observed “by degree” (Grout and Palisca, 1996, p. 563). In the world of “ordered sound” (p. 564) that does not represent a concrete world, Romantic music was believed to evoke mental impressions and intense affects. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) maintained that “music was the incarnation of the innermost reality, the immediate expression of universal feelings and impulses in concrete, definite form” (cited in Grout and Palisca, 1996, p. 564).

Some thought that music of the Romantic era, particularly music without words, communicated pure emotion. Additionally, the art song, or lied, steeped in the words of poetry and literature, occupied a major place in the Romantic literature. Composers such as Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf, and Johannes Brahms developed this genre, elegantly uniting words and music. Purely instrumental, programmatic music emerged in the form of the tone poem, made popular by composers such as Franz Liszt, its inventor, and Richard Strauss. In this context, music without words was inspired by stories that were aurally depicted in compositional form.

The late Romantic period is known harmonically by its movement toward chromaticism, although at first, the music representative of this departure from traditional tonal centers typically resolved to the expected tonic. Of importance was the growing tendency for key/tonal centers, easily identifiable through expected harmonies in the Classical and early Romantic periods, to become increasingly ambiguous; expected harmonic resolutions were delayed and eventually became unclear. What is clear is that in the late 1800s there was a stretching of the boundaries of tonality and movement away from earlier theoretical harmonic canons. The late Romantic, chromatic style was exemplified by the work of composers such as Richard Wagner (who flourished in the mid-nineteenth century and died in 1883), Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Alexander Scriabin.

The ambiguous opening chord of the prelude to Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde is perhaps more widely discussed than any other chord in musical history. The unexpected nature of its harmony, both literally and symbolically, is resolved many hours later, and only at the conclusion of the “Liebestod” at the end of the opera. Freud would have been nine years old at the time of Wagner's historical musical premier, which to many music historians marks the irreversible onset of tonal disintegration.

The “Tristan Chord,” and indeed the entire opera Tristan and Isolde, symbolized the period of musical history in Vienna that found its most revolutionary representative in composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), the architect of atonal and twelve-tone music. Atonal music has no tonal center and departs from the traditional treatment of harmony. Serial music is based on the composition of a row or series “consisting of twelve tones or pitch classes of the octave arranged in an order the composer chooses” (Grout and Palisca, 1996, p. 736). These twelve pitches may be used melodically, harmonically, rhythmically, or intervalically (forward, backward, and/or inverted upside down), in any way the composer chooses. All twelve tones are used before the composer uses any single note for a second time. This non-redundancy “implies that the relative positions within the series must be respected” (Rosen, 1996, p. 84).

Twelve-tone music, however, is not necessarily atonal and therefore could potentially have a tonal center. Schoenberg's compositional inventions have been labeled the democracy of tones since all notes of the octave are treated equally — i.e., each pitch is as important as every other. The major impact of Schoenberg's technique was that tonality and harmony, as they had been known for centuries, were dissolved as structural organizers. Harmony ceased to have its conventional function (i.e., dissonant chords no longer resolved consonantly). One writer suggested that Schoenberg tried to dissolve music altogether (Botstein, 1999, p. 41).

Thinking psychoanalytically, the equality of the twelve tones produced in any order may be likened to free association, just as the tonal uncertainty in the “Tristan chord” shares an aural connection to the psychoanalytic concept of ambiguity and mental conflict.

In his Theory of Harmony, Schoenberg wrote, “Inside where the man of instinct begins, there, fortunately, all theory breaks down” (Harmonielehre, 1911, p. 449–50). Approximately one year earlier, he had commented:

Art is a cry of distress from those who live out within themselves the destiny of humanity.… They are those who do not turn their eyes away to protect themselves from emotions but open them wide to oppose what must be attacked. They do, however, often close their eyes to perceive what the senses do not convey, to look inside of what seems to be happening on the surface. Inside them turns the movement of the world; only an echo of it leaks out — the work of art.

(“Aphorismen”, 1910, in Arnold Schoenberg, “Schopferische Konfessionem”, ed. Willi Reich, (Zurich, 1964), p. 12.)

Both this new system of musical expression and the development of psychoanalysis were traveling into uncharted regions along parallel oral and aural paths. The two did not intersect.

In his string sextet Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night), composed in 1899 (the same year in which Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams) when Schoenberg was twenty-five, the composer stretched tonality almost to its breaking point while continuing to use traditional chromaticism. It was, by 1890s' standards, hardly revolutionary, yet it created controversy. A contemporary commented, “It sounds as if someone had smeared the score of ‘Tristan’ while it was still wet” (Rosen, 1996, p. 3). A music society in Vienna refused to allow its performance, ostensibly because it contained one dissonance that had yet to be classified in any textbook.

After 1908, moral outrage began to be expressed by the public over Schoenberg's work. An outright riot ensued after a concert in 1913 — a riot reported to h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Discography: Selected CDs and DVDs for music cited in case-ettes
• Part I The aural road
• Chapter 1 Preamble
• Part II Moods and melodies
• Chapter 2 Case-ette I Ambiguity — The Tritone in “Gee, Officer, Krupke” (West Side Story)
• Chapter 3 Case-ette 2 Self-esteem — Peter and the Wolf
• Chapter 4 Case-ette 3 Separation, Loss, Grief, and Growth — Mozart in 1778, Piano Sonata in A Minor, K. 310
• Chapter 5 Case-ette 4 Jealousy and Murder — Verdi's Otello 1
• Chapter 6 Case-ette 5 Shame and Rage — The Breakdown of Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor 1
• Chapter 7 Case-ette 6 Multiple (Dys)Function — Polyphony in “The Tonight Ensemble” (West Side Story)
• PART III The aural/oral road less traveled
• Chapter 8 Beyond the concert hall and consulting room
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index