Psychoanalysis and music

The relationship between psychoanalysis and music is as old as the history of psychoanalysis itself. Psychoanalysts have examined musical phenomena, and the relationship has been reciprocal, as also musicologists have applied psychoanalysis to their work. Music therapy, too, has utilized psychoanalytic theories.

Sigmund Freud discussed shortly some musical phenomena in his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), but he was more interested in other arts, especially literature and the visual arts.

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 emotional impact of the musical sounds. Cheshire argued that maybe he was jealous and feared the potential therapeutic power of music as a rival to psychoanalysis.

It was up to other early psychoanalysts than Freud to initiate a serious psychoanalytic study of musical phenomena. First of them was the musicologist and critic Max Graf (1873–1958) who presented his views in the "Wednesday meetings" in 1905–1912. Among other pioneers was Desiderius (Dezső) Mosonyi (1888–1945) who published his writings in Hungarian and in German.

The early views of music were reductive and romantic: the composer expresses him- or herself directly in a musical composition; the reception of music is regressive.

After 1950, psychoanalytical musicology started to flourish. Within a few years several studies were published by the French André Michel (1951), Ernst Kris (1952), Anton Ehrenzweig (1953), Theodor Reik (1953), and others.

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