The Self-Restorative Power of Music

A Psychological Perspective

Frank M. Lachmann

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000465921
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Media & Performing Arts
• Thema: Music Theory & Appreciation

This book explores how we can understand the place of music from a self psychological perspective, by investigating three journeys: the one we take when listening to music, the literal journey of the author from Nazi Germany to the United States, and the subjective round-trip between the past and the present.

Drawing on the work of Heinz Kohut, the author examines how music can provide us with a way to reconnect with a sense of self, and how this can manifest in psychological and physical ways. There is particular reference to the work of Richard Wagner, Cole Porter, and Richard Strauss, and an examination of how their music enabled them, in times of stress and crisis, to restore and maintain a more positive sense of self. Finally, the book looks back at the author's own experiences of music and the place of music in the Jewish world.

With clinical excerpts, personal narrative, and sophisticated psychoanalytic insights, this book will appeal to all psychoanalysts wanting to understand the place of music in shaping the psyche, as well as music scholars wishing to gain a deeper appreciation of the psychology of music.

Chapter 1

Words and melodies, psychology and music

DOI: 10.4324/9781003220954-2

As a young teenager, my father and I would take long walks on Saturday or Sunday afternoon. One day we walked from our home, on 79th Street in Manhattan, to about 48th street. There, to our surprise, we discovered that tickets were being distributed for a free radio concert by the American Broadcasting Company Symphony Orchestra. What an unexpected delight. We then often went to hear the A.B.C. Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Max Goberman, who was well known at that time.

The trips to hear the A.B.C. Symphony Orchestra had a special meaning to me because at these concerts my father and I often heard music that my father had not heard in Germany. This was music that both of us now heard for the first time. For example, I recall a concert at which we heard Chabrier’s España Rhapsody and Bizet’s Symphony in C. My father had never heard either of the works and both works soon became particular favorites.

YouTube Videos

Chabrier—España Rhapsody

Bizet Symphony in C No. i

Many years later as I was becoming a psychoanalyst and lay on my analyst’s couch, associating freely, amid the memories and narratives, among the words that went through my mind, bits of music burst forth. In speaking of my relationship with my parents, I heard, in my mind’s ear, a theme from Bizet’s Symphony in C. It reminded me of the concerts I had attended with my father, at which we both heard these pieces for the first time. The music conveyed my bond with my father. In another hour, when recalling aspects of my relationship with my mother, I heard the waltz from Franz Lehar’s operetta, The Merry Widow.

YouTube Video

Waltz from The Merry Widow

My Freudian analyst interpreted this memory as my Oedipal wish. I had gotten rid of my father in depicting my mother as a widow, which she was not, and a merry one at that. Equating the musical passage with its title did little more than substituting words for music, as though the title of the piece was my association. I think, in retrospect, it missed the point.

When my analyst interpreted my referring to The Merry Widow as my Oedipal wish, getting rid of my father and making merry with my mother, I recall feeling rather pleased by that interpretation. I was becoming a Freudian psychoanalyst myself at that time, so I was pleased to know that in my unconscious there lurked an Oedipus complex, just like in everyone else’s unconscious, according to Freud. It gave me a feeling of belonging, not being an alien and outsider anymore.

When I subsequently thought about that interpretation, I tried to figure out what might have emerged had we investigated that musical moment rather than just interpreting the title. Other meanings might have emerged. Had we explored what The Merry Widow meant to me, I might have recounted that when I was about 15 years old my parents took me to see The Merry Widow. It was my first Broadway show. It was performed by Marta Eggert and Jan Kiepura, who had sung this operetta in German all over Europe before World War II. Now they were singing it in English, here, in New York. When my parents took me to see The Merry Widow, it reconnected them with an aspect of the world they had lost, and, for me, it was an invitation to enter that world with them. I was now old enough, and we could afford to go to the theater. It was a memorable moment, the kind of “heightened affective experience” about which my colleague Beatrice Beebe and I later wrote (Beebe and Lachmann, 2002, p. 134). Such experiences have an impact, an organizing influence, far beyond the actual time that they take.

The Oedipal interpretation did no harm, but it failed to acknowledge the meaning of my memory of The Merry Widow: a bridge to the idealized cultural and musical life that I saw my parents as having lived in Germany. It was a world and a life that I had feared would never become available to me but that I could now begin to recapture. Inadvertently, my analyst’s Oedipal interpretation made me feel that I did belong to a worldwide community. As a young psychologist, I felt I was now a member of a community of people with Oedipus complexes—just like everybody else. That may not have been his intended point in making the interpretation, but I did make something of it that I needed.

The take-away is that the meanings that listeners attach to music are private, precious, and unique, a topic that I will explore further throughout this book. Had my parents taken me to hear another Johann Strauss operetta such as Die Fledermaus or Zigeuner Baron, both of which were performed in New York and both of which could have served to connect us to our European past, the meaning of the event would have been the same. Had I recalled a melody from either of these Johann Strauss operettas, I think my analyst would have had a more difficult time formulating an Oedipal interpretation out of “The Bat” or “The Gypsy Baron.”

Psychology and music

Skipping over several years of my life, we now move more directly to the interface between music and psychology. To explore this connection, I turn to several essays by Heinz Kohut (1968, 1971, 1977).

I became interested in the theory of Kohut in the 1970s. In contrast to basing his theory on sexuality and aggression, as did Freud, Kohut emphasized the centrality of the sense of self. He formulated under what pressures and threats the sense of self may “fragment,” relinquish a sense of cohesion, eventuating in feelings of anxiety and disorientation. Kohut then discussed how psychoanalytic treatment can lead to the restoration, transformation, and maintenance of the sense of self.

In the 1950s, before he had explicated his theory of the centrality of the sense of self, in tune with the psychological writings of his day, Kohut (1957) approached the enjoyment of music, as he did psychotherapeutic treatment and early development, from Freud’s viewpoint.

“The mother’s voice,” wrote Kohut and Levarie (1950), “becomes associated with oral gratification for the infant; the mother’s lullaby, with the drowsy satisfaction after feeding. Early kinesthetic eroticism, rocking the cradle, for example, anticipates the enjoyment of dancing and may become associated with definite rhythmic patterns” (Coriat, 1945, p. 142). Kohut was already connecting music to bodily experiences, a theme he developed further in his later writings.

The relationship between music and psychology that is contained in Kohut’s writings was typical of the 1950s. It was the time when psychology relegated the arts to repressed sexual desires that push for expression as acceptable social behaviors, vicarious means of conflict resolution, and affect discharge. It was the time when psychologists promised to unveil the mysteries of the world, love, sex, and the arts. It was the time about which Leonard Bernstein (1982) said derisively, “When Dr. (Lawrence) Kubie explained the creative process by simply invoking the word preconscious” (p. 229).

Kohut, then adhering to a conflict resolution hypothesis, posited that listening to music presents a threat that requires mastery in that dissonance in the music and departures from the home key, create tension. When the music returns to consonance and to the home key of the composition, Kohut reasoned, there would be a sense of relief and a feeling of mastery. By referring to feelings of tension and relief, Kohut formulated listening to music as an experience that involved the whole body of the listener.

A brief excursion into musicology may help to clarify this and subsequent material. The home key, called the tonic, is the key in which a musical composition is written. The tonic defines the beginning ambience from which Western composers have developed and elaborated their musical ideas for the past 400 years.

Scales, keys, and the tones or notes that comprise them are derived from the “harmonic series,” a product of the physics of sound. The harmonic series contains all notes that are heard when a plucked string (as in a violin) or a column of air (as in a flute) vibrates; that is, plucking a string stimulates other notes, called “overtones,” that are in a constant relationship to each other.

The harmonic series is important because it demonstrates that tonality is an inherent physical property of vibrating objects. Different cultures, Chinese, Indian, or Western, have made up different scales by using different series of notes from the 12 tones that make up an octave. Some cultures use a five-note scale, a pentatonic scale. We use a seven-note scale, the diatonic scale. All 12 tones make a chromatic scale.

The harmonic series pulls music toward tonality. This bias was reflected in Kohut’s comments, but he recognized in his later work, there is another powerful pull, a psychological pull, in analyst and analysand, and I would extend that to composer, performer, and listener. This powerful pull is the striving for self-assertion, self-articulation, and toward defining oneself uniquely. In music, these are the contrary pulls of tonality and atonality, of diatonic scales and chromatic scales, and consonant and dissonant sounds. Armed with this brief foray into Musicology 101, we turn to the relationship between the listener and the music and between music and psychology.

The model for pleasure in listening to music that Kohut utilized was Freud’s theory of sexuality. It is the very theory of sexuality that he and many other psychoanalysts roundly criticized. An early critic was by George Klein (1950). But, in the 1950s, for both sexuality and music, Freud’s theory dictated that the aim was to get rid of the feelings of tension, to “discharge” them, rather than to savor an exquisitely sensual total experience, including an exciting build-up of tension.

When it came to the enjoyment of sensual and sexual experiences, in pleasures of mounting tension prior to satisfaction through a feeling of release, or orgasm, poets, lovers, and composers had been way ahead of the psychologists. The artists and lovers all saw foreplay, the romantic build-up of excitement and tension as an inextricable part of the pleasurable sexual arousal.

An excellent example of elongating foreplay is Richard Wagner stretching the erotic yearning of Tristan and Isolde for each other over four hours. Wagner does so through a series of excruciatingly ambiguous chord progressions that do not resolve but rather lead to another unresolved chord. That is how the Prelude begins the opera, and the unresolved chords only reach a musical resolution at the very end of the opera. They are excruciating because each unresolved chord in this Prelude, in which a key is not clearly indicated, does not come to a resolution until the very last notes of the opera, in Tristan and Isolde’s love-death. There the chord progressions are resolved, indicating that the two lovers have finally consummated their erotic desires after death. We will encounter Tristan and Isolde again in the chapter on Wagner, but here is a preview of the orchestral version, without voices.

YouTube Video

Wagner Prelude and Liebestod

from Tristan and Isolde

Like foreplay in sex, departures from consonance and the tonic key provide pleasure. They do so not only because of the expected return home, although such an expectation may be in the background, but the very violations of the departures are pleasurable.

Departures from the tonic, excursions through modulations in different keys, and violations of expectations are characteristic of the development sections of musical compositions. In symphonic music, for example, themes are taken up by different instruments and played in different keys. In effect, they are “worked through.” Like analyst and analysand, the performer and listener find a new way of looking at and hearing old material. The old material appears in an ever-changing context. As in psychological therapy, in music, working through is not designed to eliminate the impact of the old, but rather to embed it in a variety of new contexts. Thereby the old is given a richer texture in the present. In both psychological treatment and in listening to music, active creative participation is required by all participants, performers, and listeners.

In writing about music, Heinz Kohut also departed from his traditional psychological perspective and hinted at novel interfaces between music and psychology. First, Kohut (1957) linked the function of music to the function of the psychotherapist. He extrapolated from Freud’s advice about listening to patients with evenly hovering attention by recommending that therapists should listen to “the sounds of the patient’s voice, the music that lies behind the meaningful words” (p. 243). In listening to a patient’s music, and not only the words, Kohut paved the way, but was not yet ready to include the therapist’s music, the therapist’s empathic immersion as a co-creator in the patient’s experience. He was not yet ready to depict psychotherapeutic treatment as an improvisational duet.

Second, Kohut (1957) recognized the central role of repetitions and rhythm in musical compositions. However, he related the prevalence and acceptance of repetitions in music to a reduction in energy expenditure. He did not yet have access to the empirical infant research which demonstrated that rhythms can forge powerful connections (Jaffe, Beebe, Feldstein, Crown, and Jasnow, 2001).

Third, Kohut likened music to “play,” thereby departing from the anxiety-tension-reduction model of musical enjoyment. However, he linked the enjoyment of music to Freud’s observations of a child playing “being gone” in order to master actively the painful passively endured experience of its mother’s absence.

Fourth, Kohut compared music and poetry. A simple rhythm may be covered or concealed by a sophisticated tune just like the deeper primary-process layer of rhythm or rhyme may be covered by the verbal content of a poem. Here Kohut pointed toward a broader, more complex artistic organization comprising surface structures and deeper structures. This parallel between poetry and music also fascinated Leonard Bernstein as discussed below.

At the time Kohut wrote that the pleasures of musi...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Music videos
• Overture
• Chapter 1 Words and melodies, psychology and music
• Chapter 2 Thrills and goose bumps in music
• Chapter 3 Music as narrative
• Chapter 4 Richard Wagner: Childhood trauma and creativity
• Chapter 5 Richard Strauss: Creativity in crisis and crises in creativity
• Chapter 6 Cole Porter: Trauma and self-restoration
• Chapter 7 Finale: Music and the Jews
• References
• Index