Off The Beaten Track: Freud, Sound and Music. Statement of A Problem and Some Historico-Critical Notes

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Int J Psychoanal (2008) 89:937–957 doi: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2008.00068.x
Off the beaten track: Freud, sound and music.

Statement of a problem and some historico-critical notes1
Francesco Baralea and Vera Minazzib

a
Via Cuneo 4, 20149 Milan, Italy – frabar04@unipv.it
b
Via Pinturicchio 9, 20133 Milan, Italy – vera.minazzi@fastwebnet.it
(Final version accepted 25 March 2008)
The authors note that the element of sound and music has no place in the model of mental
functioning bequeathed to us by Freud, which is dominated by the visual and the representa-
tional. They consider the reasons for this exclusion and its consequences, and ask whether
the simple biographical explanation offered by Freud himself is acceptable. This contribu-
tion reconstructs the historical and cultural background to that exclusion, cites some rele-
vant emblematic passages, and discusses Freud’s position on music and on the aesthetic
experience in general. Particular attention is devoted to the relationship between Freud and
Lipps, which is important both for the originality of Lipps’s thinking in the turn-of-
the-century debate and for his ideas on the musical aspects of the foundations of psychic
life, at which Freud ‘stopped’, as he himself wrote. Moreover, the shade of Lipps accompa-
nied Freud throughout his scientific career from 1898 to 1938. Like all foundations, that of
psychoanalysis was shaped by a system of inclusions and exclusions. The exclusion of the
element of sound and music is understandable in view of the cultural background to the devel-
opment of the concepts of the representational unconscious and infantile sexuality. While the
consequences have been far reaching, the knowledge accumulated since that exclusion enables
us to resume, albeit on a different basis, the composition of the ‘unfinished symphony’ of the
relationship between psychoanalysis and music.
Keywords: aesthetics, embodied simulation, foundation (of psychoanalysis), philosophy of

music, reception, rhythm, sound and music, Theodor Lipps
O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!

[O Word, thou Word that I lack]
(A. Schoenberg, Moses und Aron, end of Act II)
The focus of interest in psychoanalysis shifted some time ago from interpretation to
the aspect that could be called the ‘aesthetics of reception’ – from the hermeneutics of
the ‘already established’ formations of the patient’s unconscious to the conditions of
‘reception’ in the analyst, which allow the revelation, or indeed the constitution for
the first time, of these formations. In psychoanalysis, interpretation and the aesthetics
of reception are in reality intrinsically interconnected. The latter confers ‘solidity’ on
the former, which would otherwise remain an abstract cognitive exercise. However, it
is the aesthetics of reception – in the modes of functioning and processes of transfor-
mation and expansion, as well as of the actual establishment of meaning, that can
commence therein – which many contemporary psychoanalysts regard as the nub of
psychoanalytic experience and the foundation of treatment theory (Ferro, 2006).
1
Translated by Philip Slotkin MA Cantab. MITI.
ª 2008 Institute of Psychoanalysis

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938 F. Barale and V. Minazzi
In this context, a renewal of interest has taken place in a subject that, while con-
stantly present in psychoanalysis, has at the same time always remained marginal –
namely, music, or rather the dimension of sound and music inherent in human
relations and experience. We have deliberately opted for the generic aggregate
‘sound and music’ in order to avoid the thorny issue of what, in every culture, turns
a ‘sound-related’ fact into one that is ‘musical’. While this is an important issue,
which pervades the history of musicology as well as of philosophy (Dahlhaus, 1978;
Dahlhaus and Eggebrecht, 1985; Schneider M, 1951; Janklvitch, 1961; Nattiez,
2002a), it is irrelevant to our present problem.
This traditional neglect of the element of sound and music is even a little para-
doxical, given that psychoanalysis is a treatment based on words, which are a par-
ticular type of sound-based events. From the beginning, however, psychoanalysis
was dominated by the primacy of the representational and the visual, an emphasis
characteristic of Freud.
Attempts to recover this neglected dimension in fact appear very early on in the
psychoanalytic literature (Ferenczi, 1909) – but Abraham (1914) too endeavoured
to incorporate auditory factors within the Sexualtheorie. Among the early ex-
amples, a special position is occupied by Isakower’s (1939) contribution with its
telling title, On the exceptional position of the auditory sphere. Again, already in the
1930s, Theodor Reik (1933, 1937), who was very interested in music, began to liken
the analytic attitude to musical listening. In a series of contributions extending into
the 1950s, Reik (1948, 1949a, 1949b, 1953) described the analyst’s unconscious as a
musical instrument – as a kind of Aeolian harp2 that captures the musical fabric of
the patient’s communication and causes it to resonate. The fundamental rule, absti-
nence, and analytic receptivity are redefined in musical terms: by suspending the
‘noise’ of normal interaction and of preconstituted meaning schemata, these permit
surprise and an openness to the deepest dimension of communication; they perform
a function similar to the silence which, from Wagner on, has been necessary for
listening in concert halls. However, in Reik, an adherent of the classical theory,
the countertransference is in fact seen as an ‘obstacle’ to the possibility of musical
reception of the patient’s words and melody (or absence of melody), as well as to
that of the fabric of harmonics, timbre, colour, rhythmic aspects, consonances and
dissonances, and so on.
From then on, the psychoanalytic literature is punctuated with re-emergences of
the theme of sound and music. The relevant authors include Sterba (1946, 1965),
Kohut (1957), Racker (1965), Noy (1969), Nass (1971), Wittemberg (1980),
Rechardt (1987), Feder (1990), and Sand and Levin (1992). These diverse contribu-
tions vary also in their theoretical approach. They seek to accommodate the
element of sound and music within the classical theory, within ego psychology, or
within self psychology. The common factor is the perception that the dimension of
sound and music is connected with a fundamental level of human signification and
2
The Aeolian harp, strung between the tree branches, was made to resonate by the action of the wind. Cheshire
(1996) points out that a school of analytic psychotherapy took its name from this instrument (the Aeolian mode –
Cox and Theilgaard, 1987). Celebrated in romantic poetry, which saw it as a symbol of the music of nature and
the harmony implicit in it, the Aeolian harp was in fact an invention dreamed up by Athanasius Kircher (1650).
More recently, the physicist Paolo Diodati constructed the extraordinary ‘natural organ’ which captures the
‘ambient noise’ that is ‘silence’ to the human ear and transforms it into ‘audible music’ (some snatches produced
in this way can be heard at http://www.fisica.unipg.it/~diodati/suoni/index.php) (Frova, 2006).
Int J Psychoanal (2008) 89 ª 2008 Institute of Psychoanalysis

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Off the beaten track: Freud, sound and music 939
relationality, albeit conceptualized in different ways. A recurring reference is to the

philosophy of Susanne Langer (1951, 1953, 1967), in whose conception music
features very prominently, and who sees musical language as isomorphic not with
particular contents of consciousness but with the very movement of psychic life, in
its basal, preverbal structure. This thesis, moreover, has a venerable tradition,
dating back at least to Hegel (1823) and his conception of music as the very form
assumed by time in mental life.
The two collections edited by Feder, Karmel and Pollock (1990, 1993) are also
very important. They set out the principal perspectives of psychoanalytic research
on music, including that of the relationship between music and affects (Rose, 1993),
which pervaded musicological thought before and after the Affektenlehre of the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries, and on which Fornari (1985), Petrella (1996),
Schoen and Schoen (1999), and Di Benedetto (2000) have also written. Mancia
(2004) uses the term ‘sound archives of the transference’ to denote the affective and
procedural memory that comes into being before any semantic and representational
memory can develop – a dimension embodied in the musical aspects of relational-
ity and corporeity that Mancia calls the ‘non-repressed unconscious’ (which is also
non-representational).
... rolling noises, waves that ended in a puff – known noises, redolent of the country. Every-
thing here is animated, vivid ... assumes greater intensity ... the shape of the noises and of
these thoughts – but then they were the same thing – seemed to me for a moment to be
truer than truth, but none of this can be conveyed in words ... years passed before I learnt
to tell the difference between Mummy and Daddy’s morning dance on their high bed and
laughter and words ...
(Meneghello, 1963, p. 1, translated)
In the last decade, as a part of the general shift of interest mentioned above,
there have been many indications that the theme of sound and music is ‘exerting
pressure’ within psychoanalytic thought. Musical analogies have been used more
and more frequently to describe aspects of the analytic situation. Contributions
abound on ‘psychoanalytic listening’ or ‘listening to listening’, which is likened
more and more often to its musical counterpart (Stein, 1999). The perception of
the ‘music of what happens’ (Ogden, 1999) is stated to be a fundamental aspect of
analytic reverie. Musical metaphors punctuate the writings of Bion and post-
Bionian conceptions of the psychoanalytic field (Zanette, 1997) – for instance,
the theme of being in ‘unison’ with the patient, or of reception of the un-heard for
‘‘expressing the music of humanity or the little bit of it which has got into your
consulting-room’’ (Bion, 1985, p. 74).
The time therefore appears ripe for a historico-critical consideration of the prob-
lem of the musical dimension in general for psychoanalysis. This is an important
unresolved question, because sound and music did indeed have no place in the
model of the mind developed by Freud – or in the idea of treatment that came to
be associated with it. For this reason, it was for a long time substantially marginal-
ized. The contributions mentioned above are the expression more of the periodic
re-emergence of an unsolved problem than of a genuine integration of the subject
into the corpus of psychoanalysis. The issue is anything but unimportant.
A century and a half after Freud’s birth, we can therefore ask ourselves some
questions. First, why did this happen? Why did Freud not consider the dimension
ª 2008 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2008) 89

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of sound and music? Neither affect nor (word or thing) presentation, it falls into a
kind of limbo, lacking representational status and significant only for what it
evokes indirectly, for instance, through associations linking a musical motif (or an
operatic aria) with a text made up of words or staged situations – that is, of
representations already established on another level, as in the numerous examples
that pervade Freud’s oeuvre.
Second, what have been the consequences of this absence? Even the barest outline
of an answer to these questions involves an impressive number of issues of various
kinds, both within and outside psychoanalysis, all of them intertwined. We shall
mention only some of these in this contribution. We shall attempt to reconstruct
some of the reasons, historico-cultural connections, and symbolic moments under-
lying this divergence between psychoanalysis and music. Because these questions
are not easy to answer, we crave the reader’s patience.
Let us begin with the question ‘why?’ The most frequent answer, the lectio
facilior, as a rule combines considerations of two kinds – namely, biographical and
historico-cultural.
The biographical considerations, repeatedly advanced by Freud himself, offer a
trivial response in terms of personal insensitivity – namely, Freud’s presumed ‘deaf-
ness to music’. The historico-cultural hypotheses, connected in various ways with
the former, postulate that Freud’s personal insensitivity was reinforced by the cul-
tural climate of his training. The ‘ineffable’ aspect of music is, according to this
thesis, not readily compatible with the positivist scientific spirit.
Both of these arguments are very unconvincing. The biographical argument is, first
and foremost, irrelevant on the theoretical level. Kant too was utterly ill endowed
with regard to music, but this did not prevent him from writing those few pages, in
the Critique of Judgement (Kant, 1790), that are mentioned in all histories of musical
thought. Some hold that these pages lie at the origin of the nineteenth-century musi-
cal formalism whose birth dates from two years before Freud’s – from 1854, the year
of publication of Vom Musikalisch-Schçnen [The Beautiful in Music] by Eduard
Hanslick, professor of musical aesthetics in Vienna. Similarly, Hegel’s lack of a musi-
cal sense and equal lack of experience of musical events did not prevent him from
offering a masterly portrayal, in his lectures on aesthetics (Hegel, 1823), of music as
the symbolic and expressive equivalent of the time of interiority itself.
This biographical thesis is, moreover, controversial even on the biographical level.
It has frequently been called into question (e.g. Diaz de Chumaceiro, 1990). Again,
it is hard to imagine that a Freud without a ‘musical ear’ for his patients’ verbal
productions could have bequeathed to us the clinical material that was his legacy.
There are many indications, meticulously collected by Cheshire (1996) and Lecourt
(2005), that Freud was much less insensitive to music than he repeatedly and almost
exhibitionistically claimed, and that a conflictual aspect played an important, if not
decisive, part in this distancing, which he so stubbornly emphasized. What then
were the elements of this conflict?
The thesis of the negative influence of the culture in which Freud was trained –
in particular, positivism – on the other hand, is manifestly unfounded in certain
respects. As regards other aspects, it can be better understood in a historico-critical
sense – that is, by seeking to reconstruct the historico-cultural factors involving
music in one way or another which Freud kept apart from the nascent discipline of
psychoanalysis, while at the same time, as Ricoeur (1965) put it, making an ‘all too

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effective separation’, with the result that the element of sound and music was long
repressed from the field of psychoanalysis.
In particular, musical interests, as a part of the common ground of bourgeois
education at the time (Gay, 1988), were very important in the culture in which
Freud trained. These were the years of late romanticism, of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk
project – under the aegis of music, the ‘art of the unconscious’ – the years of
Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragçdie aus dem Geiste der Musik [The Birth of Tragedy:
Out of the Spirit of Music] (Nietzsche, 1871), of Wagnerism as the incarnation of
the dionysiac, and then of Nietzsche’s polemic against Wagner (Nietzsche, 1895).
These were also the years of the various reactions to late romanticism. The for-
malistic reaction, Hanslick’s The Beautiful in Music (Hanslick, 1854), dates, as
stated, from 1854. This was contemporaneous with the positivist reaction: Freud’s
training coincided with the high-water mark of Musikwissenschaft, of the extension
of the scientific method to the study of music – i.e. of the birth of musicology.
Spencer’s On the origin and function of music (Spencer, 1857), an influential work in
the decades of Freud’s training, dates from 1857 and was substantially drawn upon
by Darwin in writings that Freud knew well (e.g. Darwin, 1871). Later, the growth
of psychoanalysis in the early decades of the twentieth century coincided with
another Viennese revolution – namely, the dodecaphonic ‘setting aside’ of the world
of musical tradition so as to extend its possibilities by the overcoming of the tonal
system. A contemporary both of late romanticism (Brahms, Mahler, and Strauss)
and of the protagonists of the twelve-tone system (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern),
as well as a citizen of one of the most musical cities in the history of mankind
(Graf, 1945), Freud was literally immersed in a melting-pot of musical interests,
events, and debates that, for their part, pervaded and criss-crossed the themes that
he was developing. It is no coincidence that the first members of the Wednesday
Psychological Society who met at Berggasse 19 included at least three musicians,
one of them being Max Graf, the father of Herbert – Little Hans – who himself
subsequently became an eminent opera producer.
Again, precisely within the positivist culture, interest in music was particularly evi-
dent and keen. This culture could not possibly have discouraged Freud from taking
at least a theoretical interest in music. When Fliess came to Vienna to visit Freud
for the first time, he brought a gift of the complete works of Helmholtz, of whom
Fliess considered himself a pupil. In this way, Helmholtz’s Berlin pupil symbolically
sealed his friendship with the Viennese pupil of Brcke. Helmholtz had in fact been
a close colleague of Brcke. Both were pupils of Johannes Mller and had together
established the Berliner Physicalische Gesellschaft [Berlin Physicalist Society], with
the aim of extending the principles of materialism to the study of all biological phe-
nomena, including those of psychology (‘nemo psychologus nisi physiologus’ was
Mller’s motto). The group also included some other members of Brcke’s circle:
von Fleischl-Marxow (of the cocaine episode) and Exner, colleagues in the same
institute as Freud. Helmholtz, whose work Freud knew well, is remembered in histo-
ries of psychoanalysis for the influence of his ideas – in particular, the principle of
the so-called ‘conservation of energy’ – on the first drafts of Freud’s theories and
also indirectly on the origins of the transference (Makari, 1994). Here he is recalled
for other reasons.
One of the preponderant interests of this group of scientists was to establish a
physiologically based aesthetics. The project, in which neo-Kantian themes were

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absorbed, sought the basis of the structure of knowledge (the transcendental sub-
ject and the forms of intuition) in the universal laws of perceptual experience – the
‘physiological neo-Kantism’ of the great late nineteenth-century German physiol-
ogists. Helmholtz was explicitly to stress the substantial coincidence of the empirical
data of the physiology of the sense organs with Kantian gnoseology.
Music occupied an absolutely central position in this project. In the years around
the time of Freud’s birth, Helmholtz published two fundamental works of psycho-
acoustics: ber die physiologischen Ursachen der musikalischen Harmonie [On the
physiological causes of musical harmony] (Helmholtz, 1858) and Die Lehre von den
Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage fr die Theorie der Musik [The
Doctrine of Sensations of Sound as the Physiological Basis for the Theory of
Music] (Helmholtz, 1863). In these works, Helmholtz, faithful to his programme,
presented harmony as underlaid by the natural laws of the physiology of hearing,
which he defined experimentally, and by the schemata of the appropriation of
sound-related reality by the sensory apparatus.
This is not the place to discuss Helmholtz. What is relevant here is that his work
had enormous influence on Freud’s culture, remaining for decades (the Lehre went
through numerous editions) a point of reference both within positivism and in the
debate that led to incipient new directions for aesthetics and psychology. These dis-
cussions, which were particularly vigorous while Freud was training, call for a brief
mention. Another work which Freud knew well, Wundt’s Grundzge der physio-
logischen Psychologie [Fundamentals of Physiological Psychology] (Wundt, 1874),
centred on a critique of Helmholtz’s psychoacoustics, which, according to Wundt,
failed to distinguish clearly between the ‘psychophysiological’ problem of conso-
nance and dissonance (produced by the presence or absence of ‘beats’ perceptible
to the human ear) and the more ‘psychological’ and cultural problem of harmony,
which was based on judgement of the affinity of partial tones, a matter not of sen-
sation but of representation, and hence not reducible to the ‘psychoacoustic’ level.
(As it happens, the distinction was also made by Helmholtz, who was anything but
a nave reductionist.)
However, the references to Helmholtz and music also play a central part in other
trends emerging at the turn of the century, which developed simultaneously with
psychoanalysis and were widespread in Freud’s world. The work of Stumpf (1883–
90, 1898), for example, engages in an intimate dialogue with the theses of
Helmholtz, which, however, he limits to the ‘psychoacoustic’ field. The latter is dis-
tinguished from the immediate data of psychology, these being claimed by Stumpf,
even more decidedly than Wundt, as a field of inquiry in its own right. Stumpf’s
‘proto-phenomenological’ thought owes much to Franz Brentano’s Deskriptive
Psychologie, to whose author the second volume of Tonpsychologie (Stumpf, 1883–90)
is dedicated. Husserl was in turn to dedicate his Logical Investigations to Stumpf.
Later, Stumpf was to draw progressively nearer to Gestalt psychology, another
school that developed simultaneously with psychoanalysis, and which saw music as
a primal phenomenon for investigation. In the essay that ushered in the Gestalt
age, von Ehrenfels (1890), a former composition student, repeated Mach’s critique
of Helmholtz (Mach too was well known to Freud and had also concerned himself
extensively with music), and asserted that a musical phenomenon, the persistence
of the form of a melody in its various transpositions, was the paradigm of all per-
ception and of the limitations of associationism. Others with a keen interest in

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music, after von Ehrenfels, were Wertheimer, Koffka and Koehler, who were already
pupils of Stumpf in Berlin. Similarly, the theses of Helmholtz and music were an
established reference in the nascent aesthetic of Einfhlung, through the figure of
Lipps, with whom we shall be concerned below.
The thesis that the positivist culture exerted a negative influence on the significance
attached by Freud to music is therefore untenable. In fact, music was central to that
culture and the debates that followed it. If anything, as we shall see, a problem lay
hidden in other aspects of the cultural position of music at the time of Freud,
squeezed as it was between the psychophysiological laboratories and the late-
Romantic idea of the ineffable and of abandonment to the ‘oceanic feeling’ of
fusion with Being – as well as, in particular, in the various manifestations of that
idea that were widespread in the psychiatry of the time.
If the lectio facilior is set aside, then, the question returns. In fact, various inter-
twined questions return. What was it that Freud ‘stopped’ at? What dimensions,
from the psychoanalytic point of view, were involved? To what theoretical charac-
teristics of the psychoanalytic edifice did this omission give rise? If the omission
was not the passive consequence of an insensitivity or of the cultural background
to Freud’s training, but an active – indeed, very active – obliteration, to what con-
flictuality did it correspond, both on the biographical level (which is perhaps unim-
portant, even if inseparable in Freud from that of theory) and, in particular, with
regard to whatever cultural themes Freud may have wished to keep apart from his
edifice? What have been the recent vicissitudes of this issue?
Of the many passages in the Freudian corpus that are relevant to our questions,
two are emblematic. The first is of great historico-cultural interest. It comes in a let-
ter to Fliess dated 31 August 1898 (Freud, 1887–1902). Freud was at Aussee,
immersed in the composition of his ‘dream book’ and experiencing moments when
his ‘disorientation is complete’. Five days earlier he had mentioned that he was
involved in the study of Lipps (whom he regarded as having ‘the clearest mind
among present-day philosophical writers’) (Masson, 1985, p. 324), with a view to
finding connections with his own metapsychology. The work that was the object of
his attention was Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens [The Basic Facts of Psychic Life]
(Lipps, 1883). Freud noted to his annoyance – quoting Corneille – that ‘‘the seeker
often finds more than he wished to find’’ (ibid., p. 325). For Lipps had forestalled
him in many discoveries: the unconscious nature of the majority of psychic pro-
cesses, the ‘perceptual’ function of the system of consciousness, and certain aspects
of dreams (in the copy of Lipps’s book preserved in Freud’s library, the underlining
of a passage on the processes underlying dreams is clearly visible). Freud observed
an almost uncanny resemblance, extending even to the details, between the ideas of
Lipps and his own nascent theory; the bifurcation, he hoped, ‘‘will come later’’
(ibid.). A fundamental bifurcation is in fact evident in the immediately following
passage of the letter, which is relevant to our subject. Freud writes that he has read
a good part of Lipps’s book but ‘stopped’, or ‘got stuck’ [‘‘bin ich stehen geblieben’’],
‘‘at ‘sound relationships’ ’’, which ‘‘always vexed me because here I lack the most
elementary knowledge, thanks to the atrophy of my acoustic sensibilities’’ (ibid.).
The question is: what was it that Freud stopped at?
The chapter of the Grundtatsachen at which Freud baulked is entitled ‘Die
Tonverhltnisse’ [The Relationships Between Sounds]. It comes in the third part
of the book. In the first two parts, Lipps, having dealt in general terms with the

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workings of the psyche, representation, the will, and pleasure, had discussed
impulses stemming from the unconscious. The third part begins with the develop-
ment of representations and their groupings. It also includes the chapter on sound
relationships. Why this chapter, in the very midst of the foundations of psychic life?
Lipps is quite explicit:
There is no domain of the spirit in which the regularity of the laws is as transparent as in
that of sounds. It is therefore perfectly natural for us to speak of this first of all when we
consider the laws of psychic functioning in general.
(Lipps, 1883, p. 270)
The Grundtatsachen were followed by the Psychologische Studien [Psychological
Studies] (Lipps, 1885–1905), of which an English translation exists (1926). This work
contains a transposition and reworking of the chapter ‘Die Tonverhltnisse’ of the
previous book – the chapter at which Freud ‘stopped’ – this time with the title ‘The
nature of musical consonance and dissonance. The theory of ‘‘tone-rhythms’’ ’. This
chapter is once again of central importance, occupying as it does almost half of the
book. Discussing the foundations of the kinship between sounds, Lipps here tackles
the ancient issue of the nature of consonance, dissonance, and harmony. This age-
old problem had already been addressed by Pythagoras, Zarlino, Mersenne, Kircher,
Rameau, Descartes, Leibniz, Diderot, various Enlightenment figures, and many oth-
ers. It is as follows: what (if any) are the foundations of harmony, and, in addition,
of music’s capacity to speak so directly to the human mind, to inspire affects in it,
and to produce potent unifications prior to and beyond any referential language?
On what essential or rational unity do these foundations and this capacity rest
(‘musica est arithmetica nescientis se numerare animi’, according to Leibniz)?
For Lipps, this is obviously a central issue in terms of the basic facts of psychic
life. It is here that Freud ‘stops’ and undertakes his ‘bifurcation’ from Lipps. On
the same question, and in the same year, Stumpf (1898) had published his
Konsonanz und Dissonanz. The solution to the problem arrived at by Lipps, following
a systematic discussion of the theses of Helmholtz, Stumpf and Wundt – all authors
familiar to Freud – is very interesting, but beyond the scope of this contribution,
so that only a few lines will be devoted to it here.
The central element is that of rhythm. For Lipps, rhythm is not just one of the
parameters of music, but becomes the fundamental principle of its organization.
Harmony and musical consonance, too, are traced back to the psychic effect of the
relationship between the internal ‘microrhythms’ of each sound, whether in the case
of simultaneous sounds (a chord) or a melodic succession of sounds. However, the
question of rhythm is of more general significance. It plays a central part in the
aesthetic of Einfhlung, which experienced a luxuriant flowering in the German-
speaking countries at the turn of the century. ‘Internal imitation’ (of ‘embodied sim-
ulation’, as we would now say), the basis of Einfhlung, has rhythmic foundations.
For Lipps, moreover, rhythm has to do with the general conditions of psychic experi-
ence, or of intentionality – or, as Lipps puts it, of the movement ‘of the soul as it
stretches out to the object’.
The psychological aesthetic of music in Lipps is closely bound up with the study
of the unconscious background of psychic experience – of what Lipps calls the ‘ego
feeling’ or ‘feeling ego’ [Ich-Gefhl, Gefhls-Ich], and with the roots of empathy
(Martinelli, 2002; Serravezza, 1996).

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In the Lippsian aesthetic, a new form is also conferred on concepts such as that
of Stimmung, familiar to the Romantic tradition, already present in Helmholtz, and
subsequently likewise important in psychopathology (as in Jaspers’s notion of
Wahnstimmung). Stimmung for Lipps is understood as a fundamental ‘tuning’ of
psychic life, its particular ‘rhythmics’, independent of the conscious or unconscious
representational contents present in the psychic field: Stimmung precedes these rep-
resentational contents and indeed substantially determines their quality. Stimmung
is described as ‘‘the internal rhythm, the form of movement of psychic events in
successive waves, which is embodied only contingently in a given content-based
representation’’ (Lipps, 1903).
The ideas of Lipps, who sought a path that eschewed not only any mechanization
of psychic life, but also any spiritualistic or romantic vagueness, included aspects of
great potential interest to the nascent discipline of psychoanalysis. Freud seems to
have sensed this. The shade of Lipps (and perhaps also of the things at which he
baulked) accompanied Freud for many years. He first referred to Lipps in August
1898, while writing the Traumdeutung. In the same year, Lipps (1898) published his
book on the comic, which Freud cited among his sources for Jokes and their rela-
tion to the unconscious (Freud, 1905), once again acknowledging his debt to the
‘Munich professor’ and his great importance to the conception of unconscious psy-
chic life. Freud’s scientific oeuvre ended with two unfinished contributions (Freud,
1938a, 1938b). The reference to Lipps recurs in both – and, in particular, on the
final page of Some elementary lessons in psycho-analysis. The importance of Lipps
to Freud was also emphasized by Kanzer (1981).
It may be noted in passing that Lipps’s theory belongs in a turn-of-the-century
current of thought in which the subject of rhythm came to assume a central posi-
tion not only in music theory (the origin of music being attributed to the rhythms
of the body, as in Spencer and Darwin), but also in many other fields, such as psycho-
logy. The typical exponent of this trend was Stanley Hall, the American psycho-
logist and friend of William James, who invited Freud to America in December
1908.
Let us return to our problem. Why did Freud ‘stop’? Was it due to ‘lack of knowl-
edge’, as he claimed? An examination of Lipps’s book shows that this self-diagnosis
is implausible. After all, the chapter, written in a popular style, is within reach of any
averagely cultivated reader, whether or not endowed with musical competence. It was
not the difficulty of the text – for there is no such difficulty – that caused Freud to
get stuck. What ‘stopped’ him was manifestly the overall difficulty presented by the
theme of music – a difficulty in relation to what it represented, and to its integration
within the edifice under construction. Lipps’s subject-matter would have shifted the
focus of research on the ‘basic facts of psychic life’ from the representational
unconscious (and from the vicissitudes of infantile sexuality) to a substantially pre-
representational dimension, which was excessively ‘dissonant’ with Freud’s expecta-
tions and requirements at this time. The dimension investigated by Lipps was
connected with a number of fundamental issues, such as the nature not merely of con-
sonance but also of empathy, the not only unconscious but also pre-representational
dimension of psychic life, its rhythmic foundations, and its roots in the phenomena
of ‘internal imitation’ or ‘embodied simulation’, which recent neurophysiology, using
a musical term and explicitly rediscovering Lipps, calls ‘intentional consonance’
(Gallese, 2006; Rizzolatti and Craighero, 2004; Rizzolatti, Fogassi and Gallese, 2001).

terms.pep-web.org).
The second emblematic passage is the celebrated incipit of Freud’s Moses of

Michelangelo (Freud, 1914). Here Freud describes his relation to aesthetic experience
with exemplary clarity: in order to enjoy a work of art, he writes, he must ‘‘explain to
myself what [its] effect is due to’’ (p. 211). By the phrase ‘is due to’, Freud of course
means by way of ‘what content’ or representation, which may be unconscious.
Whenever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining
any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being
moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what affects me.
(ibid.)
What an extraordinary insight is conveyed by the words ‘‘Some rationalistic ... turn
of mind in me rebels ...’’! It involves the direct perception of a conflict between fasci-
nation and danger – calling a halt at those boundaries: Bin ich stehen geblieben.
Music, as an a-semantic language par excellence, presented itself to Freud as a
prototype of what Rosolato (1978) called ‘la relation d’inconnu’, in which the
unconscious phantasy does not have a representation but instead ‘arouses the myth
of the drive’ and of the undifferentiated. In the background, too, there also lies
narcissistic longing.
Music as a ‘Siren song’ – and Freud here puts one in mind of Plato (1992), who,
in Book III of The Republic expresses the fear that an unbalanced excess of music,
the honeyed muse, might soften and corrupt the minds of the warrior guardians.
Janklvitch (1961) called this the ‘resentment of music’.
However, let us now return to the subject of Freud’s rationalism. A man of the
Aufklrung, Freud always distrusted, or indeed was positively averse to, any form
of mysticism or irrationalism, spheres to which he assigned much contemporary art
and almost all that of the avant-garde (Gombrich, 1966); to these he remained even
more deaf than to music, albeit for similar reasons.
In Freud’s view, interest in art had nothing to do with ‘oceanic feelings’ (of
which he almost proudly wrote that he could not find the slightest trace in himself),
or with the ‘magic of illusion’; it was instead connected with the capacity of the
artistic form (like jokes) to permit the emergence of the repressed, the residue of
our infantile history, and to make it tolerable and agreeable (Freud, 1905, 1907).
Paradoxically, therefore, artistic form performs an ‘anaesthetic’ function, which, if
not edifying, is almost hypnotic, as Liotard (1974) notes – a function similar to
that of sleep, which, by mitigating the censorship, allows dreaming.
What mattered to Freud, at any rate, were the already established contents of the
unconscious, the release of which was permitted by the hypnotic role of form. This
approach in itself cuts out an important stratum of the aesthetic object: the ‘con-
stitutive’ function of the representational dimension, which is renewed by the act of
aesthetic production, is excluded.
It is no accident that Freud’s taste always remained academic. As a result, a
dichotomy arose between the foundations of classical psychoanalysis and the under-
standing of modern art – in particular, formal art, the art of perceiving rather than
of the perceived (Merleau-Ponty, 1948, 1960), art that turns its back on us (Klein,
1966), that precedes its meaning, that once again confers solid significance on the
pre-representational dimension of the encounter with the world in which every
established antinomy (between inside and outside, subjective and objective, distinct
and indistinct, visible and invisible, etc.) is suspended and re-created. It was

terms.pep-web.org).
therefore inevitable that a difficulty would arise with music – a ‘language’ which,
while structured, was at the same time a-semantic par excellence, and least of all
suited to the ‘anaesthetic’ function ascribed by Freud to artistic form (Barale, 1997).
Freud’s rationalism, the primacy of words and representations, avowedly consti-
tuted a shield against the uncanny aspect of aesthetic ‘abandonment’ – or rather,
of what, for Freud, burst on to the scene in the relation d’inconnu. However, it is
paradoxical (and indicative of the strength of phantasy) that this drawing back
occurred on the threshold, admittedly not of mystical abandonment, but in fact of
a first outline of possible understanding. After all, the chapter of Lipps at which
Freud ‘stopped’ seeks to demonstrate (following a tradition of thought extending
from Pythagoras through Zarlino, Leibniz, and Rameau) that consonance, har-
mony, and Einfhlung not only belong to the realm of the ineffable and the undif-
ferentiated, but may also constitute the answer to a rational question. They do not,
or do not only, constitute the world of the mothers, which reason cannot venture
to penetrate, but form part of the logos of which reason itself is an aspect.
Freud’s ‘stopping’ at this point in some respects resembles Breuer’s retreat, some
years earlier, in the face of the irruption of the transference. It is also one of the
fundamental vicissitudes of psychoanalysis, which set off along a certain path, but
at the same time left something behind – something that was destined to re-emerge
only in recent times. From then on, psychoanalysis was to be organized as a herme-
neutics centred on language and on the expression in language of the (representa-
tional) formations of the unconscious. This in itself excluded music, which
contained ‘something that seems refractory to psychoanalytic interpretation
because it is outside language’ (Imberty, 2002a, translated) – or, at least, outside
representational language. Music, the direct language of live emotions, temporality,
and the underlying tuning of psychic life, was relegated to the margins of psycho-
analysis.
A consideration of the ‘musical’ aspects of unconscious psychic life, as in Lipps,
could have intersected fruitfully with Freudian themes, such as the problem of time
and the unconscious and that of repetition. As Imberty notes, the exclusion of
music corresponds not only to the primacy of language and representation, but also
to the idea of the timelessness of the unconscious. This timelessness in itself gives
rise to a problem with music, the ‘art of time’ par excellence, which is an expression
of the temporal movement of psychic life, and of its ‘duration’. The problem of
repetition, which is connected with that of temporality, lies at the theoretical heart
of psychoanalysis – and, moreover, not only of psychoanalysis (Deleuze, 1968).
Freud saw repetition as the most radical, ‘demoniac’, aspect of the drives. How-
ever, fundamental issues arise precisely in connection with the relation to difference
that is established by repetition – a relation that lies at the root of both the stability
and the openness of psychic life. In music, there is no such thing as repetition that
is not already elaboration. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud (1920) illustrates
this by the reel game – the alternation of fort and da that allows Freud’s grandson
to master the experience of the absence of the object and to transform it into active
control. We are familiar with Freud’s description, as well as with the numerous
pages devoted by Lacan and the Lacanians to this passage.
Here again, however, we find ourselves at the heart of the question of rhythm –
the rhythm that lies at the core of Lipps’s speculation. In the reel game, it is not
language that guarantees psychic mastery of the experience; or, at least, this sym-

terms.pep-web.org).
bolic mastery is only a later accomplishment. The structuring function of the fort
⁄ da game is afforded first and foremost by the regularity of the action, by its
rhythm, and by the anticipation permitted by that rhythm, of which language is a
late development. Nor, like any rhythm, is the fort ⁄ da game pure repetition of the
identical. It contains a grain of the variation or transformation inherent in any
rhythm, if only because every presence, even if the same as its predecessor, is also
new because it has behind it the entire sequence that precedes it; it has a ‘before’
and an ‘after’ and belongs in a time – it ‘goes towards’ something, alluding to an
anticipated future, in expectation of the coming of something identical which
might, however, not occur.
Inherent in this structure, in this ‘rhythmic identicality’ – not only in the simple
alternation of presence and absence, and still less in its control by way of language,
but in the ‘rhythm’ of the sequence – is temporality, openness to the possible, and
difference. The regularity of repetition generates the expectation of resolution, in a
temporal setting that regulates the background of psychic experience and guaran-
tees both the coherence and the openness of the self. In rhythm, too, there forms
the first outline of the ‘forward models’ of experience – to borrow a term from
present-day neuropsychology – that lie within the matrix of human intentionality
(Barale and Ucelli, 2006).
Imberty (2002b) describes the combination of repetition and variation in the pool
of music and sound in which a baby is bathed at the beginning of life as the first
organizer of interactive sequences and of the development of social communication.
This combination then structures baby talk, the echo-based exchanges between
mother and child that precede and underlie any language, interacting with the innate
capacity for imitation and ‘intentional consonance’ (Gallese, 2006). This rhythmic
experience constitutes the basis for the laying down of certain constants inherent in
the ‘musical’ and affective foundations of any subsequent exchange – namely, seg-
mentation, repetition, modulation of tempi, simplification and ⁄ or amplification of
expressive modules, melodic contours, lowering of pitch and prolongation of duration
at the end of a sentence, dynamic contrasts, acceleration and deceleration, and so on.
Imberty considers that music reactivates certain prototypical, primal schemata of
cognitive and affective experiences, precisely because it is isomorphic with the suc-
cessions of tension ⁄ relaxation and waiting ⁄ resolution that characterize the first pre-
verbal and imitative exchanges between a child and the human environment. These
exchanges take place in the particular rhythmic tempo and the particular primitive
experience of duration in which the anticipation of future experience also consti-
tutes the first prefiguration of the loss of an object that is then continually refound.
These ‘‘archaic meaning schemata’’ (Rechardt, 1987, p. 522) constitute proto-
narrative envelopes of the self.
These aspects of sound and music in the construction of psychic life have found
renewed expression in certain trends both within and outside psychoanalysis in the
last few decades. Examples within psychoanalysis are the concepts of the ‘sound
envelope3 of the self ’ and the organizing role of the mother’s voice-as-echo
(Anzieu, 1976); or the observations of Stern (1985) on the rhythmic, musical, and
prosodic aspects of mother–child interaction – aspects that permit ‘affective attune-
ment’, or feeling ‘in phase’ with the other. Research in fields other than psycho-
3
Translator’s note: Translated as ‘image’ in the English version.

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analysis is yielding a wealth of new information on musical factors in the develop-

ment of the processes of social interaction, communication, and self-
regulation in children, on the neuropsychological correlates of musical experience,
and on the primal systems of intentional consonance. Even ancient questions, such
as the relationship between music and emotions and between music and language,
or the foundations of consonance and dissonance, are being revisited on an empiri-
cal basis. Psychoanalytic reflection on sound and music has thus now returned to
the ‘beaten track’ from a number of different standpoints.
Here, however, we are already far removed from Freud – but, paradoxically, very
close to Lipps. Yet, unlike Breuer’s, Freud’s drawing back was a case of ‘reculer
pour mieux sauter’.4 In order to avoid trivializing this point, to discern something
of its complex roots and also its necessity, and to understand why – considering his
interest in the thought of Lipps – Freud, having arrived at music, turned aside, a
historico-cultural digression is called for.
First of all, a paradox in the relationship between music and science is observable
in the culture of Freud’s time. Music had for centuries been an integral part of the sys-
tem of the sciences. Ideas on music were fundamental to philosophical, scientific and
cosmological reflection. Irrespective of the varying solutions found in the history of
musical aesthetics to the eternal dilemma of sensibility versus intellect, heart versus
reason, and trends that stressed affects versus mathematical and rationalistic trends
(Fubini, 1964), music had not only always been closely bound up with scientific and
philosophical knowledge, but had often also played an important, if not central, role
in it. There is no ‘encyclopaedia’ prior to the nineteenth century, from Valla (1501) to
the Encyclopdie of Diderot and d’Alembert with its 1700 musical entries, that does
not credit music with this role in the sense of the profound unity of art and reason, of
aesthetics and thought. This unity is symbolized by figures such as Mersenne, a math-
ematician and philosopher, teacher of Descartes and theoretician of ‘universal har-
mony’ (Mersenne, 1636–37); or the Galileis, father and son; or Kepler, who imagined
correspondences between consonant musical intervals and the laws of planetary
motion; or Kircher (who was called to Vienna as Kepler’s successor, but was unable
to take up the post because he was detained in Rome by Pope Urban VIII); or
Descartes, the importance of whose Compendium Musicae in the birth of modern
rationalism has been emphasized (Gozza, 1995); or indeed Euler, who engaged in a
dialogue with Rameau ...
We have pointed out that music was central to the culture of positivism. At that
time, however, a paradoxical separation between music and science also took place.
Or rather, an already existing split became more radical – the split between the
music of the laboratories, as a naturalized object to be represented from the outside
in accordance with the laws of the natural sciences, and music as a fundamental
aspect of the living constitution of meaning in the aesthetic–ecstatic dimension of
thought; or, at least, of a thought that does not confine itself to imposing its
abstract reason on phenomena from the outside, but is based on the reception of
what is currently being experienced (Borutti, 2006).
For centuries, music had equally deep roots in medicine. From the neo-Platonism
of Ficino to the eighteenth century, music was held to possess a formidable power,
a capacity to remodulate the connections between the microcosm and the macro-
4
‘drawing back in order to jump better’.

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cosm, within the universal harmony and its laws (‘The universe is a living being
that dances to a musical law’ – Ficino, 1489). Romantic and late-Romantic medical
culture strongly reaffirmed the power of music – but its references were certainly
not to Helmholtz or to the nascent science of musicology, but, if anything, to the
spiritualistic suggestions of ancient tradition. In listening and feeling and in their
representation of themselves, musical practices and practitioners remained in sub-
stantial ignorance not only of psychoacoustics but also of attempts, such as that of
Lipps, to combine the aesthetics of meaning with scientific psychology.
A few more references may cast further light on the issue with which we are con-
cerned. For example, music held an important place in the tradition of hypnotism
and mesmerism. Mesmer himself had had a musical education and was a virtuoso
on the glass harmonica. He was a friend of Gluck, Haydn, and the Mozart family,
and the first performance of Mozart’s early singspiel Bastien und Bastienne took
place in his garden theatre (Ellenberger, 1970). Mozart offers a comic version of
mesmeric practices in the finale of Cos fan tutte.
Darntorn (1968) draws attention to the importance of music in mesmeric rituals.
However, the cultural influence of mesmerism extended far beyond its practices. It
permeated many aspects of nineteenth-century culture, pervaded its esotericism,
penetrated certain currents of Romanticism, and helps to explain the power music
was held to exert over the body and mental illness in much of the medical culture
of the time. Mesmerism, with the theme of a universal magnetic fluid and its trans-
formations, is itself merely the late heir to an age-old tradition that has taken many
forms (Boccadoro, 2002; Gozza, 1989; Morelli, 2002). To the occultism of early
Romanticism (and the medicine influenced by it), it conveyed the idea of the pro-
found connection between – expressed in ancient terminology – musica humana
and musica mundana, between the microcosm and the macrocosm.
Long before Mesmer, the idea of a magnetic fluid had been put forward by Kircher
(1641), who had emphasized the magnetic nature of the powerful bond between the
entities making up the universe and the therapeutic power of music, in particular in
relation to tarantism, to which he devoted three chapters. From Marsilio Ficino, in
1489 the first to systematize the connections between affections of the human mind,
medicine, and music, a continuous thread runs through the medicine of the humours
and temperaments. Via Fludd (1617–19), Kircher (1680), Burton (1621), Browne
(1729), and many others, this persisted into the eighteenth century, subsequently
diverging into many aspects of Romantic medicine and natural philosophy (Kmmel,
1977; Gouk, 2000a, 2000b; Voss, 2000). Mesmer simply used pseudo-scientific termi-
nology borrowed from nascent modern science to reformulate this tradition, in which
the power to remodulate and direct the universal flux is attributed to sound.
What is less well known is the influence exerted by mesmerism on the musical
culture of the nineteenth century and beyond. The case of Schubert, who composed
and played music in mesmeric sessions to assist trance-like phenomena, is merely
the best known of a series of widespread connections that fell as seeds on fertile
soil in the consonance between tradition, mesmerism, and aspects of Romantic cul-
ture, involving figures such as Liszt and Wagner.
The very notion of Stimmung, the tuning of individual and universal psychic life,
which is quintessentially Romantic, is profoundly bound up with the idea of the
musical harmony of the world (Spitzer, 1963).

terms.pep-web.org).
It is also worth considering another current that developed simultaneously with

psychoanalysis at the turn of the century: the ‘theosophy’ of Rudolf Steiner
(Steiner, 1904), of Vienna, which has been deemed (Horden, 2000) a new edition of
neo-Platonic themes in terms of a ‘Victorian spiritualism’. Here the connection with
Renaissance cosmology is sometimes direct, as when Steiner discusses the ‘astral
body in every human being’, which he likens to an inner musician imitating the
music of the cosmos (Mesmer too obtained his doctorate in 1766 with a thesis on
‘the influence of the planets’).
Steiner’s ‘eurhythmia’ (the umpteenth version of the relation between musica
mundana and musica humana!) replicates the age-old idea of the evils of the body
and soul as manifestations of a universal ‘disharmony’. With a reminiscence of
Novalis, he thought that there ‘‘will come a time when a diseased condition ... will
be spoken of in musical terms, as one would speak of a piano that was out of tune’’
(McDermott, 1984). Theosophy too influenced certain fields of musical culture in
Freud’s time; its adherents included, in different ways, Schoenberg and Scriabin.
For a modern version of these themes, see Nevill, 1989; Kurtz, 1992.
This was the general context in which Freud was immersed. From the historical
point of view, Freud’s exclusion of the element of sound and music from the psycho-
analytic edifice was inevitable, and forms part of the constitutive process of psycho-
analysis. On the one hand, the naturalization of music had little to contribute to
knowledge of the unconscious, while, on the other, Freud was determined to cause
that knowledge to grow in a soil sharply distinguished from a spiritualistic tradition
of which he could see only the dangers – dangers that lay in the repeated emphasis
on oceanic feelings or aesthetic ‘abandonment’.
These considerations may perhaps also lead to a reduction in the emphasis given
to biographical details adduced in relation to Freud’s declared aversion to music –
among which it is impossible to avoid mentioning his jealousy of Martha’s musi-
cian suitor at the time of their engagement, which spurred the young Freud on to
oppose the easy seductive powers of music with (his) rigorous scientific commit-
ment … or the episode of the sister, the only person in the house who shared their
mother’s ‘musical’ temperament, whom Freud prevented from learning the piano
by vehement protests (Freud EL, 1960). It has also been postulated (Cheshire,
1996) that Freud’s ambivalent rejection of music reflected a general ambivalence on
his part towards musical Vienna – with the result that Freud, as a Jew and a victim
of discrimination, proudly broke away from that environment, in which he did not
feel accepted. These biographical hypotheses are in our view less interesting than
the theoretical issue of the exclusion of the dimension of sound and music from the
construction of psychoanalysis, the historico-cultural reasons for it, and its conse-
quences.
For the sake of clarity, a final reference to the position of music in the psychiatry
of Freud’s time will be useful. In Romantic psychiatry, music was deemed to be
at one and the same time a possible cause and a possible treatment for insanity
(Kramer, 2000a) and mental illnesses regarded as instances of ‘psychic arrhythmia5’
5
Moreover, there was more than one similarity between this ‘musical’ notion of ‘psychic arrhythmia’ and the
contemporary concept of ‘intrapsychic ataxia’ in French psychiatry, which substituted a spatial metaphor for the
musical one; the two converged in the later idea of ‘dissociation’.

terms.pep-web.org).
or disharmonies of Gemth6, a fundamentally ‘rhythmic’ spiritual entity that shades

off into concepts mentioned earlier, such as Stimmung, or the tuning of psychic life
(Kmmel, 1977). The practice of ‘music therapy’ was widespread in nineteenth-
century psychiatry, in particular, in the German-speaking countries.7 Anyway, it
should be noted that these romantic and spiritualistic conceptions, in the back-
ground to which it is not hard to discern the long shadow of earlier traditions,
coexisted with positivist organicism, within which they were contained, tolerated,
and even turned to account without any friction to speak of.
On the whole then, the practice and experience of music in the psychiatry of
Freud’s time can, it appears, be associated with a multi-faceted and contradictory
complex of ideas in which Romantic and spiritualistic suggestions, traces of ‘moral
treatment’, and the heritage of mesmeric and Renaissance traditions coexisted in
higgledy-piggledy fashion with the prevailing organicist conceptions. Consideration
of this cultural setting may perhaps facilitate understanding of Freud’s difficulty in
confronting the subject of music and integrating it into the edifice that he was
constructing. The conceptual revolution of psychoanalysis took a different path.
However, the corpus of knowledge accruing from Freud’s genius has enabled us
to return to the ‘beaten track’ and resume the composition of the ‘unfinished sym-
phony’ (Matamoro, 2006) of the relationship between psychoanalysis and music. It
is perhaps now possible to follow up these paths without the detours, short circuits,
and ‘short cuts’ (as Ricoeur would say) (Ricoeur, 1969) of the psychiatric culture of
Freud’s time, provided that we are aware of their labyrinthine nature. The knowl-
edge stemming from various fields of contemporary research affords a valuable
reference framework, and it may be hoped that this historical note will contribute
to the overall picture.
Looking back, we can echo the words of Benjamin:
From this epoch stem the arcades and interiors, the exhibitions and panoramas. They are
residues of a dream world. The realization of dream elements in waking is the textbook
example of dialectical thinking. For this reason dialectical thinking is the organ of historical
awakening. Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the
moment of waking.
(Benjamin, 1982, p. 162)
Only words, no music (Goethe)

Only music, no words (Mozart)
First the words, then the music (Wagner)
First the music, then the words (Verdi)
(from a letter of Richard Strauss)
6
The quintessentially Romantic and spiritualistic notion of Gemth was very popular in German nineteenth-
century culture. Used by Novalis, Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Kleist, Schiller, and Schopenhauer, the term was
so widespread that, according to Kramer (2000b), Goethe suggested that it should be avoided for at least 30 years,
until it had been regenerated by a prolonged silence.
7
The case that has received the most attention is that of the Illenau psychiatric hospital in Baden, a centre of
intense musical activity for decades. Some 140 musical events, involving patients, medical staff, and visitors, are on
record at Illenau in 1879. The music was carefully selected for its potential ‘therapeutic’ effect. A favourite
composer was Mendelssohn. The performer–doctors included Krafft-Ebing, a skilled asylum pianist.

terms.pep-web.org).
Dedication
In memory of Luciana Nissim.
Translations of summary
Holzwege: Freud, Klang und Musik. Darlegung eines Problems nebst historisch-kritischen
Anmerkungen. Die Autoren vermerken, dass das klangliche und musikalische Element im Modell des psychischen
Funktionierens, das Freud uns hinterlassen hat, keinen Platz hat, weil in diesem Modell das Visuelle und Reprsen-
tationale dominieren. Sie erwgen die mçglichen Grnde fr diesen Ausschluss und seine Konsequenzen und fra-
gen, ob die simple biographische Erklrung, die Freud selbst gegeben hat, akzeptabel sein kann. Der Beitrag
rekonstruiert den historischen und kulturellen Hintergrund dieses Ausschlusses, zitiert relevante emblematische
Passagen und diskutiert Freuds Einstellung zur Musik und zur sthetischen Erfahrung im Allgemeinen. Besondere
Aufmerksamkeit widmen die Autoren der Beziehung zwischen Freud und Lipps, die sowohl in Bezug auf die Origi-
nalitt von Lipps Denken in der Debatte um die Jahrhundertwende wichtig war als auch fr seine Ideen zu den
musikalischen Aspekten der Grundlagen des psychischen Lebens, von denen Freud nach eigenem Bekunden Halt
machte. Darber hinaus hat Lipps Schatten Freuds gesamte wissenschaftliche Karriere, von 1898 bis 1938, beglei-
tet. Wie alle Grundlagen sind auch die der Psychoanalyse geprgt von Einschlssen und Ausschlssen. Der Aussch-
luss des klanglichen und musikalischen Elements ist in Anbetracht des kulturellen Hintergrunds, vor dem sich die
Entwicklung der Konzepte des reprsentationalen Unbewussten und der infantilen Sexualitt vollzogen, verstnd-
lich. Die Konsequenzen waren weit reichend, das Wissen aber, das seit jenem Ausschluss angesammelt wurde, er-
mçglicht es uns, die Komposition der ‘‘unvollendeten Symphonie’’ der Beziehung zwischen Psychoanalyse und
Musik, wenngleich auf einer anderen Grundlage, fortzufhren.
Sendas perdidas: Freud, sonido y música. Planteamiento de un problema y algunas notas crı́tico-
historicas. Los autores advierten que el elemento de sonido y mfflsica no tiene lugar en el modelo de funcionamiento
mental legado a nosotros por Freud, que est dominado por lo visual y representacional. Asimismo consideran las
razones de esta exclusin y sus concecuencias, y se preguntan si la simple explicacin biogrfica ofrecida por el
mismo Freud es aceptable. Este art culo reconstruye los antecedentes histricos y culturales de aquella exclusin,
cita algunos pasajes emblemticos pertinentes, y discute la posicin de Freud respecto a la mfflsica y la experiencia
esttica en general. Se dedica particular atencin a la relacin entre Freud y Lipps, lo cual es importante tanto
para la originalidad del pensamiento de Lipps en el debate del cambio de siglo como para sus ideas sobre los
aspectos musicales en los cimientos de la vida ps quica, ante las cuales Freud ‘‘se detuvo’’, como l mismo escribi.
Adems, la sombra de Lipps acompaÇ a Freud a lo largo de toda su carrera cient fica desde 1898 a 1938. Como
los cimientos, los del psicoanlisis fueron configurados por un sistema de inclusiones y exclusiones. La exclusin
del elemento de sonido y mfflsica es comprensible en vista del antecedente cultural del desarrollo de conceptos del
inconsciente representacional y la sexualidad infantil. Si bien las consecuencias han sido importantes, el conocim-
iento acumulado desde aquella exclusin nos permite retomar, aunque desde una distinta base, la composicin de
la ‘‘sinfon a inconclusa’’ de la relacin entre psicoanlisis y mfflsica.
Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part: Freud, le son et la musique. Etat d’un problème et quelques notes
historico-critiques. Les auteurs font la constatation que les lments son et musique n’ont pas de place dans le
mod
le du fonctionnement mental qui nous a t lgu par Freud, qui est domin par le visuel et le reprsentation-
nel. Les raisons et les consquences de cette exclusion sont examines, et l’explication biographique simple offerte
par Freud est remise en question. Cette contribution reconstitue le contexte historique et culturel de cette exclu-
sion, rel
ve quelques passages emblmatiques particuli
rement pertinents, et discute la position de Freud sur la mu-
sique et l’exprience esthtique en gnral. Une attention particuli
re est accorde la relation entre Freud et
Lipps, dont l’importance est lie la fois l’originalit de la pense de Lipps dans le dbat de la fin du si
cle et
ses ides sur les aspects musicaux dans les fondements de la vie psychique, ce sur quoi Freud s’est « arrÞt », com-
me il l’a lui-mÞme crit. De surcrot, l’ombre de Lipps a accompagn Freud tout au long de sa carri
re scientifique
partir de 1898 et jusqu’en 1938. Comme toutes les crations, celle de la psychanalyse a t faÅonne par un sys-
t
me d’inclusions et d’exclusions. L’exclusion des lments son et musique peut se comprendre au vu du contexte
culturel pour le dveloppement des concepts de reprsentations inconscientes et de sexualit infantile. Dans la me-
sure o les consquences de cette construction se sont considrablement dveloppes, la connaissance accumule
depuis cette exclusion nous autorise poursuivre, bien que sous un angle diffrent, la composition de la « sympho-
nie inacheve » de la relation entre la psychanalyse et la musique.
Sentieri interrotti: Freud, il sonoro, la musica. Posizione di un problema e alcune note storico-critiche.
Gli autori constatano che la dimensione del ‘‘sonoro-musicale’’ non
entrata nel modello di funzionamento men-
tale che Freud ci ha lasciato, dominato dal primato del rappresentativo e del visivo. Gli autori sondano i motivi di
questa esclusione e le relative conseguenze, e si chiedono se la semplice spiegazione biografica offerta da Freud

terms.pep-web.org).

stesso sia accettabile. Questo scritto ricostruisce lo sfondo storico-culturale di questa esclusione, alcuni suoi pas-
saggi emblematici e la posizione di Freud verso la musica e, in generale, verso l’esperienza estetica. Particolare
attenzione
dedicata al rapporto Freud-Lipps, importante sia per l’originalit del pensiero di Lipps nel dibattito
tra i due secoli, sia per spunti sugli aspetti musicali dei fondamenti della vita psichica, davanti ai quali Freud, come
egli stesso scrisse, si ‘‘arresta’’. L’ombra di Lipps peraltro accompagna tutta la vita scientifica di Freud, dal 1898 al
1938. Come tutte le fondazioni, anche quella della psicoanalisi,
avvenuta attraverso un sistema di inclusioni e di
esclusioni. L’esclusione del ‘‘sonoro-musicale’’
ben comprensibile nello scenario culturale in cui si
sviluppato il
sapere sull’inconscio rappresentativo e sulla sessualit infantile. Le conseguenze sono state rilevanti; ma le conos-
cenze che a partire da quell’esclusione si sono sviluppate consentono di riprendere ora, su altre basi, quella ‘‘sinfo-
nia incompiuta’’ che
il rapporto Psicoanalisi-Musica.
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Int J Psychoanal (2008) 89:937–957 doi: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2008.00068.x

Off the beaten track: Freud, sound and music.

Francesco Baralea and Vera Minazzib

(Final version accepted 25 March 2008)

Keywords: aesthetics, embodied simulation, foundation (of psychoanalysis), philosophy of

O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!

ª 2008 Institute of Psychoanalysis

938 F. Barale and V. Minazzi

Int J Psychoanal (2008) 89 ª 2008 Institute of Psychoanalysis

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relationality, albeit conceptualized in different ways. A recurring reference is to the

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The second emblematic passage is the celebrated incipit of Freud’s Moses of

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analysis is yielding a wealth of new information on musical factors in the develop-

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It is also worth considering another current that developed simultaneously with

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or disharmonies of Gemth6, a fundamentally ‘rhythmic’ spiritual entity that shades

Only words, no music (Goethe)

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