Preface

By comparison with literature and the visual arts, music has almost always come in a distant third in the paragone or friendly rivalry among fields of "applied analysis." Freud's notorious insensibility to music is doubtless partly responsible for this state of affairs. That music, by comparison with the other arts, is essentially nonrepresentational likewise renders it unamenable to the content-based exegesis that has been the stock in trade of most psychoanalytic critics. It has, to be sure, been possible to do thematic studies of operas and song cycles, as well as to investigate the lives of composers no less than of other creative artists, and these labors have often yielded impressive results. Still, it is impossible to deny that music rarely receives the attention it deserves from the majority of scholars or clinicians of psychoanalysis.

In this issue of American Imago, which owes not simply its title but its very existence to the energy and talents of Julie Jaffee Nagel, our contributors aim to conduct readers down an "aural road" to the understanding of the unconscious mind. Their collective descant is dedicated to the memory of Stuart Feder, who both by his life's work and by his unstinting generosity of spirit helped to nurture an entire generation of psychoanalytic musicologists.

It is a source of personal pleasure for me that our first essay should be by Maynard Solomon, a trusted advisor to editors of this journal since the days of Harry Slochower. As a custodian of the "orphan genre" of music biography, Solomon in "Taboo and Biographical Innovation: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert" reflects on a curious experience he had in writing his magisterial books and essays on these three giants. In pursuing his research, Solomon regularly found materials that "had long been available quite on the surface of the documentary record," but the obvious conclusions of which had been overlooked by previous scholars. Whether the topic be lies told by Mozart and his father, the identity of Beethoven's "immortal beloved," or Schubert's sexual orientation, what all these biographical details have in common is that they are "implicated in taboo" because they "encroach on forbidden regions of experience." As Solomon argues, psychoanalysis in principle refuses to "recognize the validity of any taboo on what is allowed to be known," and thus "enjoins us to interrogate every detail of a person's life, including thoughts and dreams." Paradoxically, however, psychoanalytic theory "may itself become a sacred object, guarded by taboo," thereby inducing its adherents to do no more than "perpetually reconfirm" their a priori assumptions.

Standing on the shoulders of both Solomon and Feder, Nagel trains her ears on a pivotal year in Mozart's life and his career as a composer. In "Melodies of the Mind: Mozart in 1778," Nagel connects Mozart's psychic upheaval following his mother's death during a trip she took with her twenty-two-year-old son to Paris—a death for which he was blamed by his father—to Mozart's decision to write his only piano sonata (out of a total of nineteen) in the key of A Minor. At once a Juilliard-trained pianist and a practicing analyst, Nagel moves effortlessly between biographical and formal analysis. Her scrutiny of the A Minor Piano Sonata ultimately serves to illuminate how "the nonverbal medium of music and the verbal discourse that anchors psychoanalytic therapy share many common elements, above all those having to do with the evocation and expression of affect."

Linda A. W. Brakel accesses the aural road through a very different portal in "Music and Primary Process: Proposal for a Preliminary Experiment." Surveying the range of positions taken by analytic theorists on the nature of primary process mentation, Brakel provisionally aligns herself with those who maintain that "formal primary process operations need not be linked to primitive conflict and pathology," although she does "consider this system of thought to be developmentally prior to secondary process, yet adaptive evolutionarily as the foundation for basic psychological functioning in our species and other higher mammals and birds." As both a scientist and a philosopher, as well as a psychoanalyst, Brakel recognizes that, to resolve the...