Music and Psychoanalysis (c. 1910-1970)
Introduction
The FWF-funded project “Music and Psychoanalysis (c. 1910–1970)” investigates how music was interpreted within psychoanalytic thought during the twentieth century. Starting from Sigmund Freud’s approach towards therapeutic listening and his ambivalent relationship to music, the project reconstructs how psychoanalysts, psychologists, music theorists, and early music therapists understood musical experience, affect, drive, ego boundaries, composition, and the composer. Special attention is given to the ruptures caused by National Socialism, persecution, exile, and transnational knowledge transfer, as well as to the roles of gender and religion in psychoanalytic interpretations of music.
Fig.: Instance model with the “cap of hearing” drawn by Sigmund Freud from his work "The Ego and the Id" (1923)
Project title: Music and Psychoanalysis (c. 1910–1970)
Funding: Austrian Science Fund FWF
Grant DOI: 10.55776/P36888
Team: PD Mag. DDr. Andrea Korenjak, Bakk. (lead) Erik Karim Andresen, BSc. (assistant)
Affiliation: Institute of Musicology, University of Vienna
Project duration: 2023–2027
Research Question
How was music interpreted within psychoanalytic discourses between c. 1910 and 1970, and which concepts of affect, body, gender, religion, culture, and the unconscious shaped these interpretations?