Was Freud Right About Music ?

[jochanaan]

Modifications under advisement: "some medium of communication (music an elective within this group;  Stravinsky preferred;  Wagner generally not indicated)"

Hmmm...Better, but even Bach and Mozart would seem to cause a prohibitive number of misunderstandings here... Or maybe not.

[LVB_opus.125]

Yes.

Probably not. All people of all ethnic, racial or social groups have music. It is one of the fundamental elements of "modern man" which is shared by all people, like language and a few other traits. People have probably sung and danced for tens of thousands of years.


Is talking about stuff that is beyond your horizon with borrowed vocabulary and arguments a biological imperative for you?

Is it possible for you to live a rich and fulfilled life without pretending to be smarter than you really are?

Also, don't forget that Orwell's 1984 was a world without music!

[Bunny]

"Who ever learned anything from music except the emotional power of music ?... It's a thin rather than an intellectually thick art form... Music is simply a cultural narcotic, but without the long-range costs that other drugs exact"

--Sigmund Freud

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To what extent was he right about this ? Or was he completely wrong ?

The older I get the more true it seems.

I'm late to this thread, but I find it amazing that someone who was contemporary with Mahler, Bruckner, Brahms, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, and so many other brilliant composers should feel this way about music.  I suppose that he must have had a tin ear.

[M forever]

Freud lived on the threshold of the understanding that some things that seemed to be deeply hidden in our psyche and which people thought could only be emotionally experienced could be "unearthed" and analyzed. That was his big thing in a time when groundlaying artistic and scientific breakthroughs were made everywhere. It is only understandable that he, a typical child of his time, would try to overemphasize the importance of rationality and reject emitionality and irrationality in order to give his discoveries more room and more importance. Pretty much everybody back then tried to figure out the world completely and come up with complete solutions for everything, so it can't be held too much against him that he saw things more or less exclusively from his angle. That was just normal. Of course, that makes many of his insights rather one-sided and outdated. But I think he still took some very important first steps.