Waiting, Still, or Is Psychoanalysis Tonal?
2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/oq/kbx010
ISSN1476-2870
Autores Tópico(s)Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications
ResumoFantasy (1). So, not to pry, but what about Erwartung? The question came to me while reading a recent double issue of Opera Quarterly on “Opera after Freud.”1 It crossed my mind often enough that by volume’s end, it had left behind a thatch-work, roughening the surface of an enterprise often glowing—and sometimes positively glittering—with insights into its titular objects. After all, what opera could possibly be more colonized by the Freudian imaginary? In the primal scene linking opera and psychoanalysis—perhaps even music and psychoanalysis—Schoenberg and Pappenheim’s 1909 monodrama is supposed to be the act itself, the copulating “and,” love child of a man virtually neighbors with Freud and a woman now definitively shown—after decades of speculation—to be related to Bertha Pappenheim, aka Anna O, psychoanalysis’s “patient zero.”2 So, perhaps the primal scene is really a menage à trois: there she is, in a field in Traunkirchen: the librettist Marie Pappenheim, “lying in the grass, with pencil, [with] large sheets of paper, no copy, scarcely read[ing] through what I had written.”3 There he is, in a summer study in Steinakirchen am Forst: Schoenberg, brow beaded, scribbling in 17 days 426 measures of the most complex and inscrutable music yet written down. And there he is, aboard the SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse with Jung, returning to Vienna: Freud, who had just brought the “plague” of psychoanalysis to America, and would that year alone publish his Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (the “Little Hans” case), Notes on a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (the “Rat Man” case), and the shorter “General Remarks on Hysterical Attacks.” Three snapshots of the cultural construction of phobia, obsession, hysteria: they seem to be Erwartung, to become embedded, embodied, sensualized within its measures. A nameless “hysterical” Frau, endlessly terrorized by unforeseeable shocks, suffers “mainly from reminiscences” as she vacillates between hallucination and association, metaphor and metonymy.4 Gradually, she remembers, repeats, begins to work through. Her lines are aggressively paratactic, more triple-dotted than any script until Samuel Beckett’s Not I; as in Beckett’s play, the protagonist is a systole, mouth as muscle, voice as charley horse. An “obsessive” composer meanwhile follows the law of anacoluthon, unceasingly swerving from the already written, enacting the apotheosis of a short-lived “radical athematicism,” but also the obsessive’s rituals of undoing—composition as superstition, magical thinking. What Ethan Haimo called “the birth (and death) of new music” ends up resonating uncomfortably with the Rat Man’s private misery-making games, his misplaced and replaced branches, missed and re-taken trains.5
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