Freud, Wagner and Reik: From the Oceanic to Oedipus

Broadcast 18 July, 2022. Duration: 1 hour 32 minutes

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It’s commonly assumed that Freud had a life-long aversion to music. Freud’s apparent rejection of music is remarkable, particularly when viewed against his fascination and engagement with the literary and visual arts, as well as the huge influence his theories had on art theory and practice in the 20th Century.

This lecture will explore Freud’s surprising attitude to music and offer some suggestions as to why he sought to resist the powerful experience music offered the listening subject. To examine the tensions underpinning Freud’s personal and professional suspicion of music we will be deploying some of Richard Wagner’s music dramas as ‘case studies’, exaggerations of musical tendencies that threatened to shake the rational foundations that Freud was to claim for psychoanalysis. Drawing on Theodor Reik’s early work, we will discover how psychoanalysis sought to safely bind the oceanic excesses of such music within the Oedipal dynamic.

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Speaker:

Tom DeRose founded the Freud Museum staff and volunteer reading group in 2015, which has been meeting weekly ever since. He has a long-standing interest in the philosophical aspects and cultural implications of Freud’s theories, and has published articles exploring these areas, most recently on the affinities between the thought of Freud, Wagner and Nietzsche for the Wagner Journal (July 2017). He is currently writing chapters on psychoanalysis and music for The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literature and Psychoanalysis.