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Listening to the Talking Cure: Sprechstimme, Hypnosis, and The Sonic
Organization of Affecti
In the last chapter, I discussed the role of the voice in Josef Breuer’s theory
of abreaction, elaborated in the Studies on Hysteria, showing that the function of
speech in abreaction paralleled that of emotion, and that both allegedly modified
brain chemistry, causing the eradication of physiological hysterical symptoms. In
this chapter, I assert that the beliefs I have shown Freud and Breuer to hold about
the capacity of the voice to cure hysteria paralleled beliefs held by composers,
performers, and listeners in early twentieth century Vienna. Situating my
analysis on the case study of the composition and premiere of Schoenberg’s
modernist masterwork Pierrot Lunaire, I argue that the written artistic intentions
for the voice held by Schoenberg and vocalist Albertine Zehme, who
commissioned the work, parallel the beliefs about the voice stated by Freud and
Breuer in the Studies on Hysteria.
In the October 10, 1912 issue of the Berliner Börsen‑Courrier, conductor Otto
Taubman described the vocal performance in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire as ‘full
of hysterical, distorted artificiality’ (Pedneault‑Deslauriers, 2011: 601). The
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subject of his critique was Viennese actor and singer Albertine Zehme,
performing the Sprechstimme of Schoenberg’s score. In Pierrot Lunaire, the
soprano line maintains the prosody of poetic recitation, while performing
melodic vaults around an unusually wide tessitura. The result, both parodic and
haunting, sits uncomfortably between speech and song. Zehme commissioned
the piece from Schoenberg in 1912, with the intention of trying out a new vocal
style she had developed. In her first direct letter to Schoenberg about the project,
she wrote:
I have a special recitation‑style based on my own system: trained in vocal
and expressive‑possibilities, and I am eager to make you acquainted with
the affective [seelischen] instrument on which you will hang your talents.
(Bryn‑Julson and Matthews, 2009: 44).
The goal of her technique was to express affect and emotion through the sound
of the voice, rather than through the meaning of the words spoken. This chapter
argues that Zehme’s appeal to the sound of the voice as a means for transmitting
affect and emotion, coupled with Taubman’s description of Zehme’s
performance as ‘hysterical’ was not circumstantial, but a manifestation of
contemporary beliefs about the capacity of the voice to mediate affect. Julie
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Pedneault‑Deslauriers has argued that Schoenberg’s artistic intentions for Pierrot
Lunaire resonate with the contemporary cultural meanings of hysteria
(Pedneault‑Deslauriers, 2011: 602). She documents the ways in which hysteria
was embodied in the voice, describing the shift in the clinical gaze on hysteria
from French physician Jean Martin Charcot to the Viennese doctors who
developed the so‑called talking cure, Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer. While
Charcot documented hysteria through photography, diagnosing the disease
based on visually observed physical characteristics, for Freud and Breuer,
hysteria expressed itself through the voice (Pedneault‑Deslauriers, 2011: 637).
Taking Pedneault‑Deslauriers’ lead, this chapter investigates how Freud and
Breuer theorized hysteria’s relation to the voice, honing in on a very specific
question about the similarities between beliefs held by doctors and artists of this
period about the capacity of the voice to mediate affect. I argue that the ideas
presented by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer in their 1895 publication Studies
on Hysteria invested the voice with the power to manipulate affect, through
physiological, organic processes in hysterical subjects, and connect the properties
of this voice to ideas expressed by Schoenberg and Zehme about the capacity of
the voice to produce affect and emotion.
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Sound in the talking cure
The talking cure, developed by Josef Breuer and his patient Bertha Pappenheim
during the course of her 1881 and 1882 treatment, allegedly cured patients
suffering from hysteria. The cure was proposed to derive from the acts of
speaking and listening between doctor and patient. As my genealogy of the
function of sound in the talking cure will show, Freud and Breuer thought that
the act of speaking traumas could cure psychological illness, and yet, the
implications of the treatment for sound have not been explored. Instead, the
psychoanalytic voice that has garnered much critical attention is by and large
tied up with questions of signification and meaning.ii
We can cull at least two manifestations of the psychoanalytic voice from the
writings of Freud and Breuer. On the one hand, the relation between voice and
ear in psychoanalytic practice is a sonic one, a physical exchange of vibrating
bodies. On the other hand, we have the voice as a tool of interpretation, both in
psychoanalysis and in aesthetic theories that are psychoanalytically based. Here
the voice functions as the Freudian slip – the sonic indicator of wishes and
desires that reside in the unconscious, be it the patient’s unconscious in the
clinical context, or the collective unconscious, in the critical one.
The psychoanalytic voice that has figured most prominently in critical theory of
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the twentieth century is derived from Lacan’s reading of the Freudian voice.
Lacan’s famous inclusion of the voice in the list of psychoanalytic objects along
with the other Freudian drives, rendered the voice into a fundamental aim of
human desire (Lagaay, 2008). Lacan created a new category of psychoanalytic
objects called object petite á, which included voice and gaze, and this structural
definition positions the voice always already in relation between a subject and
Other. In his 2008 book “A Voice and Nothing More”, philosopher Mladen Dolar
points out that the voice is both a medium for communication, and at the same
time recalcitrant to meaning. According to Dolar, the voice is an “extralinguistic
element which enables speech phenomena, but cannot itself be discerned by
linguistics” (Dolar, 2008: 15). The impulse to consider the voice always in relation
to language and signification is rational, as the voice is the medium of speech.
However, we can also consider the voice as a physical material, independently
from its capacity as a conveyor of thought. In this chapter, I focus on the voice
solely as a producer of sound, linking this production to the pathological
functions theorized by Freud and Breuer.
My analysis of the role of sound in the talking cure asserts that the sonic
exchange between doctor and patient that made such communication possible
was not merely the medium through which thought was conveyed, but a
physical material that had pathological implications. A closer look at the
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intellectual history that predates Freud and Breuer’s 1895 publication reveals that
the doctors were very much concerned with the status of sound – a concern that
stems from the somatic treatment of hysteria and its ambiguous status in Freud
and Breuer’s early thought and practice. I make this argument by outlining two
genealogies of the talking cure that imply an investment on the part of Freud and
Breuer in the sonic aspects of the treatment. The first traces the role of talk in
hypnosis, arguing that the theory of suggestion held by French neurologist Jean
Martin Charcot influenced Freud and Breuer to come to the conclusions they did
about how the talking cure worked to cure the body and psyche. The second
analyzes the shift in the treatment of hysteria from somatic to sonic cures.
Sprechstimme as Hysterical sounding
Considerable musicological inquiry has been vested in the question of what
specific sonic ideal Schoenberg had in mind when he wrote the vocal part to
Pierrot Lunaire. In Inside Pierrot: Performing the Sprechstimme in Schoenberg’s
Masterpiece, Bryn‑Julson and Matthews note that in the first printed version of the
score,
the
performer
is
instructed
‘die
Rezitation
hat
die
Tonhöhe
andeutungsweise zu bringen’ or ‘the recitation ought to effect the pitch as if by
suggestion’ (Bryn‑Julson and Matthews, 2009, 49). They argue that Schoenberg’s
intention was for the singer to emphasize the timbre of her speech, with the pitch
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as an afterthought, something that is present, but not focal. Avior Byron has
argued, similarly, that Schoenberg didn’t intend the Sprechstimme in Pierrot
Lunaire to be performed with allegiance to the notated pitches, but that
Schoenberg’s intention opened up space for variation in the pitch parameter of
the composition (Byron, 2006). Byron suggests, along with Richard Kurth, that
the composer’s intention was to destabilize a listener’s regular response to the
meaning of the words sung (Kurth, 2000). Schoenberg echoes this sentiment in
the instructions to the first printed edition of Pierrot, writing:
The performer, however, must take great pains not to lapse into a
‘singing’ style of speech. This is absolutely not the intention. What should
be aspired to is also certainly not a realistic, natural kind of speech. On the
contrary, the difference between normal speech and a kind of speech
which is part of a musical form should be distinct. But it must also never
be reminiscent of songiii. (Schoenberg, 1912).
If we accept Byron’s analysis that Schoenberg did not have an abstract sonic ideal
in mind for the Sprechstimme part, but rather composed a degree of
indeterminacy into the piece, and Kurth’s analysis that the composer’s intention
was to destabilize the meaning of the words sung, then Schoenberg’s artistic
goals align well with Zehme’s desire to focus her artistry on the sounds of the
words, not their meanings.
Zehme wrote that she wanted her voice to express feeling, not thoughts. In a
program note from her 1911 vocal recital, premiered eighteen months before
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Pierrot, entitled “Why I Must Speak These Songs,” she wrote:
To communicate, our poets and our composers need both singing as well as
the spoken tone [Sprachton]…. The words that we speak should not solely
lead to mental concepts, but instead their sound should allow us to partake
of their inner experience. (Bryn‑Julson and Matthews, 2009: 42).
She wanted the voice to be freed from both the semantic content of the words
spoken or sung, and the codified musical objects that the singing voice
predictably recreated through accurate technique. She contended that the sound
of the voice itself could express feeling and create affect, if it managed to avoid
any predictable mode of performance. In the same program note, Zehme wrote
of her intentions for the voice:
In daily life, the ear is not the interpreter; rather we have become
accustomed to… I want to restore the ear to its position in life. Meaning
should be conveyed not only by words we speak; the sounds should also
participate in relating the inner experience. To make that possible, we
must have unrestricted freedom of tone [Tonfreiheit]. Emotional
expression should not be denied any of the thousands of oscillations. I
demand not free‑thinking, but freedom of tone!’ (Bryn‑Julson and
Matthews, 2009: 35).
Zehme did not, however, mean to privilege singing over the speaking voice.
Rather, she argued that convention had so restricted the sounds permissible in
singing that such voices were incapable of expressing deepest feelingsiv. Of the
conventional singing voice, she wrote:
‘The singing voice, bound in otherworldly chastity, fixed in its ascetic
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bondage as an ideal, exquisite instrument ‑ even a strong exhale dulls its
inaccessible beauty ‑ is not suitable for intense emotional outbursts.’ (Bryn‑
Julson and Matthews, 2009, 35).
Zehme alleged that freeing the voice of conventional technique would
enable the performer to express feelings unencumbered by pre‑established
thoughts or meanings. She characterized the trained singing voice as ascetic and
ideal, writing that as an instrument it was not suitable for the production of raw
emotion. It is this sense of ‘real feeling’ or emotion that Zehme wanted to
achieve. She endeavored that performing musical ideas as the recreation of
abstract sonic ideals was similar to conveying thoughts through speech. Her
statements imply that Zehme understood a schism between the expression of
meaning or signification, and the expression of feeling and creation of affect. She
believed that the sound of the voice, unharnessed by technique, could produce
affect and emotion, and this capability was independent from the function of the
voice as a producer of meaningful expression. Consequently, her performance
was labeled as hysterical.
Schoenberg also sought to locate expression in vocal sound rather than text.
In his 1912 essay, ‘The Relationship to the Text,’ Schoenberg wrote that when
composing, he found that he captured the spirit of a poem better when he
focused on the sounds of the words, rather than their meanings:
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For me…inspired by the sound of the first words of the text, I had
composed many of my songs straight through to the end without
troubling myself in the slightest about the continuation of the poetic
events, without even grasping them in the ecstasy of composing, and that
only days later I thought of looking back to see just what was the real
poetic content of my song. It then turned out, to my greatest astonishment,
that I had never done greater justice to the poet than when, guided by my
first direct contact with the sound of the beginning, I divined everything
that obviously had to follow this first sound with inevitability v .
(Schoenberg, 1975).
Like Zehme, Schoenberg located expression at the level of the sounding of the
words, not their meaning. Schoenberg’s statement goes further to say that paying
attention to the sonic identity of the words in a poem allowed him to capture the
poetic expression more accurately than when he focused on the meaning of the
words. Both Zehme and Schoenberg make a distinction between the textual
meaning of the lyrics sung, and another type of expression located in the sounds
themselves. This investment in the sound of the singing or speaking voice
resonates with Freud and Breuer’s theory of the talking cure, which similarly
situated the production of affect in vocalization.
Schoenberg and Zehme were undoubtedly familiar with some of Freud’s ideas,
which had permeated the intellectual discourse in Vienna by the time of their
1912 collaboration in 1912 (Carpenter, 2010). However, it is not my intention to
show that these artists applied Freud’s ideas directly to their work, but rather to
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prove that the doctors and artists held similar beliefs about the voice. I will now
outline parallels between the ways in which Schoenberg and Zehme’s writings
demonstrate a belief that the voice can convey emotion and affect, independent
of its function as a conduit for meaning, and the ways in which Freud and Breuer
believed the voice can create affect, showing how that both sets of writing
suggest an epistemological shift in the capacity of the voice to transmit affect.
Talking Cure
In their 1893 publication “On the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena:
preliminary communicationvi” Freud and Breuer wrote that hysteria was caused
by trauma. They wrote that in general, the negative affects one experiences on a
daily basis must be abreacted, or released through catharsis. If an experience
caused a great deal of negative affect, or emotional turmoil, and the subject
didn’t abreact the emotions, Freud and Breuer thought that the affect remained
stored in the subject’s body. They wrote:
The fading of a memory or the losing of its affect depends on various
factors. The most important of these is whether there has been an energetic
reaction to the event that provokes an affect. By ‘reaction’ we here
understand the whole class of voluntary and involuntary reflexes ‑ from
tears to acts of revenge ‑ in which, as experience shows us, the affects are
discharged. If this reaction takes place to a sufficient amount a large part of
the affect disappears as a result… If the reaction is suppressed, the affect
remains attached to the memory.” (Freud and Breuer, 1895: 86).
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When the subject does not release the trauma by purging the affect through acts
such as mourning or revenge, the affect remains attached to the memory of the
trauma. By speaking of the trauma, the subject recreates the affects that were
originally associated with the trauma, and remain attached to the memory. This
gives the subject the chance to adequately release the affects: to abreact them.
Freud and Breuer stated that the act of speaking itself could adequately
release negative affect through catharsis. They wrote ‘the injured person’s
reaction to the trauma only exercises a completely ‘cathartic’ effect if it is an
adequate reaction ‑ as, for instance, revenge.’ (Freud and Breuer, 1895: 86). In
other words, some sort of action must be involved in catharsis, in order to move
the affect out of the body. However, they also wrote ‘language serves as a
substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted’ almost as effectively.
In other cases speaking is itself the adequate reflex, when, for instance, it is a
lamentation or giving utterance to a tormenting secret, e.g. a confession.’ (Freud
and Breuer, 1895: 86).
Freud and Breuer claimed that language could serve as a substitute for
action, which could imply that the symbolic qualities of language produce a
different sort of action than a physical act such as crying. However, I want to
separate this question of language from the specific utility of speaking as
cathartic actionvii. How can ‘speaking itself’ be an action of catharsis? To answer
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this question, we must consider the role of sound and speech in hypnosis.
Speech in Hypnosis
Although it had fallen out of favor in the earlier part of the nineteenth century,
scientific interest in hypnosis was restored in the 1870s by the French
physiologist Charles Richet, whose papers influenced the famous neurologist
Jean Martin Charcot to turn to the study of hypnosis in 1878. Charcot
distinguished himself from the Romantic tradition of Mesmerism by placing
limits on what could be known about hypnosis. He maintained that so long as
speculations were based on physiological processes, and not metaphysical
concepts like spirits or essences, the study of hypnosis was scientifically
legitimate (Makari, 1992).
Charcot theorized that hypnosis worked through suggestion, and it is here that
the physiology of speech comes into play. Charcot thought that when a subject
was hypnotized, he was open to incorporating suggestions, spoken by the
hypnotist. This theory was based on common model of nineteenth century
neurology and psychiatry. This model, called associationalism, held that the
process of ‘suggestion’ worked as follows: the subjective psyche included an
‘ego’, constituting the subject’s memories and beliefs. When the subject was in a
hypnotic state, the ego was not in control, but somehow sedated, and an idea, or
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group of ideas introduced by the hypnotist could be incorporated into the ego
(Makari, 1992).
These suggestions came to the subject through the speech of the hypnotist. For
example, a hypnotist might speak ‘you will be unable to move your arm’, and lo
and behold, upon exiting the hypnotic state, the subject would be unable to move
her arm (Makari, 2008, 27). Theorists and practitioners of hypnosis did not
emphasize speech as the mode through which suggestions were introduced to
subjects in a hypnotic trance. In Hippolyte Bernheim’s influential book
Hypnotisme, Suggestion, Psychotherapie (1891), he wrote, ‘I define suggestion in
the broadest sense; it is the act by which an idea is introduced into the brain and
accepted by it’ (Bernheim, 1891: 24). Although Bernheim himself took it for
granted that ideas were spoken, a closer look reveals that speech was in fact
crucial to the practice of hypnosis.
The ways in which speech acts as a cure for traumatic paralyses (i.e., in the
talking cure,) can be derived from the ways in which speech controls traumatic
paralyses in hypnosis. Charcot’s theory of auto‑suggestion was taken from his
observations of hypnosis, in which a hypnotist could cause paralyses in a subject
by suggesting she would be unable to move part of her body when awoken from
her hypnotic state. He generalized that a similar physical process was involved
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when a paralyses was caused by a physical blow to part of the body. The shock
of the physical blow or strong emotional reaction would send the subject into a
sort of hypnotic state, where, concerned for the part of the body that experienced
the blow, she would think ‘I can’t move my arm’, and this thought would cause
the paralysis. Charcot called this auto‑suggestion (Makari, 1992, 418).
A significant difference between suggestion and auto‑suggestion was that in
hypnotic suggestion, the hypnotist speaks an idea to his patient, but in auto‑
suggestion, nothing is spoken from one subject to another. Instead the subject,
hypnotized by trauma, is susceptible to the incorporation of her own fears as
suggestions. It is important to note that, according to historian George Makari,
Charcot believed that the same organic process causing paralysis occurred in
both auto‑suggestion and suggestion.
So, how does Charcot’s theory of suggestion influence Freud and Breuer’s theory
of the talking cure? In their 1893 Preliminary Communication, Freud and Breuer
wrote that hysterical symptoms disappeared when the memory of the event that
had brought on the symptom was recreated, complete with the affects the subject
experienced during that event.viii
Their clinical observations showed Freud and Breuer that patients could be
relived of hysterical symptoms by speaking of traumatic experiences. For
example, Freud’s case history of Frau Emmy von N. records that the patient
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suffered from a hysterical tic in which she made a ‘strange clacking sound with
her mouth’ (Freud and Breuer, 1895: 54). Freud endeavored her to recall what
traumas might have coincided with the instantiation of this symptom. The
patient remembered an event in which she had nursed a sick child to sleep, and
when the child finally fell asleep, she thought to herself ‘I must not make a
sound, so as not to wake him up.’ The clacking had emerged as a symptom at
that time. Freud’s analysis was this: Frau Emmy worried that she would make a
sound, in the same way a subject worries about her ability to move a limb that
has suffered a blow (Freud and Breuer, 1895, 148). This concern for the object –
be it an arm or her own voice – acted like a suggestion from a hypnotist. The
idea: ‘I will make a sound and wake the child’, or ‘I can’t move my arm’, was
severed from the emotion of fear, and the idea re‑emerged as a suggestion to the
subject’s ego. But this whole process was reversed when the subject spoke of the
trauma. Freud theorized that the affect of fear was released when Frau Emmy
spoke of the trauma that originally triggered the symptomix.
While Freud and Breuer do not suggest that the patient is hypnotizing herself in
the process of the talking cure, I want to draw analogies between the ways in
which speech functions in both treatments. In the case of Frau Emmy von N, the
patient’s hysteria was brought on by auto‑suggestion. She had the idea of
waking the child by making a sound, and this idea was incorporated by the ego,
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resulting in the hysterical symptom. The treatment Freud and Breuer propose
involves reversing the suggestion by releasing the fear that accompanied the idea
‘I will make a sound and wake the child.’ This reversal is accomplished by
speaking the trauma, therefore abreacting the negative affect. I am suggesting
that abreaction involves the instantiation of auto‑suggestion through the voice of
the subject herself, in the same way hypnosis employs suggestion through the
voice of another person. In short, the patient of the talking cure hypnotizes
herself, in the presence of a doctor.
Both Freud and Breuer’s theorization of hysteria and Charcot’s use of hypnosis
to treat hysteria implicate sound in ways that the practitioners themselves did
not acknowledge. Charcot, Freud and Breuer all invested speech with the power
to cause physiological changes, such as paralyses. In the case of hypnosis, this
was done through the speech of suggestions from the hypnotist to the
hypnotized subject. In the case of the talking cure, speech by the patient
reconnected the idea and affect that had been severed by a traumatic experience,
and this reconnection reversed the physiological transformation that had
manifested in the hysterical symptom.
The Treatment of Hysteria: from Somatic to Sonic cure
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I have shown that a belief that the act of speaking could cure a physical symptom
that resulted from a psychological trauma influenced Freud and Breuer to reason
that psychological traumas could be released through talk. This contradicts the
notion that the release of the abstract idea of the trauma – the memory defined
without connection to some bodily process or sensation – was what cured
hysterical symptoms. Instead, the genealogy I trace suggests that for Freud and
Breuer, the sounding voice had a pathological function in the transformation of
psychosomatic illness. This physiological function of the voice has longer
precedents than the history of the voice in hypnosis. These beliefs about the
capacity of the voice to transform affect can also be understood as a product of
the shift from somatic to sonic treatment of hysteria.
Until the application of hypnosis and psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth
century, hysteria was primarily treated through different forms of somatic
manipulation of the female reproductive organs themselves. The name of the
disease, derived from the Greek ὑστέρα, meaning ‘uterus’, was given by the
Hippocratic School in the fifth century B.C. because the condition was believed
to be a pathological wandering of a restless womb from its normal position
(Goldstein, 1987). The development of psychoanalysis as a treatment for hysteria
moved the site of treatment from the patient’s body, specifically her sex organs,
to her psyche and her voice. In her book ‘The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria’,
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the vibrator, and female sexual satisfaction’, Rachel Maines documents the
treatment of hysteria through genital manipulation, showing that this practice
has been a standard treatment for the illness going back as far as the Hippocratic
School.
The justification for treating hysteria at the site of the sex organs often stemmed
from the notion that the womb was either sick or ill positioned, needing to be
directly manipulated in order to return it to its proper place within the body.
Known as the ‘Local Treatment’, a common treatment for hysteria in the first half
of the century included manual investigation of the uterus, bloodletting by
inserting leeches into the uterus, injections, and cauterization, or burning of the
womb. Other approaches included hydrotherapy, electrotherapy, massage, and
the Weir Mitchell Rest Curex. In the ‘rest cure’ the patient was made to lie flat on
her back for six weeks, with plenty to eat from her bed, and often times not even
being allowed to rise in order to urinate. Electrotherapy, hydrotherapy, and
massage, were most often different means of genital stimulation. Maines
documents in painstaking – and sometimes painful – detail the equally wide
range of treatments endured by women with these symptoms in the nineteenth
century.
We can see in the Local Treatment and the Rest Cure different forms of
manipulating the female body ‑ by either forcing it to move and react in
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torturous ways, or in the drastic opposite ‑ by depriving it of movement
altogether. Genital stimulation manipulated the body in yet another way, by
literally bringing the patient to orgasm through manual stimulation of the
patient’s genitals by the doctor with fingers, electromechanical vibrators, or
water pressure devices. In their 2011 article ‘Women on the Couch: Genital
Stimulation and the Birth of Psychoanalysis’, psychoanalysts Lew Aron and
Karen Starr discuss the widespread practice of genital stimulation by Viennese
doctors, and argue that this standard practice, documented by medical treatises
from the time, meant that Freud was undoubtedly aware of the treatment. Over
the course of the nineteenth century, the treatment of hysteria changed from
somatic practices to sonic ones. In hypnosis, the doctor suggests things to the
patient while she is under a somnambulistic trance, intended to sedate her ego,
therefore making her susceptible to suggestion. Josef Breuer and Bertha
Pappenheims’ treatment went a step further in its use of talk – the patient gave
voice to her troubles; the doctor listened, and guided her ruminations. Classic
Freudian psychoanalysis requires that the doctor refrain from touching the
patient at all, but in the early days of the talking cure, Freud did touch patients.
In ‘Studies on Hysteria’, he reports using a method where he placed a hand on
the patient’s forehead and commanded her to say whatever came to mind. He
also mentions massage as part of his practice (Freud, 1895). While they admit
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there is no ‘smoking gun’ – no substantive proof that Freud himself practiced
genital manipulation, Aron and Starr argue convincingly that Freud must have
been aware of genital massage as a treatment for hysteria, writing:
We do know that Freud acknowledged doing full body massage as he
listened closely to his early patients, owned the best electrical equipment
available, and claimed to practice all of the standard treatments of his day
(Freud, 1925)…We show that Freud was well aware of and knowledgeable
about this practice, obfuscated this knowledge in his autobiographical
narrative, and sought to distance himself and the psychoanalytic method
as far away from it as possible. (Aron and Starr, 2011: 375).
What does the trajectory here – from touching the patients’ genitals to
encouraging her to speak her traumas – have to do with the role of sound in the
treatment of hysteria through hypnosis and talk? Sander Gilman has argued
(2010) that Freud’s move to treat hysteria through the voice rather than through
the body is indicative of his belief that the illness was located in the mind, not the
body. This argument is consistent with Freud’s own writings, however it also
seems that the replacement of the patients’ genitals with her voice as the site at
which the doctor treated a subject’s hysteria renders the aural space of the
talking cure into a physical site of touch.
This transformation also changes the patient’s autonomy over her own
subjectivity and body. In the transformation of hypnosis into the talking cure, I
speculated that the subject hypnotizes herself by speaking her traumas,
proposing that the logic of auto‑suggestion (where the concern a subject has for
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herself leads her to suggest to herself a physical transformation has actually
taken place) was what led Breuer and Freud to theorize the talking cure. My
analysis shows that the talking cure granted increased agency to the hysteric,
because she could transform her physical ailments by speaking her traumas
while conscious. Breuer and Freud must have thought that hysterics could
reverse the auto‑suggestions they had created at that moment of trauma by
speaking these traumas.
The development of the talking cure granted patients more autonomy in relation
to the previous somatic treatments detailed above. Surprisingly, according to
Maines (1999), notions of the sexual nature of genital massage as a treatment for
hysteria have not been documented. Instead, the treatment is historically
purported to release mysterious tension that causes hysteria. What is consistently
described in the history of this practice, however, is the emulsion of fluid from
the vagina as a result of the treatment. From this we can use the contemporary
definition of female orgasm and ejaculation as a consistent way in which to
understand what was going on in this practice, regardless of whether we regard
it as a form of sex.
The treatment of hysteria, which was understood to be a sickness of the soul or
psyche, by bringing the patient to orgasm, conflates a woman’s psyche with her
genitalia. If a woman’s psyche can be purged through the emission of fluid from
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her vagina, then her vagina and psyche must be linked or identical in some way.
In this context, no significant transformation has taken place with the
development of the talking cure: the patient’s body is cured through the
vibration of her body ‑ her vocal chords instead of her genitals. The organ that
purges has shifted from the vagina to the voice.xi
Through my reading of the talking cure as a theory of the physiological
curing potential of the voice, I endeavored to unveil similarities between the
ways in which both Zehme and Schoenberg and Freud and Breuer appealed to
the physical capacities of the voice in order to create affect and emotion. While
the voice Freud and Breuer theorized belonged to a hysterical subject, the voice
Zehme theorized belonged to an artist. However, the characterization of Zehme’s
performance in Pierrot Lunaire as hysterical brings these worlds close together.
Perhaps the shift in the site of hysteria’s treatment, from the genitals to the voice,
made it possible for critics to hear hysteria in Zehme’s performance. The
intention expressed by Schoenberg to harness the meaning of a poem not by
reading and contemplating the words, but merely by setting the text based on the
sound of the words, might be influenced by Freud’s psychoanalytic method,
which had many followers in both the medical community and popular Viennese
discourse by 1908 (Makari, 2008). It may be that the cultural memory of genital
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stimulation and other somatic treatments of hysteria, along with the
understanding of vibration as the building blocks of sound, influenced Zehme’s
and Schoenberg’s artistic intentions. This would suggest that Taubman was
expressing something explicitly modern when he called Zehme’s performance
hysterical.
Conclusions
There is a paradox in the ways in which Freud and Breuer treated the voice. At
the same time they invested the voice with the power to make physiological
changes, to enact catharsis, they denied the voice the power of meaningful
expression. In their case studies, Freud and Breuer observed the breakdown of
linguistic capabilities as a telling mark of hysteria. Breuer’s patient Anna O. lost
the ability to speak her native German. Frau Emmy von N. was troubled by a
persistent involuntary clacking sound made by her mouth. The hysterical
subject’s symptoms were frequently found in her voice, and in the breakdown of
her capacity to communicate meaningfully.
Julie Pedneault‑Deslauriers uses this construction of the hysterical voice, cast as
lack of signification, in her analysis of the Sprechstimme in Pierrot Lunaire.
Pedneault‑Deslauriers writes that the liminal space between speech and song
that Sprechstimme inhabits recasts the tension between signification and the
erasure of signification that characterizes the hysteric’s speech. She maps this
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tension, between signification and its erasure brought on by song, onto Freud
and Breuer’s characterizations of hysterics as unable to speak coherently.
Pedneault‑Deslauriers is correct to observe that Freud and Breuer diagnosed
hysterical symptoms in the breakdown of speech, however my analysis of the
voice in Freud and Breuer’s theory unearths a different function, and produces a
different reading of Sprechstimme. The pathological function of sound in the
talking cure reveals that Freud and Breuer believed that vocal sound worked
physiologically to cure hysteria. Freud and Breuer denied hysterical speech the
power to signify at the same time they gave it the power to release traumatic
affect from the body and psyche.
According to Freud and Breuer, hysterical speech and vocal sound were
devoid of meaning. Hysterical speech was mad, and it was the task of the analyst
to decode this speech and make it legible. How does this belief interact with
Zehme’s stated intentions for the singing voice, or Schoenberg’s writings about
the irrelevance of literal poetic meaning? Did they think that vocal sound could
be meaningful, or merely that it could transform affect in listeners?
Richard Kurth writes that Zehme and Schoenberg believed that the
‘meaning and inner experience of words is conveyed purely through their
sounds’ (Kurth, 2010). According to Kurth, Schoenberg’s intentions for
Sprechstimme resonate with the Symbolist belief that poetic sound is the purified
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manifestation of meaning. Pedneault‑Deslauriers makes the opposite claim, that
Sprechstimme performs a resistance to legibility that acts like the Lacanean pre‑
symbolic( Pedneault‑Deslauriers, 2011: 34)xii.
The voice I present here is indifferent to meaning or its erasure. Contrary
to both Pedneault‑Deslauriers and Kurth, I suggest that Zehme and Schoenberg
did not intend for the raw and strange voice of Sprechstimme to express or erase
meaning, but merely to transmit affects and emotions from singer to listeners.
Schoenberg’s declaration that the ecstasy of composing music for poems had no
room for semantic meaning surely didn’t intend to create new meanings.
Zehme’s proposal for a vocal sound independent from the meaning of either the
text or instrumentalized vocal technique didn’t appeal to expression. These
artists made music for the purpose of creating affect and emotion, and their
intentions resonate strongly with Freud and Breuer’s belief in the capacity of
vocal sound to transmit affect in catharsis.
My analysis doesn’t offer new ways to understand the cultural meanings
of Pierrot Lunaire as a composition, but my speculations might offer new modes
for experiencing the piece. The belief I have shown, in the capacity of the voice to
produce physiological affective change, independent from its capacity to
transport meaning, implies that Zehme and Schoenberg wanted the soprano’s
voice to affect listeners, to stir their emotions, but to refrain from lingering in
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particular affects or emotions. The intention to avoid meaningful expression is
supported by the ambiguities of Sprechstimme as a technique, and documented by
the wildly different renditions that have been presented over a century of
performance
practice.
Aiden
Soder
remarks
that
Pierrot’s
substantial
discography reveals few interpretive consistencies. Soder writes ‘Sprechstimme is
such a sophisticated, and yet, somewhat ambiguous and undefined, technique,
that it has resisted the formation of a complete, all‑inclusive, and objective
definition of what it is and how to perform it’ (Soder, 2008: 98). Assuming that
Schoenberg and Zehme intended that the Sprechstimme remain undefined to a
certain extent, and to remain ambiguously plural between speech and song,
supports my claim that the artists believed the voice could physiologically
manipulate affect and emotion. For both the techniques of Sprechstimme and
psychoanalysis, it was necessary that this embodied voice remain formless and
meaningless. At the same time, while the physical capacity of voice depended on
an absence of meaning, neither Freud and Breuer nor Zehme and Schoenberg
actively denied the capacity of the voice to mediate language. In the final chapter
of the dissertation, I will reconcile the physiological voice I’ve articulated here,
with the voice as a mediator of signification, furnishing a new reading of the
Freudian voice that reconciles the signifying voice with voices that are heard.
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WORKS CITED
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neurasthénie, psychothérapie. 3éme edition revue, corrigée et augmentée.
Paris: O. Doin & fils.
Bryn‑Julson, P. and Matthews, P. (2009), Inside Pierrot Lunaire: performing the
Sprechstimme in Schoenberg’s masterpiece. Scarecrow Press.
Byron, A. (2006), “The Test Pressings of Schoenberg Conducting Pierrot Lunaire:
Sprechstimme Reconsidered.” Music Theory Online 12.1
Carpenter, Alexander. “Schoenberg’s Vienna, Freud’s Vienna: Re‑Examining the
Connections between the Monodrama Erwartung and the Early History of
Psychoanalysis.” Musical Quarterly 93 (2010): 144–81..
Dolar, M. (2006), A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Freud, S. and Breuer, J. (1955), Studies on Hysteria. Vol. 2 of Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works. Translated by James Strachey et al.
London: Hogarth.
Freud, S. and Breuer, J. (1893), Über den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer
Phänomene (Vorläufige Mitteilung), Neurologisches Centralblatt, 12 (1), 4‑10
(Sections I‑II), and 12(2), 43‑7 (Sections III‑V). (January 1 and 15).
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The Jewish world of Sigmund Freud (pp. 66‑77). Jefferson, NC:
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Schoenberg and Words: The Modernist Years, Charlotte M. Cross and
Russell A. Berman (Eds.) New York: Garland Press, 203‑242.
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Collected Work: The Cambridge companion to Schoenberg. J. Shaw and J.
Auner (Eds.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 120‑134.
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Maines, R. (20??). ‘The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria’, the vibrator, and
female sexual satisfaction’
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Makari, G. (2008), Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. New
York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Pedneault‑Deslauriers, J. (2011), “Pierrot L.” Journal of the American
Musicological Society, 64: 3, 601‑645.
Schoenberg, A. (1912), Dreimal Sieben aus Albert Girauds “Pierrot Lunaire”,
Universal Edition, Forward.
Schoenberg, A. (1975), Style and Idea, Belmont Music Publishers, 144.
Sodor, A. (2008), Sprechstimme in Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. A Study of
Vocal Performance Practice. New York: Edwin Mellen Press
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Birth of Psychoanalysis’ Psychoanalytic Dialogs, 21:4, 373‑392.
i
An early version of this paper was presented at the 34th meeting of the Society for
Music Theory in Minneapolis, Minnesota, October 27‐30, 2011. I am grateful to Amy
Cimini and Alex Ness for reading drafts of this text, and most of all to Suzanne
Cusick, for helping me organize my thoughts, and critiquing many drafts.
ii The voice has been theorized as a psychoanalytic object by many thinkers in the
twentieth century. The most prominent contributions to this relatively large field of
inquiry are perhaps Barthes, R. (1977), ‘The Grain of the Voice’, in Image, Music,
Text; Silverman, K. (1988), The Acoustic Mirror: The Female voice in psychoanalysis
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and cinema; Dolar, M. (2006) A Voice and Nothing More; Dolor, M. (1996), ‘The
Object Voice’, in Zizek, S. and Saleci, R., Gaze and Voice as Love Objects; Lacoue‐
Labarthe, P. (1998) ‘The Echo of the Subject’, in Typography. Mimesis, Philosophy,
Politics.
iii “Der Ausführende muss sich aber sehr davor hüten, in eine “singende”
Sprechweise zu verfallen. Das ist absolut nicht gemeint. Es wird zwar keineswegs
ein realistisch‐natürliches Sprechen angestrebt. Im Gegenteil, der Unterschied
zwischen gewöhnlichem und einem Sprechen, das in einer musikalischen Form
mitwirkt, soll deutlich warden. Aber es darf auch nie an Gesang erinnern”
(Schoenberg, 1912). Translation by Peter Burt.
iv Zehme’s comments demonstrate an investment in what we would now call
extended vocal technique. In the 20th Century, it was common for composers and
performers in the European and American avant‐garde to extended instrumental
techniques beyond established conventions. Zehme’s comments present a rationale
for the compositional necessity of extended technique, of which Sprechstimme is a
form.
v “Als ich aber dann die Gedichte gelesen hatte, stellte sich für mich heraus, daß ich
dadurch für das Verständnis dieser Lieder gar nichts gewonnen hatte, da ich nicht
im geringsten durch sie genötigt war, meine Auffassung des musikalischen Vortrags
zu ändern. Im Gegenteil: es zeigte sich mir, daß ich, ohne das Gedicht zu kennen, den
Inhalt, den wirklichen Inhalt, sogar vielleicht tiefer erfaßt hatte, als wenn ich an der
Oberfläche der eigentlichen Wortgedanken haften gelieben wäre. Noch
entscheidender als dieses Erlebnis war mir die Tatsache, daß ich viele meiner
Lieder, berauscht von dem Anfangsklang der ersten Textworte, ohne mich auch nur
im geringsten um den weiteren Verlauf der poetischen Vorgängezukümmern, ja
ohne diese im Taumel des Komponierens auch nur im geringsten zu erfassen, zu
Ende geschrieben und erst nach Tagen darauf kam, nachzusehen, was denn
eigentlich der poetische Inhalt meines Liedes sei. Wobei sich dann zu meinem
größten Erstaunen herausstellte, daß ich niemals dem Dichter voller gerecht
worden bin, als wenn ich, geführt von der ersten unmittelbaren Berührung mit dem
Anfangsklang, alles erriet, was diesem Anfangsklang eben offenbar mit
Notwendigkeit folgen mußte.” (Schoenberg, 1965). Translation by Andrew Porter.
vi Über den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Phänomene (Vorläufige
Mitteilung), translated into English by James and Alix Strachey.
vii Freud and Breuer’s proposal that talk can be a form of catharsis has been taken to
locate catharsis in language by every critique of which I am aware. Instead, I
understand Freud and Breuer to say that talk itself is what produces catharsis.
viii Freud and Breuer wrote ‘We have found, to our great surprise at first, that each
individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we
had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was
provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had
described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into
words. Recollection without affect almost invariably produces no result. The
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psychical process which originally took place must be repeated as vividly as
possible; it must be brought back to its status nascendi and then given verbal
utterance.’ (Freud and Breuer, 1895).
ix Freud recounted in the case history that discovering the “original” trauma that
caused this symptom was a complicated process. He kept finding deeper traumas
that pre‐dated those he had already endeavored Frau Emmy to recall. See Freud and
Breuer, 1895. 101
x Silas Weir Mitchell advocated the seclusion of the hysteric, writing in 1874 ‘There
is often no success possible until we have broken up the whole daily drama of the
sick room, with its selfishness and its craving for sympathy and indulgence…A
hysterical girl is…a vampire who sucks the blood of the healthy people about her.’
Jane Ussher, Women’s Madness: Misogyny or mental illness?, Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1991, 76.
xi This conflation of female voice and vaginal discharge is consistent with early
modern theories about the connection between female voices and female sexuality.
See Bonnie Gordon, Monteverdi’s Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early
Modern Italy (Cambridge, 2006), 10‐47. For discussion about how these theories
may have influenced singing technique as taught to women, see Suzanne G. Cusick,
Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court (Chicago, 2009), 11‐14.
xii Peneault‐Deslauriers cites Michael Poizat’s notion of the “cry” that the singing
voice can create in moments of great cathartic release – a transformation into a pre‐
symbolic state.
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