Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis by Stuart Feder
New Haven:Yale University Press, 2004. pp. viii+353.
Reviewed by Martin L. Nass, Ph.D. Clinical Professor of Psychology, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; Faculty, Training and Supervisory Analyst, New York Freudian Society; Professor Emeritus, Brooklyn College, City University of New York.
Stuart Feder, a man who has engaged in two successful careers, that of psychoanalyst and music scholar, has written a most readable and gripping biography of Gustav Mahler. He has portrayed Mahler in a most human light with all of his gifts, conflicts and struggles. In so doing, he has created a work that at times reads like a fascinating work of fiction. The book is a major contribution to Mahler studies and it is a significant addition to the field of psychoanalytic biography.
The book is subtitled, “A Life in Crisis” and deals with Mahler’s lifelong depression, mourning and preoccupation with death. In fact, to bring this into sharp focus, Feder begins the book with a quotation from Freud, (as quoted by Marie Bonaparte) regarding his experience around Mahler’s consultation with him in Holland. Mahler’s ambivalence about visiting Freud is expressed with good humor and forms a fulcrum around Mahler’s unhappiness, particularly in his last years. (Mahler died the year following his consultation with Freud). Feder skillfully reconstructs the essence of the consultation and describes it with compassion and good clinical understanding. He uses unpublished material from the diary of Marie Bonaparte to document Freud’s account of the meeting.
Mahler’s entire life was filled with experiences of death and much of his music expressed those sentiments. He was born in Kalisch in Bohemia in 1860 and the family moved a few months after his birth to the town of Iglau in Moravia. His father owned a distillery and tavern. A brother born two years before Mahler was killed in an accident and it seemed that Mahler was a replacement child and the move may have been to establish a “fresh start” for his parents. After Mahler, his mother had thirteen other children, seven of whom died by the time Mahler was 19 years old. All of the deaths were boys. The deaths of children was a recurrent theme in his life and consequently in his music. Not only did he experience the deaths of his siblings, but also his own older daughter died of diphtheria at the age of four-and-a-half years. This was a trauma to Mahler and his wife that they never recovered from and was never truly mourned. So death and the deaths of children were continually in his awareness and in his thoughts. He also considered himself to be an outsider, feeling that he didn’t belong. His is reported to have said, “I am three times without a country: a Bohemian among Austrians, an Austrian among Germans, and a Jew among the whole world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.” So notwithstanding his talent as a composer, conductor and musician, Mahler continued to be an unhappy man. He was preoccupied with hypochondriachal concerns, a consequence of his life-long depression. Feder employs his clinical expertise to demonstrate this fact.
One of the themes throughout the present book has been Mahler’s lifelong romance with death. In Mahler’s mental life, death was not only the opposite of life, but its reciprocal, death and life equated. ….At the root of all were Mahler’s early and constant experiences of familial deaths at ongoing stages of life, and the consequent and varied forms wishes for his own death assumed. (p.274)
This preoccupation with death and his inability to mourn probably derives from the fact that he experienced death at an early developmental stage. While there is some controversy over this position, Wolfenstein (1966) maintains that children cannot completely mourn until they have experienced the mourning process of adolescence. Mahler life may reflect an instance of this developmental issue.
Mahler married Alma Schindler in 1902 at the age of 41. She was 23 years old and in love with the conductor and composer Alexander Zemlinsky. Prior to that relationship, she was involved with Gustav Klimt. She gave up the relationship with Zemlinsky following the courtship with Mahler. Their marriage lasted nine years until Mahler’s death at the age of 50. Alma outlived him by 53 years. She had a profound influence on his work and gave up her own musical ambitions and activities at his request. (Zemlinsky had been her composition teacher) After Mahler’s death she wrote two books dealing with their relationship. Alma was a formidable presence as a woman. During their marriage, she had an affair with Walter Gropius. Alma’s mother served as go-between for the lovers while maintaining a cordial relationship with Mahler. In this way, she also repeated a phase of her own life where she had an affair with her husband’s young student and eventually married himIt was in 1910, the year before Mahler’s death that Alma met Gropius. Mahler learned of the affair as a result of an acting-out by Gropius when he addressed a love letter to Alma to “Herr Direktor Mahler” and sent it to their residence instead of to a post office. It was shortly thereafter that Mahler consulted Freud and took the “walking cure” around the city of Leiden in Holland. While Freud was helpful to him, Mahler only lived until the following year.
Following the consultation, Mahler recovered his potency. Ernest Jones says, “..the marriage was a happy one until his death, which unfortunately took place only a year later.” (Jones, Vol II, p.80) What bears more directly to this issue is a part of a letter that Freud sent to Marie Bonaparte in 1925 regarding the consultation. He said in part,
(Mahler’s) father, apparently a brutal person, treated his wife very badly and when Mahler was a young boy, there was a specially painful scene between them. It became unbearable to the boy, who rushed away from the house. At that moment, however, a hurdy-gurdy in the street was grinding out “Ach du lieber Augustin.” In Mahler’s opinion the conjunction of high tragedy and light amusement was from then on inextricably fixed in his mind and the one mood inevitably brought the other with it.
Alma married Gropius in 1915 some five years after Mahler’s death. The daughter from this marriage died of polio at the age of 16. Alban Berg dedicated his violin concerto to her memory. Alma was a rather flirtatious woman who had involvements with many men of the Viennese literary and artistic circles, including Oskar Kokoschka, by whom she became pregnant. . Her last husband was the writer Franz Werfel. One would wonder why Mahler, who was described by his wife as sexually awkward and inexperienced with women, would chose such a vivacious, flirtatious woman who was sought after by many men and about whom he was most anxious regarding the attentions of other men. At one time, he summoned Alma and Gropius to a meeting during which Mahler insisted that she choose between them.
In connection with the Freud consultation, one would wonder why Freud, who was so strict about confidentiality, would disclose the information to his patient, Marie Bonaparte fifteen years later. . She began analysis with him in September of 1925, and remained until 1929, so the communication regarding Mahler was made early in the analysis and early in their relationship, which lasted until his death in 1939. (It was she who got the Freud family out of Austria and into Britain) Obviously, something stimulated this on Freud’s part. According to her diary, there was a rather social tinge to their sessions in which Freud discussed with her many of his ailments. It was she, incidentally, who introduced Freud to Max Schur who became his physician and then undertook psychoanalytic training. Freud had visited her when she was in a hospital attended by Schur. Marie Bonaparte was considered to be one of Freud’s “special” women, who like Lou Andreas Salomé had strong intellectual interests and numerous liaisons with prominent writers and men of letters. . Alma Mahler was also such a woman. Could this be some of the motivation to discuss Mahler with his patient fifteen years after their consultation? Or could it be some of the Princess’s own analytic material that triggered this off in Freud, particularly the primal scene derivative?
In his book, Feder has seamlessly woven in some of his previous studies of Mahler, written over the last 25 or more years. It is quite clear that Gustav Mahler, his life, his psychology and his conflicts has been a passionate area of research for him and the style and personalized portrayal of the major subjects of study clearly reflect this fact. The book is written in a flowing, readable style with good documentation consisting of chapter notes and an index. My only issue about the format is that it does not contain a bibliography of works cited. This makes it difficult to check references without seeking them out in the notes of each chapter.
In reading this work, the reader is brought into the musical, literary, and artistic life of late 19th and early 20th century Vienna with its exciting intellectual and artistic scene. This provides an additional dimension to an already exciting and stimulating book.
REFERENCES
Bertin, C.(1982) Marie Bonaparte: A Life. New York:Harcourt.
Jones, E. (1955) The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2. New York: Basic Books.
Wolfenstein, M. (1966) How is mourning possible? Psychoanal. Study Child, 21: 93-126.