Only logged in members can reply and interact with the post.
Join SimilarWorlds for FREE »

I Analyze My Dreams

After I retired on the evening of Thursday December 12, 2013 I had the following dream about the German composer, Ludwig van Beethoven. I had had a therapy session with my psychiatrist earlier that afternoon.

[i]Beethoven and I are alone in a room. We talk about music. I feel awe, enthrallment and narcissistic elation talking to Beethoven. I ask him what he plans to write after the series of string quartets he’s working on. I feel sadness because I know that in fact Beethoven died after he completed his late string quartets. I know that he will not write any more music. He tells me that he has not decided what he will write after he completes his series of quartets. He tells me that he will never write another symphony, piano sonata, or string quartet. I suggest that maybe he will write something in variation form. He says, “perhaps.” He then launches into a long technical discussion about the variation form. I don’t understand anything that he says but I listen with keen interest. I then said, “People say that every musical form you tackle, you seem to exhaust. Your compositions are such a comprehensive statement in every form you write in that you leave nothing for the composers who will follow you. You say everything there is to say.” Beethoven responds, “I have heard that. I don’t believe it. Composers who come after me will write symphonies, piano sonatas and string quartets.” (Beethoven was deaf from about the age of 35 onward).[/i]

EVENTS OF THE PREVIOUS DAY:

1. I have a session with my psychiatrist in the late afternoon. I attempt to say something about Beethoven (“Sunday is Beethoven’s birthday“), but the psychiatrist cuts me off, “Maybe we’ll get to that later.” Perhaps my feeling of being cut off by the psychiatrist corresponds to Beethoven dying relatively young at the age of 56. Beethoven’s life was cut short before he completed his life’s work, while he still had something to say.

I spent the session with my psychiatrist talking about the issue of narcissistic elation. ‘”Narcissistic elation” was a term used by Béla Grunberger to highlight ‘the narcissistic situation of the primal self in narcissistic union with the mother’. The term was coined to describe the state of prenatal beatitude, which according to Grunberger characterizes the life of the fetus: a state of megalomaniacal happiness amounting to a perfect homeostasis, devoid of needs or desires. The ideal here is bliss experienced in absolute withdrawal from the object and from the outside world. Narcissistic elation is at once the memory of this unique and privileged state of elation; a sense of well-being of completeness and omnipotence linked to that memory, and pride in having experienced this state, pride in its (illusory) oneness. Narcissistic elation is characteristic of an object relationship that is played out, in its negative version, as a state of splendid isolation, and, in its positive version, as a desperate quest for fusion with the other, for a mirror-image relationship (i.e., a relationship with an idealized other). It involves a return to paradise lost and all that is attached to this idea: fusion, self-love, megalomania, omnipotence, immortality, and invulnerability. Narcissistic elation may subsequently be reactivated within a therapeutic context. Edmund Bergler wrote of ‘the narcissistic elation that comes from self-understanding’ (i.e., as through psychoanalysis); while Herbert Rosenfeld described what he called the re-emergence of ‘”narcissistic omnipotent object relations”…in the clinical situation’.

2. My treating psychiatrist had practiced psychiatry in Vienna, Austria for twenty years. Beethoven’s funeral was held in Vienna in March 1827.

3. Earlier in the day I had an appointment with the nurse practitioner who prescribes my psychiatric medications. At the consult she said to me, “You have no friends.” At Beethoven’s funeral, the composer’s friend Franz Grillparzer gave a funeral oration which contains an observation that I have long identified with: “He fled the world because he did not find, in the whole compass of his loving nature, a weapon with which to resist it. He withdrew from his fellow men after he had given them everything and had received nothing in return. He remained alone because he found no second self (i.e., a “mirror-image object” The quest for such an object is an aspect of narcissistic elation).” It is estimated that from 20,000 to 30,000 people attended Beethoven’s memorial service. Beethoven had achieved fame.

My book Significant Moments quotes Grillparzer’s funeral oration:

I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, . . .
[b]Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.[/b]
… he wrote to his sister in Basel:
[b]Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.[/b]
. . . when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate in my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother!
[b]Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.[/b]
Nietzsche’s loneliness was caused by his inner plight, for only the very few were receptive to what he said, and perhaps he wasn’t aware of even these few. Thus, he would rather be alone than together with people who did not understand him.
[b]Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.[/b]
He remained alone, because he found no second self.
[b]Barry Cooper, Beethoven quoting Grillparzer’s Funeral Oration.[/b]
In his solitude, he had new ideas and made new discoveries; since they were based on his most personal experiences, but at the same time concealed them, they were difficult to share with others, and they only deepened his loneliness and the gulf between him and those around him.
[b]Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.[/b]

4. On December 10, 2013, I posted the following quote from President Obama’s speech at the memorial service in South Africa for Nelson Mandela. The memorial service was held in a sports stadium; thousands attended:

Mandela showed us the power of action; of taking risks on behalf of our ideals. Perhaps Madiba was right that he inherited, “a proud rebelliousness, a stubborn sense of fairness” from his father. Certainly he shared with millions of black and colored South Africans the anger born of, “a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments…a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people.”

The quotation highlights Mandela’s stubbornness and rebelliousness.

5. On December 12, 2013 I learn that the sign language interpreter assigned to interpret the public speakers at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service was a fake. He was an alleged schizophrenic whose signing, according to those knowledgeable about signing, was gibberish. Beethoven was deaf.

6. In the evening I posted a biographical video about Beethoven on this blog. The video is titled, “The Rebel,” and talks about Beethoven’s social isolation, his rebelliousness, his desire for fame, and his stubbornness. That evening I also did some research on the Internet and discovered that according to the Meyers-Briggs classification system, Beethoven would be classified as INTJ. This created a sense of identification since I have taken the Meyers-Briggs test and also scored INTJ. I may have registered the notion that Beethoven and I were mirror-image objects.

 
Post Comment