Listening to the talking cure: Sprechstimme, hypnosis, and the sonic organization of affect
In the 10 October 1912 issue of the Berliner Börsen-Courrier, conductor Otto Taubman described the vocal performance in Arnold Schoenberg’s modernist masterwork Pierrot Lunaire as ‘full of hysterical, distorted artificiality’1 (Pedneault-Deslauriers 2011: 601). The 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 Zehme’s 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 Pedneault-Deslauriers has argued that Schoenberg’s artistic intentions for Pierrot Lunaire resonated 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, Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, who developed the so-called talking cure. 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’s 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 empirical voice to ideas expressed by Schoenberg and Zehme about the capacity of the voice to produce affect and emotion.
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.2
We can glean 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 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 objet petit a, which included voice and gaze, and this structural definition positions the voice always already in relation between a subject and Other. In his 2006 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’3 (Dolar 2006: 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 material voice independently from its theoretical role as conveyor of thought. In this chapter, I focus on the voice solely as a producer of empirical sound, linking this production to the pathological functions theorized by Freud and Breuer.
My analysis asserts that the sonic exchange between doctor and patient that made semantic communication possible was not merely a medium through which thoughts were conveyed, but a physical material that had pathological implications. A closer look at the 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 analyses 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 Lunaire: 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 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 must always be on guard against falling into a ‘singing’ manner of speech. That is absolutely not intended. But neither should he aim for a realistic-natural speech. Quite the opposite, there should always be a clear difference between customary speech and speech that contributes to a musical effect. But this should never remind one of song.4 (Byron 2006: 2.6)
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 programme note from her 1911 vocal recital, premiered 18 months before 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 programme note, Zehme wrote of her intentions for the voice:
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 feelings.5 Of the conventional singing voice, she wrote:
The singing voice, bound in otherworldly chastity, fixed in its ascetic 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 endeavoured 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 labelled 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:
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. (Bryn-Julson and Matthews 2009: 36)
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 (Carpenter 2010). However, it is not my intention to show that these artists applied Freud’s ideas directly to their work, but rather to 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 that both sets of writings suggest an epistemological shift in the capacity of the voice to transmit affect.
Talking cure
In their ‘Preliminary Communication from Studies on Hysteria’, from 1895, 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)
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 action.6 How can ‘speaking itself’ be an action of catharsis? To answer this question, we must consider the role of sound and speech in hypnosis.
Speech in hypnosis
Although it had fallen out of favour 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 such as 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 a common model of nineteenth-century neurology and psychiatry. This model, called associationalism, held that the process of ‘suggestion’ worked as follows: a subject’s psyche included her ‘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 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 say ‘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 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.7
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 suffered from a hysterical tic in which she made a ‘strange clacking sound with her mouth’ (Freud and Breuer 1955: 54). Freud endeavoured 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 1955: 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 symptom.8
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, 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
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 a longer history than the use 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 bc 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’, the Vibrator, and Female Sexual Satisfaction, Rachel Maines (1999) documents the treatment of hysteria through genital manipulation, showing that this practice was 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 nineteenth century included manual investigation of the uterus, bloodletting by leeches on the uterus, injections and cauterization or burning of the womb. Other approaches included hydrotherapy, electrotherapy, massage and the Weir Mitchell Rest Cure.9 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 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 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 Pappenheim’s 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 1955). While they admit 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 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 has been purported to release mysterious tensions that cause 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 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.10
Through my reading of the talking cure as a theory of the physiological curing potential of the voice, I endeavoured 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 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.
Sprechstimme, hysteria, and irrationality
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 to create 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.
In her analysis of the Sprechstimme in Pierrot Lunaire, Julie Pedneault-Deslauriers uses this construction of the hysterical voice, cast as lack of signification. 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 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, independent from words, could be meaningful, or merely that vocal sound itself could transform affect in listeners?
Richard Kurth writes that Zehme and Schoenberg believed that the poetic meaning of words is conveyed purely through their uttered sound (Kurth 2010: 124). According to Kurth, Schoenberg’s intentions for Sprechstimme resonate with the Symbolist belief that poetic sound is the purified manifestation of meaning. Pedneault-Deslauriers makes the opposite claim, that Sprechstimme performs a resistance to legibility that acts like the Lacanian pre-symbolic (Pedneault-Deslauriers 2011: 34).11
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 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 hover ambiguously 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.
Notes
Acknowledgement
An early version of this chapter was presented at the 34th meeting of the Society for Music Theory in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 27–30 October (2011). I am grateful to Ian Biddle, Marie Thompson, Amy Cimini and Alex Ness for reading and commenting on drafts of this text, and to Adele Mitchell for editorial advice. Most of all, I am grateful to Suzanne Cusick, for helping me organize my thoughts, and critiquing many versions of this chapter.
1 ‘… ein[e] Rezitation der Verse voll hysterisch verzerrter Unnatur.’ Taubmann, Berliner Börsen-Courier, 10 October 1912, in Brinkmann, Kritischer Bericht (Pierrot lunair), 248. Quoted in Pedneault-Deslauriers (2011).
2 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 (1977); Silverman (1988); Dolar (2006; 1996); Lacoue-Labarthe (1998, ‘The Echo of the Subject’). While diverse in their approach to the psychoanalytic voice, none of these thinkers address empirical voices.
3 Dolar clarifies elsewhere that Lacan’s theory does not coincide with heard voices, writing: ‘In order to conceive the voice as the object of the drive, we must divorce it from the empirical voices that can be heard. Inside the heard voices is an unheard voice, an aphonic voice, as it were. For what Lacan called objet petit a – to put it simply – does not coincide with any existing thing, although it is always evoked only by bits of materiality, attached to them as an invisible, inaudible appendage, yet not amalgamated with them: it is both evoked and covered, enveloped by and conceals the voice; the voice is not somewhere else, but it does not coincide with voices that are heard’ (Dolar 2006: 73–4. Quoted in Lagaay 2008: 61).
4 Original text in German can be found in Schoenberg, Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds Pierrot Lunaire (1990, Forward).
5 Zehme’s comments demonstrate an investment in what we would now call extended vocal technique. In the twentieth 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.
6 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.
7 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 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 1955: 101)
8 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 endeavoured Frau Emmy to recall. See Freud and Breuer (1895: 101).
9 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’ (Ussher 1991: 76).
10 This conflation of female voice and vaginal discharge is consistent with early modern theories about the connection between female voices and female sexuality (see Gordon 2006: 10–47). For discussion about how these theories may have influenced singing technique as taught to women, see Cusick (2009: 11–14).
11 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.