When Mahler met Freud

In 1910, at a desperate time in his life, though at the height of his fame, Gustav Mahler decided to seek the advice of the equally celebrated Sigmund Freud. 

He had returned to Europe after an exhausting tour of America, just before which he had suffered the devastating loss of his daughter Maria, and he had been diagnosed with a form of heart disease. 

And that Summer he discovered that his wife was involved with another man.

After a couple of cancellations – perhaps he was wary of what he would learn – Mahler eventually arranged to meet Freud in Leiden in Holland, on 26 August.

Freud and his family were on holiday and staying nearby, but were about to leave for Italy. So this was Mahler’s last chance. Freud took the tram into town, and they spent four hours together, meeting at The Gilded Turk café and walking through the botanical gardens until late in the evening.

It seems they found an immediate rapport. Indeed, despite Freud lacking much interest in music, they had much in common, with their Viennese backgrounds and being of a similar age (Mahler was 50 and Freud 54). Freud had also travelled to America. They were pre-eminently deep thinkers.  

Freud apparently said he’d never met anyone who so quickly understood the nature of psychoanalysis. 

Various accounts of this meeting speculate on how Freud would have analysed Mahler, and what advice he might have offered. We know that Mahler told his life story – plenty enough to occupy the four-hour walk. He would have related episodes from his emotionally traumatic childhood: his violent father, the untimely death of his brother Ernst, and, we can assume, the incident he related elsewhere when he rushed from the house to escape hearing his parents quarrel, and was stopped short by the music of a barrel organ playing, incongruously, an amusing folk melody - an experience that he drew on in juxtaposing extremes of emotion and context in his music. 

Recent events would also have occupied them. Mahler had had to leave his post at the Vienna Opera, and, the main reason for the meeting, his wife Alma’s affair with Walter Gropius. (After Mahler’s death, Alma and Gropius would marry, and he went on to found of the Bauhaus school of architecture after the war.)

Psychoanalysts agree that Freud would have identified a mother fixation. For Mahler, Alma Mahler had become a mother figure, whom he could not bear to lose. Throughout their life together, he and Alma had wild, obsessive swings from being utterly devoted to desperately needing to get away from each other. Notoriously, Mahler wrote her a letter before their marriage, explaining that her life would have to be committed and subordinated entirely to his in order for him to achieve his musical vocation: "The role of composer, the worker's role, falls to me, yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner”, he wrote, demanding that she abandon her own musical ambitions, including composing. We know that Freud told Mahler that this was damaging, and after the meeting Mahler did encourage Alma to compose. He also dedicated his Eighth Symphony to her – it received a triumphant first performance in Munich in September that year. 

However, Alma kept up her relationship with Gropius, albeit discreetly. The meeting with Freud seems to have been helpful, but the two never met again. Mahler died just eight months later, in May 2011.

Sources include
https://mahlerfoundation.org/mahler/locations/netherlands/leiden/meeting-with-freud/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23439545/
https://www.npr.org/2010/07/02/128192566/a-composer-on-the-couch-mahler-meets-freud
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Mahler

See also:

When Margery Kempe met Julian of Norwich
When Milton met Galileo
When Conrad met Laurence of Arabia
When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

When James met Eliot

When Keats met Wordsworth

When Shaw met Kipling