During the summer of 1910, when Freud was vacationing with his family on the North Sea in the Netherlands, Gustav Mahler, in a state of deep depression, decided to consult him. The neurologist Richard Nepallek, a relative of Alma Mahler, was the go-between. The composer's "maddening doubt" led him to put off the meeting on three successive occasions. August 26 was the last day it was possible to meet Freud, since he was getting ready to travel to Sicily together with Sándor Ferenczi.

The meeting took place in a restaurant in Leyden. For four hours there took place a "psychoanalytic session," along the canals of the city where the two men walked. That summer of 1910 Mahler had experienced a personal drama: He feared his wife would leave him and became aware that his life had become that of a neurotic.

In a letter to Theodor Reik, written in 1934, Freud noted Mahler's "brilliant faculty of comprehension." This unique psychoanalytic session allowed him to discover the musician's Marian complex (mother fixation), but "no light was shed on the symptomatic façade of his obsessive neurosis." Freud continued, "If I can believe what I have heard, I have done good work." Mahler, for his part, wrote in a telegram he sent to Alma the day after the meeting, "I'm filled with joy. Interesting conversation. . . ." He died May 18, 1911, nine months later.

DOMINIQUE BLIN

See also: Music and psychoanalysis; Reik, Theodor; Walter, Bruno.