Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Walter, Bruno (1876-1962)

The celebrated conductor and composer Bruno Walter was born in Berlin on September 15, 1876, and died in Los Angeles on February 17, 1962.

Born German, Bruno Walter Schlesinger was naturalized as an Austrian citizen in 1911, took French citizenship in 1938, and became an American citizen in 1948. Dropping his surname in favor of "Walter" represented an identification with Walther von Stolzing, the hero of Wagner's comic opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Walter's musical training took place in Berlin, Cologne, and Hamburg, where he met avant-garde composer Gustav Mahler, who became his mentor and whom he followed to Vienna. There he began a brilliant career as conductor and pianist, and was also Mahler's staunch defender.

Walter was an active participant on the unique and complex intellectual scene in turn-of-the-century Vienna, and his introduction to psychoanalysis occurred in 1906, while a young conductor and Mahler's protegé.Thenata crucial stage in life, he suffered from a paralyzing neuralgia and, after consulting a number of specialists, he decided to seek help from Freud. From Walter's autobiography we know the course and outcome of their meeting, which has been the subject of a small number of studies. Freud's work with Walter was unusual in that he operated less as psychoanalyst than as a psychiatric consultant.

Indeed, while the young Walter expected months of psychological investigation, Freud, after a physical exam and a single visit, prescribed sojourns in Italy and Sicily. The impact of the consultation had such an effect that Walter obeyed immediately. His subsequent treatment with Freud resembled therapy by suggestion such as was common in the nineteenth century. When Walter asked Freud if he would be able to play in front of an audience because he feared a relapse, Freud took upon himself the responsibility, assuming the role of a protective paternal figure and inducing an almost hypnotic effect upon Walter, traces of which were still discernable forty years later.

The case history of Bruno Walter was discovered by the Austrian analyst Richard Sterba, who also emigrated to the United States and was a great music lover. Since his 1951 publication, this unusual affair has come regularly under scrutiny, whether for purely historical value, as a key example of brief therapy, for Freud's use of a somatic approach, or even as a method of treating the so-called "actual neuroses."

The close-knit Viennese artistic milieu fostered fortuitous encounters. Mahler, for example, also had a therapeutic consultation with Freud; and Ernest Jones, in the second volume of Freud's biography, mentions that it took place to the intervention of Viennese neurologist Richard Nepallek, who also happened to be a relative of Mahler's wife, Alma. Others have suggested Walter as the source of the consultation, but have not been able to prove it. It is true that during the 1930s Walter collaborated with Herbert Graf, better known in psychoanalytic circles as "Little Hans." Whether these experiences intensified Walter's powerful admiration for Freud, as revealed by Sterba, is not known.

NICOLAS GOUGOULIS

See also: Music and psychoanalysis; Suggestion.