T
,28 REPORTS
musical sound is found in species which have in the course of theur evolution just succeeded in establishing genital sexuality, in the moment just before copulation. The seasonal commencement of their libido created in the first place a narcissistic tension (also shown by various somatic extensions of their organism, swollen ' body, pockets filled with blood or often with air, horns, ornamental
plumage, etc.) which the animal is perhaps not able to get rid of through the outlet of its genital system because the libido has to pass through a period of ripening in which it probably repeats the phases of its evolution. At first it attempts to confine the superfluous quantity of libido to die erotogenic zones of its own body, thereby letting this libido retain its cadiexis and placing the muscles in a state of characteristic tonic stiffness. As the Ubidinal tension increases this limitation to the erotogenic zones is insufBcient and the animal in availing itself of a formerly used instrument attempts to liberate itself from this tension by now emitting a substitute— air{thus imitating the manner of division and separation of a part of the libido-bearing body). Because this air as the bearer of the narcissistic libido escapes through an ero- togenic zone charged with libido— a contracted sphincter— it acquires the characteristic quality of the sensuaUy agreeable impression and its meaning as a simple objectless expression of the internal pro- \ cesses of the ego. The speaker also designates this process as a
"P normal hysteria which is founded on a primal repression and
i mentions furthermore several other connections of this theme with
I • individual psychology and with pathology.
Discmsim: Dr. S. Rado has objections to the methods of this report as it dealt exclusively with phylogenetical-biological specu- lations. Even though Freud has lately introduced die ethnological point of view mto analytical research by tlie side of metapsych- ological speculation, he has done this surely to complement rather than to displace the present ontogenetically orientated empiric method of approach. The analyst as investigator of the psychology of music could assemble observations in great numbers and ought to obtain from experience the points of attack for the theoretic treatment of die subject. Though the psycho-analytical fictions of the speaker concerning the psycho-physiology of the creation of sound by birds, frogs and the like, may be here and there ever so ingenious and plausible, they are dangerously hasty before such phenomena have been studied on the human being.
