Gustav Mahler (Meeting with Sigmund Freud)
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.
Mahler and Freud
"In the spring of 1910, Gustav Mahler casually discovered that his brand-new wife Alma, with whom he was deeply in love, was succumbing to the insistence and flattery of the young architest Walter Gropius, future founder of Bauhaus. Intimately affected, the musician arranged an appointment with Sigmund Freud and visited the already celebrated psychoanalyst at his office. Freud dedicated to him a sole and intense session of four hours, at the end of which he dismissed him, comforted. On May 18, 1911, Mahler died. And it was more or less then when the psychoanalyst realized that he had not delivered an invoice. Without thinking twice, Freud wrote out a "Quittung", signed it, attached two fiscal stamps, dated it ("Vienna, October 24, 1911"), and sent it to the musician's heirs, that is, to Alma, with the specification "for medical services rendered". And that invoice is precisely one of the lots which will be auctioned at Christie's in Paris on July 5, for an estimated price between 4,000 and 6,000 euros."