Abstract
Attempts to link Mahler with the world of psychology have been predominantly biographical and/or psychoanalytical in nature (Feder, McGrath, Ringel, Flesch) while some have embraced phenomenological or existentialist themes within similar contexts (Greene, Holbrook). Rather than engage in so-called ‘necropsychiatry’, this paper instead brings developments in radical pre-Freudian psychological theorizing into the historical analysis of the late 19th-century Austro-German cultural networks surrounding the composer. It explores the implications for his music of the turn from idealist, top-down ‘content’ psychology to empirical, inductive ‘dynamic’ cognitive models in the work of, among others, Wundt and Brentano. The latter’s role as precursor to phenomenology, and interrelationships between empirical psychology and musicology via Hanslick, Adler and Kurth in turn-of-the-century Viennese intellectual contexts invite consideration of oppositional topographical and temporal models of consciousness and their significance for notions of linear dynamics, and more recent fashionable theories of narrativity, in the analysis of Mahler’s symphonic music.