Here is the chain of events that led to today’s blog. Another one of those days of just me and the dog at home. I: trying to play the piano, as I only do when no-one is around given how much my skills have deteriorated these days. The dog: doing his best to make me stop, sharing that quality assessment, I guess. I: trying to explain to him the complicated structure of Bach’s fugues and how I needed to concentrate. He telling me in no uncertain terms that he hates counter point and really wants someone to throw a  ball.

Guess who won?

And guess who, reduced to reading, came across an interesting essay by Freud, flagged by someone who wrote about Bach’s ability to invoke both joy and fear, horror and beauty, exact opposites in his compositions?  Freud’s (1910) essay is called The Antithetical Meaning of primal Words (Über den Gegensinn der Urworte) and starts with a reference to his work on dreams and their ability to combine contraries into a unity – said simply: something can stand for both one meaning and its opposite. He then introduces an 1884 text by a historical linguist, Karl Abel, that describes at length a peculiarity of ancient languages. They contained, according to Abel, numerous words that have two meanings, one the exact opposite of the other. Some old Egyptian word might mean wet as well as dry, for example. Further, he claims, there were compound words that bind together things of opposite meaning (old- young, far-near) but they express only one of them.  All this was postulated for Egyptian, Semitic and Indo-European languages (and, coincidentally published at the same time in the late 1800s when Marx had written extensively about dialectics…)

Freud enthusiastically took off with finding words in the more familiar Latin that seemed proof for this: altus means high and low, sacer means sacred and accursed, and so on. Then he explored German, and wouldn’t you know it there were words with opposite meaning: e.g. Boden meaning the lowest part of the house as well as the attic… voila, archaic languages provided the pattern that re-appeared in dreams.

You can read his deductions now linking this perceived pattern to the analysis of dreams yourself (if you are not distracted by a bored puppy…) https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_Antithetical.pdf

Only one problem: The bulk of Abel’s work was thoroughly discredited, it’s a croc; and that was already established by serious philologists in the late 19th century, for sure at the time of Freud’s writing. Freud was clearly seduced by a claimed pattern that fit with his hypothesizing around his discoveries and methods in his psychoanalytic studies. Whether he willfully ignored or was just hopelessly blind to the state of the art in linguistics, who knows. It is certainly the case that we are all subject to this kind of confirmation bias.

Independent of dreams, it is a fact that contradictory emotions can be experienced when listening to a single piece of music, and that patterns can be woven into compositions that are of a dialectical nature. Nobody did that better than J.S. Bach. Which was what started this whole train of thought….

Photographs today of some lovely point/counterpoint reflections, collected during fall.