ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses an episode that masks a complex set of cultural relations organizing the music therapy practised in a nineteenth-century German asylum which pioneered an approach to psychiatry emphasizing sensory stimulation over pharmaceutics or routines of persuasion. It would lead too far astray here to present this psychiatric approach in all its diagnostic, etiologic and therapeutic distinctiveness, or equally to attempt an exhaustive description of the cultural conditions which organized that approach. Yet we cannot appreciate the music therapy it spawned without recognizing that pre-Freudian German psychiatry was directed towards a peculiar soul-organ called the Gemiith, which, by all accounts, suffered its own forms of illness, required its own forms of treatment and was peculiarly susceptible to sensory stimulation, especially music. The chapter explores the phenomenal process that characterizes music therapy by relating the efficacy of Illenau's musical cures not primarily to the music per se, but to their reception in the cultural context of nineteenth-century Germany.
