ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author provides a more precise example of one kind of relationship between the musical and extramusical contexts of an emerging song. As he listens to a woman's complaint about her husband's impotence, the ditty Three Blind Mice occurs to him, words and tune, anticipating perfectly his later judgment regarding her character. E. L. Freud implies three separate problems in the question of the haunting melody: its emergence from the unconscious, the extramusical context that lends it its obsessional significance, the question whether an intrinsically musical factor, alone or combined with extramusical factors, can account for the sudden emergence of a tune. The fact that a tune emerges before a verbal or other extramusical context reaches consciousness proves only the presence of isolation, a mechanism that is clearly not restricted to musical obsessions.
