Bodily claustrophobia and the music: A psychoanalytic note on Beethoven’s Fidelio

Freud held that creative writers – and this might be extended to artists generally  – could arrive intuitively at the same knowledge that psychoanalysis acquires through a laborious empirical process (Freud, 1907). Of all the arts, music, by its nature, is the one that lends itself most particularly to evoking the most profound aspects of a human being:  indeed, Schopenhauer claimed, with good reason, that it allowed one to apprehend the nature of the world without the mediation of representations.