Blue Eyes, Lacanian Real : A psychoanalytic reading of Gustav Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen

Abstract: Gustav Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (first published 1887) feature as their only character a miserable wayfarer who laments his unrequited love for someone and who, in spite of all his beautiful pastoral surroundings, cannot help but feel deep unhappiness. Using Lacan’s three orders (Imaginary, Symbolic and Real) and further developments of his theory by Slavoj Žižek in The Sublime Object of Ideology, I argue that the eyes of the wayfarer’s beloved are the Lacanian Real that disrupts his symbolic network and thus are the origin of his traumatic existence. His misery becomes an immanent part of his identity and he can therefore only exist through this feeling. Furthermore I suggest that, although he laments the situation, he subconsciously desires the unhappy love affair as a way of guaranteeing his own existence as a wayfarer, in accordance with Freud’s concept of Repetition compulsion.