Musical responsiveness and blocked capacity for intimacy: a comparison of music and psychology students

The hypothesis that music serves a compensatory emotional need, specifically that blocked capacity for intimacy would predict musical responsiveness, was examined in musicians and psychologists. Music and psychology students completed a musical preference scale and measures of personal relationships and capacity for intimacy. Degree of musical responsiveness was significantly related to a blocked capacity for intimacy in music students but these measures were non-significantly negatively related in psychology students. For the latter group, musical preference (i.e. degree of liking for different kinds of music) and measures of blocked capacity for intimacy were significantly negatively related to reported time spent listening to music. The results for music students are consistent with the Freudian hypothesis of sublimation and extend the work of Machotka in the realm of visual arts to that of music. The results for psychology students, however, indicate that for them music is not serving an aesthetic function in the sense defined by Wallach (1959). The most plausible explanation for the difference between music and psychology students is in terms of anxiety as a mediating variable.