Mahler on the Couch

Mahler on the Couch is a 2010 German film directed by Percy Adlon and Felix Adlon. It is an historical drama depicting an affair between Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius, and the subsequent psychoanalysis of Mahler's husband Gustav Mahler by Sigmund Freud. Historical accuracy The affair between Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius did occur, and Gustav Mahler did consult Freud. Alma did marry Gropius several years after Gustav's death. Ty Burr pointed out in his review of the film, "No one actually knows what Mahler and Freud talked about in their meeting." Jeffrey Gantz made much the same point. The film focuses on Gustav Mahler's demand that Alma give up her own artistic efforts (composing songs) to live a more traditional life as a wife and mother, and on the stress this caused in their marriage. There is some historical support for this concept. In a biography of Alma, Oliver Hilmes writes: "In her diaries, the echo of an authentically felt as well as an alleged loss of 'her' music resounds ... 'My heart stood still,' she noted in her diary, 'Give up – give away – my music, the thing I have lived for till now. My first thought was – write him off.'" But Hilmes goes on to say, "Later Alma put the legend into the world – and that is what makes it so hard to fathom the truth of her entries – that Mahler had forbidden her from composing. Today we can see from Mahler's Dresden letter just how groundless this claim is." And there were other sources of strain: Hilmes mentions "…a lifelong hostile rivalry between Alma and Mahler's close friends." After Gustav Mahler's death in May 1911, Alma carried on a correspondence with Gropius while she was having a multi-year affair and living with Oskar Kokoschka. She married Gropius on 18 May 1915. Hilmes describes the marriage as "over before it could even begin". Hilmes concludes that the marriage had "much more to do with a social, in any case exterior convention that had her thinking she needed to marry again ... Love ... was just not part of the game." None of these complexities are dealt with in the film.