(For example: in my studies of the symphonies, I am forever blithely pointing out developments, derivations, metamorphoses, correspondences and allusions in the motivic working, and perhaps I give too much of an impression that all these details were consciously calculated . I'm damn sure that a significantly large proportion of them were; I'm equally sure that many of them arose spontaneously, with no conscious worry on Brian's part as to how they fitted as piece in the puzzle. This isn't to suggest that at some times he "knew what he was doing", and at others didn't: rather, that he "knew" in both cases, but that we have to widen our definition of "knowing". Brian's approach was creative, not analytical. We have no means of distinguishing whether any particular motivic allusion, apart from the immediately obvious ones, is "conscious" or "unconscious". I simply see it as my duty to point out what is there in the scores, and how it seems to function in an overall process.)

I would, however, have liked to see Mr.Nettel further develop a subject which he just touches on at the end of "The Joker", and hints at obliquely elsewhere in the articles - though I have heard him state it directly in conversation: that Brian's great creative secret was that he had learned to make use of his unconscious mind: that he could summon up his music, or at least the driving conceptions behind it, through meditation, often with a work of literature as catalyst. His role as an artist was to respond to, but also capture and channel, these outpourings from the psyche.

I can't help feeling - though it's a dangerous area, where I wallow in ignorance - that the second-hand post-Freudianism which serves, at least in this country, as the dominant psychiatric orthodoxy, is not going to be a great help to us in understanding Brian (apart, perhaps, from elucidating some of his obsessional neuroses). Freud, if I understand correctly, thought the unconscious was a nasty dark hole into which we repressed everything that gave us the horrors.

And it wasn't Freud, the "father of psychoanalysis", who coined that familiar phrase. It was the man Freud stigmatized as his "errant son" -who as a result is still intellectually distrusted, little-read, and whose thinking is, in any case, much more difficult to grasp: because, unlike Freud, he propounded no dogma, passed fewer moral judgements, and spent his life exploring the contents of the unconscious which Freud believed himself to have adequately catalogued already: Carl Gustav Jung.

Now, if my grasp of Freud is sketchy, my understanding of Jung is probably even slighter, but I do know the following:

I. That while Freud evolved his psychology in the treatment of hysteria and obsessional neuroses (as Reginald Nettel points out, Brian was something of a prey to the latter), Jung's insights into the unconscious stemmed from his work with schizophrenics (and while cautiously agreeing with Harold Truscott's conclusion, in his essay on the Gothic, that Brian's music contains a "schizoid" element - using the term loosely and unclinically - I think I would go further and hazard the opinion that certain aspects of Brian himself, his obliqueness, deviousness and secretiveness especially, may amount to clinically identifiable symptoms of a schizoid personality. I do not suggest that Brian was therefore "a schizophrenic" - I think that, like Jung, he possessed a strong enough ego to withstand a total mental collapse, and was able instead to capitalize on the experience in his creative work,).

II. That Jung was specifically interested in the creative aspects of the unconscious mind.

III. That Jung developed what seems, on the face of it, a far more sensible, pragmatic and informative method of dream-analysis than that practised by Freud. (I would be fascinated to see a really high-powered Jungian analysis of some of those dreams which Brian wrote down and which obviously meant a lot to him - especially the "Nuremberg" dream he recounts in "How the 'Gothic' Symphony came to be written": as Reginald Nettel points out, he needed no psychiatrist to tell him these were important communications from his unconsciousness. I'm not equipped to interpret the "Nuremberg" dream, but it seems numinous in the extreme.)

I don't want to give the impression that I am trying to stir up some kind of academic contest between "Freudian" and "Jungian" interpretations of Brian and his music. I daresay that most people would find such a debate bewilderingly far from their experience of the works themselves. Mr.Nettel is quite right, too, to warn us away from any "doctrinaire" approach to Brian's psychology. But insofar as I understand anything about Jung, he doesn't seem to have laid down any fixed doctrine or dogma (indeed, he once said that he wanted there to be no school of "Jungians" to petrify his work), but to have developed a means of holding a dialogue with the contents of an individual's unconscious, and of exploring the relationship, in that individual, between the conscious and unconscious minds .I think this could, ultimately, prove relevant to our understanding of Brian's creative achievement.

But I have a different reason for invoking the name of Jung: namely a bunch that it may be possible to arrive at an overall conception of Brian's work by a direct comparison between his career and that of the Swiss psychologist. During the years 1917-19, Jung himself went through a period of acute mental stress, with marked schizophrenic characteristics. His psychological disturbance seems to have had several different causes -a "mid-life crisis", the violent break with the father-figure Freud, guilt about this and about the complications of his marital life; also, he felt, the influence of the apocalyptic zeitgeist which presently broke forth throughout Europe in the shape of the Great War.

Recognizing his own danger, he decided to psychoanalyze himself, to seek a "confrontation with the unconscious", to "probe the depths of his own psyche". Through this long and painful process he arrived at the insights which he spent the rest of his long life refining and exploring in a vast body of writings, many of them of daunting density and allusiveness.

What I'm trying to say here, I think - and it's a view I've been gradually moving towards over several-years - is that The Gothic cannot be evaluated purely as a musical phenomenon, without a recognition that it constitutes a psychic one as well. (And maybe even a psychotherapeutic one. One of the means by which Jung eventually came to terms with his mental turmoil was to paint mandalas - circular quasi-abstract drawings symbolic of him inner state, whose shapes usually resolve into four quarters. Though the mandala seems to be ultimately Oriental in origin, Jung points out that it has been well-known in European art for millenia, and that it has a more familiar Western counterpart, the cross.

The motto from Faust on The Gothic's title-page gives further cause for thought. Goethe, and his Faust in particular exercised a life-long fascination on Brian. On Jung also. It was Jung's contention that Goethe, in his heroic adaptation of the Faust legend; had created a potent symbolic drama of the struggle of the artist (Faust) with the ungovernable forces of the unconscious (Mephistopheles). In the 'On the Other Hand" column of the March 1939 issue of Musical Opinion Brian, writing as "La Main Gauche", published a short article about Goethe's Faust which in general parallels Jung's conclusions. Much more striking is the fact that some of Brian's comments on Faust duplicate the phraseology he had used about himself in "How the 'Gothic' Symphony came to be written" (published four months previously): for instance, Faust is "seeking a solution to the mysteries of the unknown".

Perhaps this can extend our insight into the relationship between Faust and The Gothic; and possibly between Brian's symphonies and literary sources of inspiration generally. I think I would take issue with Mr.Nettel when he says that "as time went on [Brian] found extra-musical ideas unnecessary and the later ideas became quite abstract". In some ways I believe Brian's music may have become more, not less, programmatic. But the programmatic element became more profound, more absorbed into the drama of the symphonic structure itself; less concerned with pictorial illustration, more a matter of drawing universals from particulars.

The metamorphosis of Symphony No.2's Gotz von Berlichingen programme into "Man [=Brian] in his cosmic loneliness" provides a useful metaphor for Brian's own creative processes. Faust, Gotz, the young Goethe (Symphony No.7), Agamemnon (No. 12), Oedipus (No.30) - and who knows what other literary figures stand behind the intervening symphonies? - were, so to speak, lenses through which he could look into his own unconscious, and find out what of them lay within himself, and could be shared with others in other words he was aware of them as Archetypes - and it was Jung, of course, who coined that term, too.