Opera on the Couch

Music, Emotional Life, and Unconscious Aspects of Mind

Steven H. Goldberg, Lee Rather, Steven H. Goldberg, Lee Rather

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000591552
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Opera Music

In this widely ranging collection of essays, a group of contemporary psychoanalyst/authors turn their finely-honed listening skills and clinical experience to plumb the depths and illuminate themes of character, drama, myth, culture, and psychobiography in some of the world's most beloved operas.

The richly diverse chapters are unified by a psychoanalytic approach to the nuances of unconscious mental life and emotional experience as they unfold synergistically in opera's music, words, and drama. Opera creates a unique bridge between thought and feeling, mind and body, and conscious and unconscious that offers fertile ground for psychological exploration of profound human truths.

Each piece is written in a colorful and non-technical manner that will appeal to mental health professionals, musicians, academics, and general readers wishing to better understand and appreciate opera as an art form.

1 Psychoanalysis and Opera

A Felicitous Match

DOI: 10.4324/9781032271408-1

Steven H. Goldberg and Lee Rather

Opera as an Art Form

As an art form, opera is particularly well-suited as subject matter for psychoanalytic investigation. The great operas tell stories, in words and in music, that unfold timeless and universal themes of love, death, war, power, rivalry, class, and religious faith. With opera’s unique integration of music, lyrics, stagecraft, and acting, these themes are brought to life in drama and in character. A particular strength of opera is its potential to convey emotional complexity and conflict on multiple levels and in multiple registers simultaneously. The music may support, reflect, and add nuance to the emotions and lyrics evident on stage, or may suggest unconscious emotions underlying, and even contrasting with, what the audience witnesses. The synergistic power of opera affords a penetrating and complex view of character and motivation, emotion and meaning, to which both opera and psychoanalysis aspire.

It is a premise of this collection that psychoanalysis and opera have much to offer each other. While the same could be said about psychoanalysis and music in general, opera’s unique synthesis of music, text, dramatic realization, and the communication of meanings at multiple levels offers particular opportunities for the psychoanalytic understanding and deepening appreciation of the art form. Conversely, we attempt to demonstrate that opera can open new areas of understanding for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis and opera both explore the depths of human emotional and psychological experience at conscious and unconscious levels, enlarging our awareness and setting change in motion. Both seek to uncover realms of human experience that are difficult, if not impossible, to access, either because they are experiences not yet formulated and represented in words, or because they are emotionally intolerable and rendered inaccessible by defensive operations. Both involve moments of heightened emotional intensity that we sometimes seek to experience, and at other times seek to avoid. Both have prominent corporeal aspects – opera through the intimate bodily expression of emotion in the acts of singing and acting, and psychoanalysis in its emphasis on embodied aspects of emotion and psychosexuality. And both call for complex and heightened forms of attentiveness, in which one listens, observes, and resonates at multiple levels to the words, the music of the words, the unique quality of the voice, and bodily presence and movement. While such multifaceted attentiveness occurs to some degree in response to all forms of art and even normal conversational speech, it is especially heightened in opera and psychoanalysis.

As different approaches to understanding the meanings and challenges of being alive, opera and psychoanalysis each expand and enhance the potential of the other. While on one side of the curtain operatic artists look to psychology to render their performances as powerful and transformative as possible, on the other side of the curtain, psychoanalysis gives opera aficionados the opportunity to deepen their experience and understanding not only of opera but also of themselves.

Applied Psychoanalysis

It is not surprising that the application of psychoanalytic thinking to the arts and music begins with Freud and his early circle of adherents. Freud arrived at his intellectual maturity in fin de siècle Vienna, a city of two million people characterized by a surge of creative activity in the arts, music, sciences, and humanities. The cultural milieu of museums, concert halls, and myriad salons and coffee houses set the stage for an unusual cross-fertilization among disciplines (Gay, 1988; Kandel, 2012; Schorske, 1980). For Freud and his early followers, clinical discoveries illuminated artistic and cultural realms, while the artistic and cultural realms contributed invaluably to clinical thinking. Topics such as group phenomena, culture, and the arts were considered to be integral aspects of psychoanalytic study. Prominent within the 24-volume Standard Edition of Freud’s work are a number of essential papers and monographs on topics that would only later be labeled “applied psychoanalysis” (e.g. Freud, 1910, 1911, 1914, 1928). While the term may have had the effect of marginalizing this area of psychoanalytic research, it is clear that psychoanalysis from Freud to the present time offers not only a comprehensive basis for the exploration and treatment of mental life in the clinic, but also a body of hypotheses and observations that can be used to investigate a variety of non-clinical fields of inquiry.

While according to his biographer, Peter Gay (1988, pp. 316–317), Freud’s relationship to artists was complex and ambivalent, his famous remark to the Minister of Culture of pre-Nazi Germany in 1928 is nonetheless emblematic: when the Minister said, “I have come to greet the great discoverer of the unconscious,” Freud replied, “The poets and the philosophers discovered the unconscious long before I did; I merely discovered its laws and the method to study it scientifically” (quoted from Lehrman, 1954, p. 264).

Freud had recognized early on that an investigation of dreams was a “royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (1900, p. 608). From there, it was a natural step to consider the possibility that the unconscious might also be revealed in more intentional creative acts and cultural practices. In the fertile ground of fin de siècle Vienna, Freud’s exceptionally broad vision detected reflections of his clinical discoveries in the great myths and other artistic creations, and Freud even noted the similarity of his case studies to the development of character by novelists. Respect for this vein of inquiry sent many subsequent analysts and psychoanalytically informed academics on a journey of applied analysis.

Freud’s oft-noted aversion to music (1914, p. 211) will be discussed in a later section; in fact, he made little mention of any form of music anywhere in his voluminous writings. Yet despite this conspicuous absence, many analysts and musicologists since Freud have turned their attention to the psychoanalytic themes embedded in music in general, and in opera specifically. Taking the connection between music and psychoanalysis even further, a burgeoning emphasis in more recent psychoanalytic contributions concerns the role and therapeutic potential of “communicative musicality” (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009) in the consulting room, as embodied and musical forms of communication are increasingly understood to have essential mutative effects.

Origins of the Collection

The collection of essays in this volume emerged from more than a decade of collaboration between the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the San Francisco Opera in a program known as “Opera on the Couch.” Following Sunday matinee performances of selected operas, two psychoanalysts present psychoanalytic discussions of the opera just performed to a group of audience members. The presentations, open to the public at no charge, allow for a substantial period of dialogue with the audience, which typically includes not only psychoanalysts but also individuals from a diverse range of intellectual backgrounds and professions. Over time, the enthusiastic response to our discussions and the interplay between responses from those immersed in psychological theories and those coming from other disciplines became an impetus for this volume. A generative experience for all, a number of participating psychoanalysts were inspired to expand their informal talks into more fully developed papers for publication. This synergy carries over into this book, especially in the final chapter, written by a noted musicologist and distinguished discussant at many national psychoanalytic meetings.

A second inspiration for this collection was the increasing number of compelling psychoanalytic studies of opera published in the psychoanalytic literature, both by authors within our group, and by other psychoanalysts nationally and internationally. Although limited to those published in English language journals, we sought to gather some of the best of these published papers, along with newer unpublished papers by colleagues whose work we knew and admired. The latter, along with the former, constitute the chapters of this book.

Opera on the Couch

Psychoanalytic theories and concepts develop and expand the meanings of an opera at multiple levels that include the creative process of the composer, the nature of the dramatic action, the music and the ways in which music and words interrelate, and the ways in which particular productions emphasize and interpret psychological themes. For example, a psychoanalytic approach can render intelligible the unconscious motivations of central characters, as well as the determinative traumas and other life events that contribute to character formation and interpersonal relationships. A further expansion of meaning might involve illumination of the ways in which the instrumental music constitutes an “orchestral” (S. Goldberg, 2011, p. 58) register of experience that tells a story richer than, and sometimes at variance with, the sung words alone. This musical dimension may amplify, specify, or carry more than what the characters consciously know. The psychoanalytic awareness of multiple voices speaking in multiple registers of consciousness and unconsciousness offers the opera audience a deeper understanding of motivation, character, and conflict – in the drama, and in ourselves.

The breadth of psychoanalytic approaches to putting opera “on the couch” is one of the strengths of this volume. Each of its chapters makes use of one, or more often several, of these psychoanalytic approaches. The following summary will orient the reader to the range of approaches represented here, as well as the specific ones emphasized in each chapter.

The first approach assumes that an opera may be examined in order to discover traces of unconscious wishes, conflicts, and traumas manifest in the creative process of the composer (and/or librettist, director, stage designer), whether consciously intended or not. In this modality, the opera is approached as a psychological expression of the composer’s inner life, akin to his/her artistic “dream,” and “analyzed” with the aim of understanding the creator’s innermost psychic life. In this volume, such an approach is most evident in the chapter concerning Berg’s Wozzeck (Beaumont), Janacek’s The Makropulos Case (Tutter), and Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (Balas).

A second approach is to regard fictional operatic characters as if they were actual people, and to view their roles from the vantage points of their unconscious conflicts, motivations, and developmental histories. Questions related to why they feel and behave as they do are particularly amenable to such psychoanalytic inquiry. Why is Don Giovanni manically driven to seduce every woman he encounters? Why is Elektra unable to mourn, and is instead consumed by her passion for revenge? Why is Madame Butterfly so unwilling to face the reality of her fate, and why is her only recourse suicide? Why is Senta devoted to the Dutchman to the point of her death? Why is Tristan’s sense of self such a tragic one, even though those around him see him as very much the hero? Each chapter explores such questions with the tools of psychoanalytic insight. Attending to affects, dreams, psychological defenses and inhibitions, creative processes, identifications, and developmental crises portrayed on stage sheds light on the mysteries of how the mind functions and gives rise to the deeper understanding of various motivations, characters, and self-experiences dramatized in the opera. This approach is most emphasized in the chapters on Puccini’s Tosca (Tyson), Madama Butterfly (Goldberg), Strauss’ Elektra (Mallouh), Britten’s Billy Budd (Schaefer), Wagner’s Die Meistersinger (Harasemovich), The Flying Dutchman (Keller), Tristan und Isolde (Muller), Mozart’s Don Giovanni (Rusbridger), and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (Nagel).

It is, of course, worth noting that both the first and second approaches deal with people, real and fictional, that are not in an analytic relationship, and the interpretations offered by the analytic writer must remain speculative since there is no actual analysand to react to interpretations in confirmatory manner, as is essential in clinical psychoanalysis (see Frattaroli, 1987 for an in-depth discussion of this theme).

A third approach assumes that successful operas that endure with the public do so because they transcend the particulars of character, setting, and plot to arrive at universal unconscious themes. From this perspective, opera may be approached as a genre of myth or psychodrama in which the characters sym bolically elaborate aspects of ourselves within a dramatic and musical narrative In this sense, regardless of the particulars of character or setting, the opera is a crystallized condensation of complex, over-determined, and enduring emotional themes with which we resonate deeply because it presents an externalized psychodrama of our own internal life. This approach is particularly evident in discussions of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (Rather), and in Sendak and Knussen’s Where the Wild Things Are (Hindle).

Finally, a fourth approach examines how opera examines what is now beginning to be thought of as the social unconscious, focusing on ways in which cultural and linguistic givens, reflected in power relationships and differences in race, class, gender, and sexual orientation are internalized and importantly shape the individual unconscious. This approach also explores the inevitable tensions between the individual and the collective, the fundamental challenges of negotiating what Freud referred to as “civilization and its discontents” (Freud, 1930). While this is a theme embedded in each chapter, it is particularly central in those on Mozart’s Don Giovanni (Rusbridger), Puccini’s Tosca (Tyson), Madama Butterfly (Goldberg), Wagner’s Die Meistersinger (Harasemovitch), and The Flying Dutchman (Keller). Given the growing psychoanalytic attention to the impact of political, economic and socio-cultural factors on the formation of the dynamics of defense, symptom, and character (e.g., Akhtar, 2018; Cushman, 2019; Dajani, 2017; Gonzalez, 2020; Layton, 2020), we anticipate seeing more of this approach in the future.

While the perspectives outlined earlier are conceptually separate, the reader will find that they are often intertwined in individual chapters according to the inclination of each contributor. In addition, there is considerable variation within each approach in the extent to which contributors use not only the libretto but also the musical score to study the ways in which character and motivation are conveyed. Special attention to the musical score is particularly cen...