Full Description
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.
Contents
1. Introduction: Psychoanalysis and Opera: A Felicitous Match
Steven H. Goldberg & Lee Rather
2. The Internal World of Don Giovanni
Richard Rusbridger
3. Across the Great Divide: Reflections on the Moral Reversal in Mozart's The Magic
Flute
Lee Rather
4. Lucia di Lammermoor: An Intersection of the Oral and Aural Roads
Julie Jaffee Nagel
5. Transformation through the Other: Senta and The Flying Dutchman
L. Eileen Keller
6. The Orpheus of all Secret Misery; The Expression of Profound Grief in Wagner's
Tristan und Isolde
John J. H. Muller IV
7. The Dark Matter of Wagner's Dream: Chaos and Creativity in Die Meistersinger von
Nürnberg
Jeanne C. Harasemovitch
8. Evil as Sadistic Perversion in Tosca
Amy Tyson
9. Sliding Walls and Glimpses of the Other in Puccini's Madama Butterfly
Steven H. Goldberg
10. Elektra: Traumatic loss and the Impossibility of Mourning
Catherine Mallouh
11. Yearning for intimacy: Bela Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle
Anna Balas MD
12. Reflections on Applied Analysis and a Secret Program in Alban Berg's Wozzeck
Ralph Beaumont
13. Janáček's Eternal Feminine: The Makropulos Affair
Adele Tutter
14. Billy Budd: A Study in Envy and Repression
Milton Schaefer
15. Sendak and Knussen's Where the Wild Things Are: A Developmental Journey
Debbie Hindle
16. Appendix: Synopses of the Operas
