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A memorable Victoria Roberts cartoon from the New Yorker depicts a smiling couple walking out of the Metropolitan Opera, one observing to the other, “Most opera plots could be averted by some decent therapy.”
What makes this so funny? At one level, it speaks to the art form’s heightened affective tenor. Operatic characters seem to fall in love, reverse their affections, plot murderous revenge, pledge undying fidelity, die by their own hands, and generally act out to a far greater extent than the general population, to say nothing of their propensity for singing as they do so. They all but cry out for psychological treatment, yet we also laugh at Roberts’s cartoon because that very prospect is absurd. If Floria Tosca were the kind of person inclined to call an analyst rather than leap to her death off the Castel Sant’Angelo, she would no longer be the indelible opera character she is, but someone else entirely. As the cartoon suggests, there simply wouldn’t be opera if its characters sought help. Even given this, as analysts it can be hard to resist pondering how we might understand someone like Tosca should she spend some time on one of our couches, and such curiosity is given free rein—in more and less convincing manners—in Steven H. Goldberg and Lee Rather’s edited volume Opera on the Couch: Music, Emotional Life, and Unconscious Aspects of Mind.
The book is the product of a long-standing collaboration between the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the San Francisco Opera, in which pairs of analysts offer a series of post-matinee lectures with psychoanalytic reflections on a given afternoon’s performance. Many of the book’s collected essays grew out of these apparently generative discussions, and taken as a whole demonstrate both the great potential and the unavoidable difficulties of so-called applied psychoanalysis.