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Steven H. Goldberg and Lee Rather have assembled an exciting collection of papers on the dialogue between psychoanalysis and opera, which emerged from a collaboration between the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the San Francisco Opera. Papers such as these have begun to appear more frequently in recent years, and this book supports this welcome trend. The editors state early in their introduction their premise that the two disciplines have much to offer each other, and in this I think they give the main rationale for undertaking this project—the direction of study being two way, meaning that psychoanalysis is not just a lens through which opera may be viewed, but that opera (and art in general) has much to offer psychoanalysis. This interface can, in the editors’ words, “demonstrate that opera can open new areas of understanding for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis” (p. 1), a claim which I very much endorse. Not all the papers in the collection take up the challenge in this particular way, and for me those that do are the most powerful. However, the book as a whole contributes much to this way of thinking.
The editors detail four approaches to this dialogue: the first suggests reading the opera as a gateway to understanding inner dynamics of the composer; the second analyses the dynamics of characters in the opera as if they were “real” people; the third assumes that the endurance of certain operas in culture implies their transcendence of the particulars of the opera and therefore relate to universal unconscious themes; and the fourth explores the opera as a study of the social
unconscious. For me the last two are those which hold real potential for realizing the editors’ claim to mutuality of the dialogue, and the book is reviewed with this in mind.
The chapters in the book are ordered chronologically with the composition of the operas. However, I would like to begin with two chapters which I view as presenting the theoretical basis of the di