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The legacy of Giuseppe Verdi is comprised of some of the most beloved operas in the modern repertory, including La Traviata, Il Trovatore, and Rigoletto. Like many 19th-century opera composers, the drama and pathos in Verdi's work revolve around romantic love, and, like many works of art that analysts have explored, his operas illustrate and enact the dynamics that often take center stage in psychoanalysis. In this essay, I offer some reflections on two of Verdi's operas, Otello and Aida. Taken together, these operas dramatize the unbidden arrival of love, the jealousy and envy it can unleash, and the social forces with which love must contend — in short, the forces that subvert love. I will approach Otello as a dramatization of the fundamental dynamics of love, trust, and vulnerability in the pre-Oedipal register, and I will explore Aida in terms of conflicts of love and loyalty in the Oedipal register at the level of family and the broader social order (Freud, 1930).
Like Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (2005), Aida and Otello have earlier oral and literary precursors and may be thought of as crystallized condensations of complex, over-determined, and enduring emotional themes. Therefore, to further contextualize the process of putting these operas “on the couch,” I approach them as myths in which the characters are distilled into a psychodrama of conflict between different aspects of the self. In this sense, each character represents certain aspects of the psyche as it encounters the other. It would be as limiting to claim any interpretation of Aida or Otello as a “correct” reading as it would be to claim that Freud's (1910, 1985) reading of the Oedipus myth is more correct than the additional readings offered by Klein (1945) and Bion (1963). As myths, both operas are rich