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Opera on the Couch delivers more than one might suspect from this title, which at first seems to suggest that opera might be subject to the paradigms of psychoanalysis. The subtitle, Music, Emotional Life, and Unconscious Aspects of Mind suggests a much more complex bidirectional undertaking. Not only does psychoanalysis offer insight into the operas, but opera offers ways of understanding the analytic process and human development.
In the introductory chapter, “Psychoanalysis and Opera: A Felicitous Match,” Goldberg and Rather state that 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, the authors attempt to demonstrate that opera can open new areas of understanding for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.
This anthology consists of an introductory chapter by the editors, Steven H. Goldberg and Lee Rather, and an additional fourteen engaging chapters, each addressing a particular opera. These chapters offer resonant insights into operas that may already be familiar but also enticing introductions to operas that may be unfamiliar. Additionally, at the end of the book there is an appendix with plot summaries of all the operas discussed. Plot synopses are useful when watching and listening to operas, as opera plots are often complex, confusing, or improbable. But the music and the drama add dimensions that the stories by themselves don’t always tell. Similarly, in psychoanalysis the story tells much but not everything. And in psychoanalysis, like operas that are seen and heard over and over, detail and nuance emerge with repetition. This is also the case in listening during psychoanalysis where a patient wil