Music, Emotional Life, and Unconscious Aspects of Mind

Edited By Steven H. Goldberg,Lee Rather

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.

1. 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 Bartók’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