Opera on the Couch

Steven H. Goldberg, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and a personal and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. In addition to many publications, he has co-chaired Opera on the Couch in collaboration with the San Francisco Opera. Lee Rather, Ph.D., is a personal and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and a faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. As a teacher, presenter, and writer he has a long-time interest in the unconscious aspects of creativity in music, literature, and the arts.

1. Introduction: 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 Bartok’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

16. Appendix: Synopses of the Operas