Psychoanalysis and opera both have an uneven relationship to feminism, to put it mildly. The former, even when challenging the disorienting, traumatic quality of patriarchy, is a product of that same power. The practice’s roots lie in Jean-Martin Charcot’s Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, which turned the confinement of so-called “hysterical” women into a public spectacle. Freud restored to the hysteric a kind of dignity by finding meaning in her speech and body, opening a space for complex and textured subjectivity; he strove to describe how unhappy bourgeois sexual morality made people; he emancipated psychic difficulty by placing it at the center our self-image. All the same, Freud got his female patients wrong, sometimes wildly. As a bourgeois Viennese patriarch, he was hardly an exception to the world he inhabited.
Like the Volga Singing
Janáček, Freud, and the forces that drive us.
