Conference: Music & Psychoanalysis 2

Richard Rusbridger: The Internal World of Don Giovanni

Andrea Sabbadini: Psychoanalysis and Choral Singing

Richard Rusbridger: The Internal World of Don Giovanni

The author tries to account for the disturbing impact of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. Some writers idealize Don Giovanni's power and vitality. The author’s view is that Mozart's music depicts him as a much emptier character, using phallic narcissism as a way of surviving a psychic catastrophe by projecting his pain into others. The music shows how Giovanni lives in projective identification with many other objects and part objects, masculine and feminine; and how he seduces them into complicity with his defensive system. This situation is contrasted musically with the world of the other characters, particularly the women, who are depicted as more ordinary, more complex and, in fact, more sensual.

Andrea Sabbadini: Psychoanalysis and Choral Singing

After a brief introduction on the relationship between psychoanalysis and music, and on the importance of sounds in early development, I will describe some aspects of my long experience as an amateur choral singer of classical music. Over the years singing, with its direct involvement of the body alongside the mind, has represented for me an invaluable contrast to my daily analytic work with patients, as well as a complement to it. I believe that my involvement with choral singing and psychoanalysis has much enriched my appreciation of both.