ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis and music are synthesized to examine the origins and vicissitudes of shame and guilt in the emotional disintegration of the heroine of Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor. Lucia’s affects as well as her intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamics serve as quasi-clinical themes and are expressed through Donizetti’s music. The music of Lucia di Lammermoor works because it has the capacity to bring listeners in touch with the complexities in the melodies of our own mental lives. If the verbal analysis of dreams paves a Royal Road to the unconscious, music provides an Aural Road to the same destination.
