A seminar that became a book

The book is the written form of a seminar that its two authors and compilers, Pier Giorgio Semboloni and Juan Luis Linares, have been giving for many years, together or separately, in the most varied forums of systemic family therapy. Three authors have joined them more recently: Francisco Javier Ortega, Roberto Pereira and Carlos Sluzki, among the few who travel the world of opera from within systemic theoretical reflection.

Writing about the family at the opera might pass for a purely playful undertaking. The introduction argues otherwise: this is an invitation to think, addressed to anyone curious about the manifestations of the human adventure, and just as much an encouragement to give in to the pleasure of listening to music while following one trail among many possible ones. The motto the authors claim for themselves is borrowed from Tirso de Molina: deleitar aprovechando, to delight while instructing.

Music, the human voice and theatre converge in it — joined by the visual arts of stage design and, increasingly, by technology. But if the genre interests the clinician, it is because it takes up myths and builds archetypes able to move those who encounter them emotionally. Don Juan, Carmen, Otello; the couples formed by Rosina and Count Almaviva, Susanna and Figaro, Cio-Cio-San and Pinkerton, Turandot and Calaf; the parent-child relationships of Rigoletto and Gilda or of Manrico and Azucena: so many figures that display, with rare lucidity and great emotional intensity, relational phenomena central to mental health and psychotherapy.

The book is thus built at a crossroads, where the interests of music lovers meet those of psychotherapists and, more precisely, of family and couple therapists. The authors have deliberately avoided commonplaces: they focus on relational conflicts and interpret the characters by bringing out whatever, in their story, has to do with a problematic bond with their systems of belonging, couple or family of origin.

Three examples, given in the introduction, are enough to situate this shift of gaze. Carmen is not merely the rebellious, exotic gypsy who arouses Don José’s desire, but his partner in an impossible couple, symmetrical in its organisation and carrying incompatible mythologies. Rigoletto’s morbid obsession with protecting Gilda is not the self-denial of a father concerned for his daughter’s good, but the narcissistic egocentrism of a man who puts the satisfaction of his own ghosts before the real needs of the person in his charge. As for Madame Butterfly’s suicide, it is read from the rejection by the family of origin — the episode of the bonze uncle — which leaves Cio-Cio-San defenceless before Pinkerton’s predation: an excellent metaphor for depression.

Why music, for a therapist

Red Sistémica reproduces this introduction in full. Only its main lines are given here: the text belongs to the book, and its complete Spanish version remains available on the journal’s site.

Its second half is written in the first person by Semboloni, who recounts the two paths by which the subject came to him. The first is a family one: his son having sung in the children’s chorus of a Carmen at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa, three months of rehearsals and eight performances let him discover that world almost from the inside. His attention turned to the chorus, a genuine field of group dynamics and relational play: it stands for the crowd, the people, those who watch and comment; it is almost never the protagonist and is hardly ever asked for an encore, even though the success of the performance depends on its anonymous quality as much as on the voices of the soloists.

The second path is clinical. A sixteen-year-old girl comes for consultation with bulimia: a changing body, separated parents, two blended families, the birth of a half-brother. Nothing but the very ordinary, except that the father is a famous tenor, remarried to a young soprano and endlessly on tour, who prefers to behave as a generous, guilty friend rather than as a father; the daughter, in order to be noticed by him, makes herself ever fatter and less attractive, and gets herself excluded from the choir where she used to sing. Observing the family together at last, the therapist catches himself imagining them as an opera quartet: the daughter as the soprano who has only the language of the body to voice her love and her pain, the mother as the mezzo with the accusing finger, the father as the tenor dazed by the high voices, and himself in the grave, solemn register of the bass, whose task it is to unravel the enigma of human suffering.

This fantasy is not an ornament, and it is here that the review meets the theory. It serves to name a well-known limit of systemic thinking: language is linear where living reality is circular, it imposes a before and an after, a subject and an object, hence a postulate of cause and effect and, in the end, a moralising definition. Bateson, for his part, held that purposive rationality alone, deprived of the help of art, religion or dream, is pathogenic. Keeney warned that a therapist who conceives of himself as an intermediary of power, with no aesthetic orientation, risks perpetuating the pathology he treats. The operatic concertato offers the reverse figure: several irreconcilable voices are superimposed there at the same time without becoming noise, because an element that goes beyond words — music — adds a “meta” level to speech and gesture.