Seeing and Believing: Tom DeRose contrasts an unorthodox psychoanalytic reading of ‘Parsifal’ with a more orthodox account

Reviews of Tom Artin, What Parsifal Saw (Free Scholar Press, 2016); John Mastrogiovanni, 'Parsifal': The Will and Redemption (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014).

July 2017, Volume 11, Number 2, 78–82.

How does one go about conducting a psychoanalytic interpretation of an opera? It is one thing to assert, as both Barry Millington and Bryan Magee have, the affinity between the Freudian project and Wagner’s music dramas, but quite another to put one ‘on the couch’. In 2013, Tom Artin produced such a reading with considerable success in his book The Wagner Complex in relation to the composer’s Ring cycle, and he takes up the reins again with his most recent publication, What Parsifal Saw, based on the most symbolic of Wagner’s operas, Parsifal.