DIVA is the nom de chant of three sopranos and a mezzo, the Deranged and Incorrigible Vocal Artistes. 

What are we doing on a psychoanalytic website, you want to know? The easy answer is that we sometimes get inquiries as to where we can be found on the 'Net, and I was the only one with a site, so here we are. But I have to admit, since we masquerade during working hours as two psychologists, a psychiatrist, and a social worker, that we ask ourselves the same question sometimes. We've never been sure how successful our disguises are, and when a colleague invited us to open Grand Rounds at Cambridge Hospital, it started us wondering. Especially when she didn't say anything about presenting any cases. . .

So I think the time has come for us to leave the closet and insist that the relationship between singing and psychoanalysis be recognized as dialectic, not dichotomous. Why should our field continue to be confined by the narrowness of Freud's vision, especially in the area where said vision was notoriously narrowest? Time to shift paradigms! Classical analysis must yield to classical music, the royal road to transcendent and highly differentiated affective experience. 

Mozart is neglected in the psychoanalytic literature. This is regrettable. He anticipates Freud in his gift for elegant subversion of the status quo (Le Nozze di Figaro, 1786), and in his understanding that without tolerance of ambivalence there can be no real psychological maturity (Cosí fan Tutte, 1790). He is a perceptive commentator on the family (Die Zauberflöte, 1791), and an unsurpassed illuminator of psychodynamics (Don Giovanni, 1787). His case studies, usually called operas, deserve far more attention than they have so far received from the analytic community. 

But although Mozart is preeminent, he is not alone in using music to analyze and elaborate the psyche, relationships, and existential context of his subjects. Schubert, Verdi, and the other gifted musical psychologists of their schools have also suffered the politics of exclusion engendered by Freud's tin ear. Enough! These schisms must be healed. Musical psychoanalysts unite! Where there are enough of us we will be able to form an institute of our own and give performances of Idomeneo at our symposium panels. (Instead of a Freudian, a Kohutian, a relationalist, and a Kleinian, our discussants will be a soprano, a mezzo, a tenor, and a bass.)

My DIVA colleagues and I acknowledge the importance of these important theoretical and political issues and we think a lot about them; we figure that that counts as work, and so we're allowed to spend the rest of our time singing. We are contemplating a study of the psychological aspects of group vocal work (which, we are here to tell you, are many, powerful, and profound). But that will have to wait for a while. We're not sure that the world is ready yet for an honest exposition of our techniques, and anyway, we don't have time. We're singing at Grand Rounds in ten minutes.  

P.S.  If you want to reach us, as singers (separate or together) or as the originators and only living practitioners of Mozart Ensemble Therapy, we are Myra Durkin, Eve Golden, Paula Shepard, and Gail Shulman. You can reach any or all of us through me at e-mail Eve.