Voice. Psychology. Spirituality. The Feminine. These four subjects have spun endlessly in my mind for the last two and a half decades, although the energies of their push and pull have likely been with me from the very beginning of my life. These are the energies that hum quietly (and sometimes rage deafeningly) in the background of all I do, think, feel, and know; they are the undercurrent to all that inspires, fascinates, frustrates, and delights me. Fragments of their persistent presence fill the pages of countless index cards, post-it notes, and personal journal entries; they infiltrate dream images and meditative visions, and they insinuate themselves into nearly every conversation in which I engage. They are the lens, the framework—the epistemological and ontological foundation—through which I perceive and engage with the world.

My own experience of feeling isolated, broken, and, in a sense, abandoned by a benevolent force that, I thought, was meant to have my back, both caused me to lose my sense of grounded identity, and to find a deeper strength within me that I eventually realized could guide me, and others, on the path. It provided the context and the impetus that has allowed me to bear witness to the suffering of countless others during a 25-year career as a voice therapist, and that experience, combined with the knowledge I obtained from studying the science of voice, has allowed me to help others heal. I learned that our most vulnerable experiences often allow us to access both our shared humanity, and our god-and-goddess-like divinity.

The path toward selfhood, at least when recalled from the safe distance and generous perspective of hindsight, is often marked by unexpected but strangely powerful moments of insight—moments when something that was veiled or hidden from conscious view suddenly becomes clearly seen and known. It’s as if memory, often what feels like soul-memory, unravels from within, and a portion of the Self merges with a profound archetypal energy that is perceived as being both inside and outside of the Self, putting us into alignment with the greater truth of who we are and know we are meant to become. This opening in consciousness reveals an understanding, at times, that is so shockingly, blatantly obvious that it prompts us to wonder how we could have been so blithely ignorant of a particular reality only moments before.

This paper draws on my experience as a singing-voice specialist and my research in depth psychology to explore the human drive to express beauty, emotion, and artistry through the act of singing. Specifically, I focus on what many people in Western culture consider the most demanding, virtuosic style of singing—opera and Western classical singing. I investigate why individuals seem driven to sing opera, and why they experience anguish, a loss of identity, and a sense of failure and depression when they are faced with a vocal injury that inhibits or prohibits their ability to sing professionally. It is my hypothesis that the unconscious conflict and ensuing tension between masculine and feminine principles—the inhibition of the feminine principles of freedom of expression, beauty, and connection, in favor of the masculine principles of control, perfection, and accomplishment—contribute to vocal injury (and, in fact, soul injury) in opera singers. For rehabilitation of the singing voice to be effective and enduring, a holistic approach that addresses unconscious drives affecting the physical as well as psychic balance in the system must be included in the healing journey.

There is power in the female voice, power that so threatens the male order that men have silenced it since antiquity, while convincing women instead that they are weak, their voices shrill, and they have nothing of significance to say. The silencing of women’s voices continues generation after generation and is so deeply buried in the collective unconscious that Western civilization convinces itself that women’s voices have found their expression in modernity by the sheer fact that, at least some of them, sometimes, speak. But to conflate a woman’s speech with the expression of a woman’s voice is to misunderstand not only the distinction between the embodied, affect-toned, dynamic voice and symbolic, logos-driven speech, but to misunderstand, at a core level, the transgenerational trauma that every woman living under patriarchy has carried in her body and her psyche since antiquity that colludes in keeping her quiet. While the field of depth psychology purportedly makes the healing of trauma its business, it cannot heal—without bringing into consciousness—what amounts to its own unconscious complex: the ubiquitous silencing of women that walks side by side as the shadow to the amplified voices of men.

There is no way to ignore her blaring blunder; her voice has failed to deliver the sound that is anticipated by both herself and her live audience, and there is no option to go back and re-record it. At this moment, a moment in which many professional performers would be horrified by the unexpected betrayal of the body as an instrument of expressive beauty, Hill does something utterly magnificent, something that is now immortalized in this recording of her live performance: she giggles. She does not stop. She does not apologize. She audibly giggles. And then, in precise rhythmic time, she continues on to the next phrase and finishes her soulful song.

The essence of illusion. Our beliefs. Our flesh. Our clinging. Our grasping. Our thoughts. Our words. We have to get to love. Love is the energy that is the life-force of all human beings. It is stored within and beyond our vessels and we can experience it when we press into each other in nakedness. But here is why it is very difficult: We are afraid. We simultaneously fear annihilation while we cling to self-loathing. The sameness of the walls, as a repetition, becomes a dialogue, and through that dialogue, I recognize my own sameness—the unchanging body that encapsulates me to form the inescapable boundary of separateness. I have to press through, beyond this sameness; beyond the illusion of identity. Pressing to evaporate the physical lines is a philosophy; what is the emotion? How do I break through these barriers? With a knife? Fist? Sledgehammer? Fingertips? Or, do I not break these barriers, but, rather, stretch them? Dance into them? Sing through them? What is a boundary? Does a boundary require an “other” in order to be defined or disintegrated? What is the energy of being caught in the in-between? Could it be that the answer to my suffering has been this simple all along? That I simply need to create?

In 1993, British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman released a film called Blue, a 75-minute projection of an unchanging monochrome that stretches across a darkened screen—a rectangular symbol of Jarman’s slow descent into death from AIDS-related illnesses. Out of the glow of International Klein Blue, Jarman’s voice emerges as if from behind this eerie scrim, accompanied intermittently by the sounds of monastic bells, environmental noises, and composed music. In both narrated prose and poetic verse, Jarman tells the story of the interminable wait between his suspended life and his impending death, while his body is consumed by the virus. At the fore of the disease’s relentless attack is the slow diminishment of his sight, relegating his ocular vision to mere shadows and shades of blue.

In 2012, the eminent music historians Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker published a 624-page compendium titled A History of Opera. Hailed on its cover by the Times Literary Supplement as “The best single volume ever written on the subject,” this hefty volume traces the art form from its very beginnings to present-day practices, concluding with a section title that quips: “THAT’S OPERA. JUST A LOT OF PEOPLE IN COSTUMES FALLING IN LOVE AND DYING” (Abbate & Parker, 2012, p. 566). In the finale of their significant tome, Abbate & Parker (2012) consider humanity’s proclivity for art and beauty—both in those who strive to live as artists and in those who venture to witness their creations. At the core of this impulse seems to be the desire to connect with the archetypal: the gods and goddesses who live in our collective psyches and vie for their own expression through our bodies and our voices, in both their magnificence and their doom. Opera, with its multi-sensory imagery and masterful telling of well-known narratives, offers a most exquisite medium for archetypal transmission.

When I was a child, I used to sneak into my mother’s closet and snuggle into the perfumed clothes that hung above the rows of leather shoes and bunched up purses on the floor. My mother kept a shoebox in her closet that was filled with old photographs. Alone in the liminal space of shadows and muffled sound, I would open my mother’s box of mementos and pull out a photo of my parents, standing on a beach in Alexandria, Egypt, on the day they met. While I stared at the photograph, it was as if I was suddenly pulled into the scene: I imagined myself walking back and forth along the shore, wading through the shallow water, and jumping from rock to rock. Though I have no idea why this photo held such fascination for me, I visited that scene again and again; it brought me great comfort and a sense of place.