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In singing the voice erotic, a world-renowned voice teacher lays bare the basic instincts-an anatomy-of theatre as a verbal art
The voice is inherently an erotic organ. The sensation of voice is part of the totalized suspended eros of childhood-what Freud referred to as the polymorphous perverse world of childhood, upon whose delights we slam the door as adults. Children, the object of their own love, explore indiscriminately the erotic potential of the whole body, and that erotic potential extends to the inner organs of the body and is in no wise limited to the genitals. As adulthood teaches us to draw our energies up out of our bodies and to concentrate them in reasonable and rational thinking in the brain (which lives in the head), the pleasure principle is subdued to the reality principle-polymorphous perversity becomes buried libido. Thought and speech become the servants of reason and fact, and the voice that expresses such thoughts loses, in adulthood, its map of the neurophysiological circuitry that connects the voice with the sensuality of the body. When the connecting door between voice and autoeroticism is shuttered, communication through mere language becomes dry, hollow, authoritatively vociferous or shrill-to the point at which a larger erotic possibility shrivels and dies. Deliberately mis-used, the human voice could well be developed as a tool in aversion therapy for...