Music Therapy by Proxy: Using Humanised Images in Song

Abstract

Developing awareness, exploration and expression of emotionally sensitive issues can be difficult for some clients in music therapy. They may find it hard to express emotion through improvised music and may turn instead to the perceived security of the repetition of known songs.

This paper presents the results from a completed research PhD, a qualitative case study based on naturalistic clinical practice, which examined the song choices of one woman in a medium-secure forensic unit over the three-year course of her music therapy.

A descriptive narrative account was subjected to analysis according to a modified form of therapeutic narrative analysis (Aldridge and Aldridge 2002), resulting in the abstraction of a series of generative metaphoric images, framed within a chronological series of events. Crucially, these images were found to be humanised figures, yet they were also emotionally decentred or depersonalised. When approached from the philosophical and methodological perspective of behaviourism, which views these as conditioned responses associating music with life experiences as part of a process of developing self-identity, such images can be seen to provide an unspoken voice for the client’s feelings to be expressed in a manner that is personally revealing, socially acceptable, culturally accessible and therapeutically constructive.

I assert that using these third-person characters as a form of proxy facilitates mutual reference and experimentation, and places music firmly at the heart of a socially constructed process of music therapy.