Abstract
It is argued that healing practices are always embedded in ontological realities, in which they make sense. (Sebastian Hachmeyer, 2018: 1)
Music therapy practice in the United Kingdom, Europe, at large and beyond has long been influenced by theories of unconscious processes of relating, specifically from psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and counselling (Odell-Miller, 2001). But, what is the nature of the relationship between psychotherapy and music therapy? Why have psychodynamic theories and practice continued to be of interest to music therapists, and to develop and flourish since the pioneering days of the 1960s, and at the same time produced so much debate? One music therapist captured some of the issues in the pages of this Journal, posing the questions: ‘is it possible to transfer the verbal processes of psychotherapy to the “musical dialogue”?’ and ‘is it necessary to explain our work in terms of another paradigm?’ (Lee, 1992: 23). These and other attendant questions have been explored ubiquitously, sometimes in the form of heated uncompromising exchange.
Such exchange whilst often uncomfortable is, I propose, always interesting and vital for the development of any discipline. In recent years, the integration of psychoanalytic thinking in music therapy has inevitably developed and changed, not only through the increased authority of practitioners committing time and resources to undergoing further clinical training but also through the critique of therapists who explicitly distance themselves from practice informed by notions of the unconscious. For example, the role of musical performance as part of practice has emerged as a key topic through which debate has taken place: is performance clinical practice, is it sometimes or is it not? For any one music therapist, to address the question of performance as integral to music therapy practice is to align themselves to questions of what is music therapy for, what is the meaning of the public and private domains where therapy might take place, and what kind of therapeutic relationships are necessitated by any one kind of work (see Ansdell, 2005; Darnley-Smith, 2014). Furthermore, our intra-professional exchange continues to be enriched by new research from disciplines as diverse as musicology, aesthetics, theology, clinical neuroscience, developmental psychology, integrative psychotherapy and sociology (not an exhaustive list) and to have informed the development of music therapy from a wider variety of perspectives than before, and this traffic of influence is by no means one way.
This special edition of the British Journal of Music Therapy (BJMT) addresses a need to take stock and to consider in the light of these developments questions of diversity of practice within music therapy as we approach the 2020s. While it was my original intention to explore psychoanalytic thinking in music therapy today, the result of this BJMT is an edition that is largely concerned with difference: differences between/within disciplines, art forms or differences within the day to day experience of the individual practitioner and their clients. The aspiration of each author is noticeably concerned with a joining together of the seemingly disparate and a kind of dialectical recognition of the ‘other’.
Donald Wetherick writes about the topic of intra-disciplinary exchange. Taking a systematic review of recent book reviews as his starting point, he notes a tendency for some writers to write from within their preferred or ‘home’ perspective in such a way as to create the impression of ignoring or denigrating even, other perspectives. It is not the actual content of these perspectives that is of concern to Wetherick. Instead, he is interested in the impact of what he terms a ‘fault line’ that is created or re-created between respective views or approaches and the potential for this to inhibit developments in theory and practice. Wetherick is not the first to make a plea for pluralism in music therapy theory but his observation that music therapists might be ‘talking past one another’ throws light on the politics of the matter: there is power in writing as though other perspectives didn’t exist or were not worthy of consideration and possibly an anxiety, rage even, upon feeling that your own perspective might have been missed out. As Wetherick suggests, the danger is that this monistic-like viewpoint may trickle down into the perspectives presented in the training of students and clinical practice and take too firm a grip.
Luke Annesley takes this same exploration further into the realm of his own clinical work. Annesley is well known for his recent podcast interviews of music therapists, probably making him uniquely informed about music therapy practice in Britain today. In this Journal issue, he writes about the differences in his own music therapy practice, the myriad of ways in which he might understand his clients and respond to them. He cites Ken Aigen’s (2014) suggestion that music therapist’s theoretical allegiances might be determined by ‘fears and insecurities about working primarily in the music’ or ‘by an inability to face their own unconscious fears and blocks’ (p. 117). Annesley recognises both these of perspectives in himself, and in doing so immediately dissipates the anxiety and defensiveness that arises from feeling a necessity to sit on one side of the fence. Annesley presents a series of case studies that demonstrate not only the limitations of theoretical allegiances in clinical work but alternatively, as with Wetherick’s article, the creativity of theoretical diversity or pluralism and resultant benefit to the client.
An additional article by Martin Lawes, published simultaneously online, (to appear in the next edition) contributes a working example of one music therapist’s thinking through psychoanalytic ideas. Lawes demonstrates the very complexity of understanding a musical therapeutic relationship through music, dreaming/day dreaming and the live moment by moment process of being with a client.
As a centrepiece to this journal edition, I invited two colleagues from my own University setting at Roehampton to submit articles. Rosemary Rizq and Anastasios Gaitanidis are both psychoanalytic psychotherapists who have a deep concern with music. Along with Luke Annesley’s article in this edition, earlier versions of both articles were presented at a day conference jointly convened by myself with musicologist Samuel Wilson. We wrote in the outline to the conference, despite influencing one another, [our observation was that] the disciplines of music therapy, musicology and psychoanalysis tend to operate independently, with practitioners of each rarely directly engaging across the disciplinary divides. Musicologists, music therapists, and psychoanalysts have talked about music, but rarely do they speak to one another about music.
The day conference addressed ‘the need for interdisciplinary dialogue by asking: what can we learn about music when these disciplines begin to speak and listen to one another?’ (Darnley-Smith and Wilson, 2018). In both published versions of their papers, the reader is presented with examples of musical thinking from within psychoanalysis, with the added ingredient of literary fiction in Rizq’s article. The question of what can music therapists learn about music therapy from psychoanalysis is thereby turned upon its head to include, what can psychoanalytic psychotherapists learn about the processes of psychoanalysis from music? Again, engaging writers from outside of our practice is not new to this Journal and hopefully can enhance our own in-house concerns.
Three additional perspectives are provided through book reviews which have proved to be timely additions for this Journal edition. Karen Gold considers some new writings in psychotherapy, and usefully takes the opportunity to pose further questions about the practice interface with music, especially the absences of specifically music therapy thinking in both of the publications she considers. Gold also raises the lack of contemporary Jungian thinking within music therapy although Jung’s own promotion of art making as therapy has been a central tenet in some traditions of Art Therapy. As a Jungian Analyst, as well as a music therapist, Gold is well placed to make this observation and hopefully we will hear more from her in future. Tara Roman considers new writing from musicology and psychoanalysis in a volume edited by Samuel Wilson (as it happens including my own chapter on Jung and the Transcendent Function in Music Therapy). Roman poses some penetrating questions and provides a useful introduction to this far reaching inter-disciplinary volume that hopefully will be taken up by music therapists. Finally, Alison Levinge considers Gro Trondalen’s Tour de Force, ‘Relational Music Therapy’ and candidly demonstrates how absorbing new theory is not necessarily an easy process, at the same time acknowledging the way in which the author stays close to the clinical musical processes of the work. Trondalen’s commitment to intersubjectivity as a basis for her understanding of this work may ultimately prove to be the direction in which a wide variety of practice perspectives develop and are able to meet with ease, a meeting that is surely needed as much as the debates indicated above.
A final note: Some readers may notice that the voices of music therapists trained in psychoanalysis and other traditions of talking therapy are somewhat missing from this special journal edition – their presence was part of my original conception of the edition and their absence is my one regret in an otherwise rich collection of new writing. In all, it is my hope that this issue will stimulate an informed discussion, and hopefully having attended on this occasion to some of the immediate intra- and inter-disciplinary questions, it will motivate some new critically informed writing and articulation of the therapeutic processes and understanding that arise in day-to-day clinical practice in music therapy from this particular viewpoint of psychoanalysis.