The sound link: Psychodynamic group music therapy in a therapeutic community setting

SUMMARY

This paper explores the efficacy of on-going weekly psychodynamic group music therapy with those with chronic mental illness in a therapeutic-community setting. Co-improvised music-making was the primary medium of communication and connection in the group, combined with a period for verbal reflection. Central to the therapist's thesis is that the shared music medium primarily acts as a way of expressing, organising and containing the experience of individual members and of the group. It allows for contact between members at a pre-verbal, preconscious level. For this particular patient group, contacts made at this level can be critical to their further ability to tolerate and integrate feelings in a more verbal and conscious way. The music-therapy setting is seen as aiding the process of linking together these two areas of experience, thus providing patients with a potentially freer, less restricted, way of relating to themselves and each other.