Marching Musical Metaphors: Reply to Blum,Knoblauch, and Music

The commentaries of Knoblauch, Music, and Blum (this issue) provide a fruitful interplay with the text, by considering embodied accompaniment in containing trauma and dissociation, and how it might play out in the supervisory experience. The commentaries all, in different ways, consider the way musical metaphors work. Their responses encouraged me to clarify and deepen the idea of musical accompaniment as metaphor, so that a restatement of some ideas seems warranted. For example, while appreciating the communicative force of a musical metaphor in calling up this embodied rhythmic domain of our work and its various forms, I have also come to see the power of analytic accompaniment and its mutative impact as musical in itself. This perspective helps explain the therapeutic, transformative power of improvisational accompaniment–because it works in the tangible register of music.