So, after the BAMT 2018 conference, which was full of positivity and new ideas, with a great spirit of openness, there’s lots of different possible blog posts that could be written. But I have to go with one idea that’s inescapably in the foreground for me. During the ‘Question Time Debate’ Gary Ansdell made a couple of provocative comments. There’s a danger of me misquoting, for which I apologise in advance. (Hopefully the recordings will be available to check in on later.) First he said something about the alignment of music therapy with a psychotherapeutic model being an ‘old chestnut’, which is now well and truly ‘roasted’, and that music therapy has restricted itself as a profession by identifying with this model. Then, in the round of closing statements, he said that we should do away with ‘music therapy’ within the next 50 years, by which time enough musicians will have been trained appropriately to replace the role, because ‘there will never be enough music therapists’.
There’s something about the provocative statement that stays with you. It’s a real talent, to come out with those soundbites that annoy people just enough that they can’t quite let go of them, but not so much that they can simply dismiss them. If he’d said ‘5 years’, for example, that would have been easier to let go of.
This is part of the (very much partially roasted) ongoing discussion which some people, for some reason, wish would go away. A few thoughts have been occurring to me. First of all, on the idea that there might be something restrictive about the psychotherapeutic model; I wonder what psychotherapists would have to say about this. Do psychoanalytic, person-centred, transpersonal, Gestalt, integrative, existential, systemic or cognitive analytic (etc. etc.) psychotherapists find their models restrictive? Music therapists have drawn on ideas from all of these perspectives and many more. I also struggle, in certain senses, to see any fundamental difference between music therapy and psychotherapy, especially if we take both as rather broad terms. This may be a bias connected to the type of work I do, which is often with children and young people in a time-boundaried, confidential, attachment-based context, where the therapeutic relationship is central to the work. But actually I’m not so sure about this: I think psychotherapy, if it is ‘treatment by psychological rather than medical means’ (OED), covers a broad spectrum.
My own experience of (psychoanalytic) psychotherapy, as a client, is that it provided containment for feelings, emotions, wellings-up, that were difficult to manage in day-to-day life. The importance of having a space to take aspects of self that it can be difficult to fully contend with is not easy to assess, but it’s not to be underestimated. And I wouldn’t describe my own personal struggles as anything out of the ordinary. The verbal, cognitive aspects of this were important, but they were only a part of the whole experience, in which the presence of a supportive ‘other’ was really the key factor. (I almost wrote ‘non-judgemental’, but it’s not as simple as that in a transference relationship.) I would suggest that the overlap between what was going on in my own psychotherapy and what generally goes on in music therapy was substantial. You don’t even have to factor in the verbal aspects of music therapy for this to be the case. The supportive other, listening, reflecting back, partially understanding, and trying to understand more, over time – these, in my experience as a client were/are/will be the important therapeutic factors.
This is such a significant experience, so fundamental in the way it operates, that a word like ‘restrictive’ feels baffling. I can imagine an answer, along the lines of, ‘it depends on the client group, aims of therapy, setting, social context’, and so on, but you can say the same thing about psychotherapy, with its array of models which adapt to different individual and group settings. Of course, you could also argue from the other side, that verbal psychotherapy restricts itself by not having music as a medium of expression, although it can use attunement, inflection, silence, body language, facial expression, all the various modes of communication of which we’re often not fully aware.
This is too complex a topic to contend with fully in a blog post, and I hope to hear Gary say more on it, perhaps to correct my own (at best) partial understanding of what he meant. Maybe I'm repeating old arguments, but if I worried too much about that, this blog wouldn't exist in the first place...
I do welcome these kinds of statements, because without them we’d just be agreeing with each other. The other statement, about there only being 50 years left for music therapy, I can only respond to with a hunch, which is that, to me, it feels like we’re just getting started.
