Music: The Aesthetic Elixir
Summer, Lisa - Volume: 1
This article utilizes both psychoanalytic and musical theories as a basis for explaining the aesthetic experience of music as a stimulus for therapy. Winnicott's theories support the author's definition of the therapeutic relationship [therapist/client dyad J as a reenactment of the healthy parent/child dyad and help explain the music therapist's goals of using improvised, popular, familiar, New Age, and client-preferred music in therapy. This approach is contrasted with utilizing classical music for therapy. Classical music, and specifically the Guided Imagery and Music method, is used as an "evocative
musical space" in order to explore personal and transpersonal phenomena. The author identifies, within the process of musical composition itself, how classical music contains the structure which allows the GIM client access to the realm of the personal and/or transpersonal unconscious.