Music in Therapeutic Practice: Using Rhythm to Bridge Communication Barriers

Trisha Ready

09/2016 · Rowman & Littlefield

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Music in Therapeutic Practice: Using Rhythm to Bridge Communication Barriers builds upon an emerging awareness in psychotherapy that music can create therapeutic rapport with patients. Music has been described as our first language, beginning with our mother’s heartbeat. Early rhythms echo and elaborate as themes threading through the narratives of our emotional lives. Given the ways we can access and share music today, we find ourselves increasingly maneuvering through musical landscapes and constructing our identities around music. Ready illustrates how music provides alternative access to patients undergoing severe mental health issues by interweaving the psychoanalytic theories of Wilfred Bion, Daniel Stern, and others with those of ethnomusicologists, psychobiologists, and neurobiologists who believe our early urges toward music are attempts to socially bond. Theory comes to life through vivid case studies and excerpts from individual sessions and psychodynamic therapy groups. Ready also demonstrates how music can be a particularly effective communication tool with cross-cultural and young adult patients. Building music into treatment can transform the therapeutic process, making music a powerful ally to both patients and clinicians.

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Trisha Ready, PhD, directs the Partial Hospitalization Program at an acute psychiatric hospital in Seattle. She has conducted psychoanalytic-based research in using music as an adjunct therapy, an interest that grew out of twenty years’ experience working with homeless youth and other hard-to-reach populations.