Dissertation - World Federation of Music Therapy

An actual case example is that of Harriet, a 40-year-old nurse who struggled with low
self-esteem, connected with her parents' negative attitude towards her, and a marital
conflict related to her interests in spiritual development. In Harriet's sixth session
(Music: Sibelius: The Swan of Tuonela, final section, plus Villa-Lobos: Bachianas
Brasileiras #5, for guitar and voice) she explored a bodily feeling of unbalance,
concentrated in a ‘numbness’ of the right side of her body. After five minutes she saw
dark parental figures carrying her right leg away, leaving her with only one leg. This
awkward condition was a challenge for the client. First she realized, that having only
one leg was a good excuse for doing nothing. Then she realized that she had split off
the leg herself, but that she could still ‘navigate’ on one leg, even have fun, if she just
didn’t care about how it looked in other people’s eyes. Later in the session she was
given a new, ‘tender’ leg.
This metaphor - and the whole episode - had a strong impact on the client. It made her
realize that she could not just blame her family from restricting her; that her passive
aggressiveness (especially towards her husband) was an unprofitable strategy, that
‘being on her own’ implied a grounding, she had not found (yet). ‘The leg’ became a
metaphor for a (split-off) part of her life strategy, a point of reference for her
therapeutic process.
Other examples of narrative episodes around a core metaphor abound in the BMGIM
literature. Rinker (1991) reported how a volcano played an important role in the
imagery of a woman therapist-client, who had difficulties in managing the anger
raging inside her. Pickett (1991) opened her case study with the common metaphor of
a wall. In this case, images of a very thick black cement wall provided a metaphor for
the client’s defence system that both protected and isolated her. Bush (1995) reported
how a giant octopus with eight arms was controlling and killing her client in the
imagery, a metaphor representing the client’s experience of being overwhelmed,
controlled and damaged by her surroundings. Goldberg (1995) wrote about a young
gay man suffering from depression, who in the imagery kept coming back to the same
place in a park, where he met his (late) father. As Goldberg described it, this was a
concrete representation of therapeutic issues, but still a narrative episode built round a
metaphor of the roots of the client’s depression. Other examples include: the black
bird (Bruscia 1991), the wound (Bush 1995), the man on the table (Pickett 1996), the
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