Dissertation - World Federation of Music Therapy

metaphoric episodes constitute a narrative with great therapeutic potential. In
Ricoeur's words: ‘When changing its fantasy a human being changes its existence’.
Metaphor is a matter of imaginative rationality: it allows us to comprehend one aspect
of a concept, a phenomenon or a problem, in terms of another. However, metaphor is
not only highlighting, it is also hiding (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 10): the
metaphorical structuring does not give us a total, only a partial understanding. In
psychotherapy, like BMGIM, metaphors may highlight defence manoeuvres while
hiding their source. The multimodal interventions of the BMGIM therapist and the
dynamic support of the carefully selected music makes it possible to explore the
metaphors in depth and often connect them into a narrative episode or a complete
narrative. Clients may resist therapeutic change and try to maintain their ‘past plots’
or ‘scripts’, but with the help of the therapist, and in BMGIM the music, clients may
gradually release the control of past interpretations and “bring to language and
awareness the narratives they have developed to give meaning to their life”
(Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 182). Next step will be the experience of new configurations
and different plots, enabling a new and sounder organization of the client's life story.
Even Ruud (1997, p. 198, my translation) paraphrases Ricoeur when he writes:
“Life becomes human through narrative articulation. In creating plot and
coherence in our unclear understanding of everyday life we change/transform it
into a more comprehensible literary configuration. The narratives we create about
our lives will change it and give it a specific form - just like in a hermeneutic
circle.”
Insight and therapeutic change is based on the integration of image, enactive and
lexical thinking. In BMGIM this integration takes place in a special narrative form,
where metaphors unfold and develop accompanied and stimulated by the music’s
non-verbal narrative. The music is catalyst and co-narrator, as formulated by a man
suffering from schizophrenia in his reflections on classical music and its meaning:
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