E-Book of Articles - World Federation of Music Therapy

Schiltz-Ludwig, Lony: When Aggression is disturbed ...
evolution towards an affective maturation and to a resumption of the
subjectivation process.
During the last decade, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists have
discovered that there is an increasing number of adolescents with a
borderline organisation predisposed to act out their aggressive drives in a
violent or suicidary way. This is the psychopathological explanation of the
increasing number of bullying, of suicidal attempts or of drug addiction ; it
reflects itself a deep modification in educational practice, in moral
standards and in family structure.
These young people need a long lasting individual psychotherapeutic
treatment, otherwise they risk to grow up towards a lasting character
pathology at adult age; they could developp towards the antisocial, the
narcissistic or the depressive personnality organization described in the DSM
IV among the abnormal personnalities. During adolescence, we have the
possibility to prevent this malign evolution.
As I worked with adolescents as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist
for nearly thirty years, I have often had the opportunity to deal with
adolescents suffering from this type of personality disorder. With the
traditional verbal therapy, they take a long time to evolve. As music therapy
is likely to act both on the emergence of the personal desire and on the
release and canalising of the aggressiveness, it seems to be an effective
measure in case of predisposition to acting out. This hypothesis has been
put to the test.
2. Clinical background
During the last decade, the clinical interest for borderline personality
organisation in adolescents has continuously increased. The adult borderline
personality has been described in a psychodynamic perspective with
reference to the analyses of Kernberg and Kohut: because of difficulties in
the primary objectal relations, the child has not been able to separate from
his parents and to grow towards an autonomous personality. Even as an
adolescent or an adult, he is utilising preferentially archaic defence
mechanisms such as splitting, projective identification and primitive
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