E-Book of Articles - World Federation of Music Therapy

Introduction
Bonde, Lars Ole: Analogy And Metapher In Music Therapy Theory ...
Analogy And Metaphor In Music Therapy Theory- And The
Metaphoric Nature Of GIM
Lars Ole Bonde, Aalborg University (DK)
One of my favorite games is a question game that goes like this: If
your marriage was a car - what kind of car would it be? In a new Danish film
(The only one, Susanne Bier 1999) the question is asked this by a
councellor/ psychologist, and the answer of the male client makes his wife
very upset. He says: “I think it is a van, a solid van”.
You can ask yourself similar questions: If my ambitions were an animal,
what animal would it be? Or: If my childhood was a dish, what dish would it
be?
The Italian film The Postman (Il postino, M. Troisi 1994) is a wonderful story
about love and how to expres: the protagonist learns from the great poet
Pablo Neruda how language is not only a lexical system, but also a living
source of emotional self expression: the postman learns about metaphors.
This makes him able to win the woman he loves and fills the rest of his
(short) life with a new dimension: poetry.
Metaphor is a way of thinking and expressing ideas and emotions
about the world (Lakoff & Johnson 1980). Metaphor and related speech
figures like analogy and symbol (see Table 1) - is not a special gift of poets
or artists; it is a unique human ability, and it is - or can be - a crucial
element in psychotherapy.
Metaphor is best understood within the framework of the narrative.
This has been demonstrated in many books on narrative psychology and
verbal psychotherapy (Polkinghorne 1988, Siegelman 1990, Combs and
Freedman 1990, Kopp 1995), and the idea of the symbolic function and its
importance in psychotherapy goes back to Freud and especially to C.G. Jung
(1990). This has been elaborated in modern analytical theory and practice
under the headline “Active imagination” (Kast 1990, Johnson 1986).
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