E-Book of Articles - World Federation of Music Therapy

Bonde, Lars Ole: Analogy And Metapher In Music Therapy Theory ...
Induction: Transforming the metaphor into an embodied induction image
Music travel: Exploration and elaboration of the metaphor through music-
assisted imagery
Postlude: Using integrative imagery as a metaphoric bridge to cognitive
operations.
In this way the whole GIM session can be understood as a movement into the
world of images, metaphors and symbols (through the induction of ASC), a
thorough exploration in the musical-metaphoric mode of consciousness (in
ASC), and a return to normal cognitive mode (NSC) using the imagery as a
bridge - potentially synthesizing the wellknown and the unknown into
insights of the client (and the therapist) through metaphoric and cognitive
dialogue.
But what is the relationship between image(ry) and metaphor? The question
will be discussed more extensively later in the paper. My first, simple
answer is that a metaphor is a lexical/verbal transformation of an embodied
image. The image is the client’s experience in a specific representational
mode (Horowitz 1983); the metaphor is a specific way of communicating it.
Or speaking with Paul Ricoeur: The language of metaphor is a language of
images (Kemp p. 18)
Siegelman (1990, p. ix) writes that metaphors have three characteristics:
“1. They often represent “the outcropping of an unconscious fantasy”.
2. They combine the abstract and the concrete in a special way, enabling us
to go from the known and the sensed to the unknown and the symbolic.
3. They achieve this combination in a way that typically arises from and
produces strong feeling that leads to integrating (i.e. affectively grounded)
insight.”
Any GIM facilitator will recognize these points from successful sessions and
therapies. It is also my point that the use of carefully selected music -
meeting the needs of the client (and using the ISO-principle) and her level
of metaphoric thinking - 1. makes the “outcropping” easier, 2. prolongs and
deepens the experience of meeting the unknown, 3. secures a deep
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