23.7. 1993 Vitoria-Gasteiz / Spain - World Federation of Music Therapy

accommodate their immature physical-emotional selforganisation.
In the case study of Steven we shall see how music
therapy processes can engender an emotional
relationship with an autistic child by using musical
improvisation, the dynamic forms of the musical
improvisation being carefully, clinically directed to
support the child's individual and sometimes
idiosyncratic responses.
The study demonstrates the dynamic form of musicmaking,
used
with a creative and clinically informed improvisational
approach, as being both the medium and mediator of
therapeutic change and growth. In this way, music
therapy can instigate and support change which may
generalise to other settings, contributing to the autistic
child's capacity for cognitive learning, social adaptation
307
and self-organisation, and to lessening the restrictions
of his pathology.
In particular, musical improvisational processes which
constitute 'temporal and emotional organisation'
will be identified in their role of providing the autistic
child with the 'central cohesive organizing force' that
Frith describes him as lacking. Such experiences, far
from being ephemeral, can have far-reaching effects on
the autistic child, offering him musical-emotional
experiences or, in Hobson's words, 'affectively charged
interpersonal relations' (Hobson, 1991), modulated or
modified in such a way as to 'attune' to the autistic
child~s needs and emotional-develoomen~ 1 nf
functioning from moment to moment.
CASE MATERIAL: STEVEN