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

I will be speaking to you today about my work with
clients in private practice; clients diagnostically referred
to as neurotic, narcissistic and borderline personality
disorders. I call the method of treatment I employ,
Jungian-oriented analytic musictherapy.
I've been practicing for eight years and in that time I
have observed how the psyche has a tendency to
dissociate into inner fragments or part-personalities.
Dissociation is a term originally used by Charcot, Janet
and Freud when they were seadying hysteria. Janet
held that the psyche, through some inherent weakness,
could lack the strength to hold itself together and could
"fall apart" into dissociated fragments operating
independently. Freud led the way to the opposite view
that ego weakness is the outcome, not the original
cause of a splitting of the primary unity of the psyche
which occurs under severe early traumatic stress.
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The Jungian viewpoint is that we are born in a state of
unconscious unity. The ego is identified or merged with
the self, the central archetype of wholeness, As we
move towards consciousness there is a breaking up of
the original unconscious unity and the psyche
undergoes dismemberment and dispersal. Adaptation
to the real world of multiplicity, as well as adapting to
parents' needs and desires, mean that aspects of
oneself get left out in the course of one's ego
development. Parts of us that never get seen, valued
and related to, remain unintegrated. So we aIl have
dissociated or unintegrated partial aspects of the self.
With severe early traumatic stress there will be more
severe fragmentation. The extreme example of
dissociation can be seen in the multiple personality
disorder.