“You can say something in music”: a single-case study of music therapy with a person living with chronic aphasia
Abstract
Studies to date on music therapy and music-based therapeutic interventions for people living with
aphasia have mainly focused on functional language outcomes, and have been quantitative in
nature. Whilst early music-based interventions have used a manualised method focusing on
improving functional language output, subsequent variations with more of a music therapy
orientation have introduced improvisational elements. However, the study of these improvised
elements and the role they may play within a therapeutic relationship has been largely
overlooked.
The purpose of this single-case study is to explore what it might have meant for a person living
with aphasia to “say something in music”. The author takes the position that for a person to feel
that something has been said, they must also perceive it to have been comprehended and
responded to by an ‘other’. Hence a relation-centred method of inquiry was adopted to study the
ways in which a therapeutic alliance was formed and reformed in the moving-along process of
music therapy, within both music and words, intra-subjectively and inter-subjectively.
The author concludes that a psychodynamically informed, improvisational approach to music
therapy with a person living with aphasia is congruent with a value-based person-centred
approach to forming a socially constructed therapeutic relationship. The use of a relation-centred
method of inquiry may also offer an ethical approach to researching the lived experience of
people with aphasia within music therapy encounters.
Key words: Aphasia, music therapy, improvisation, psychodynamic, relation-centred