“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