Music Therapy is a form of psychotherapy. Therapy derives from psychoanalysis, which came from poems and stories. The wisdom of the arts is the soil from which therapy sprang; without the poets, Freud and his colleagues could never have built what they did. “Everywhere I go,” Freud said, “I find a poet has been there before me.” That term “poetry” means not only words, but melody, intonation, cadence, and the nonverbal matrix of sound that all life shares.

At the very beginning of life, there are no words yet; they come along later, after the basic pathways of communication have been laid down in the singsong exchange of preverbal care and shared attention. In life’s final seasons, mastery of language can fade—but music remains, encoded in parts of the brain that are deeper than common neural ailments tend to reach. In my own experience I’ve seen catatonic and unreachable patients suddenly sit up and communicate in musical expression, often after months or even years of silence.

Between our earliest beginnings and our last years, we’re as verbal as we can be, speaking, reading, writing to make ourselves understood and hear the voices of others in social, civic, and familial life. But underneath the words, there is a constant musical background that evolved eons before the dawn of language. Our emotions, too, are far more ancient than the words and phrases we deploy to share them. Music can release deep-seated passion, pain, yearning, and joy that our more rational parts of self cannot perceive, let alone articulate.

I do plenty of traditional talk therapy. But even when that’s the main event, I my ear is linked into the sounds of my patient’s voice and breathing, sighs and pauses, silences and repetitions, and subtly expressive melodies of ordinary human speech. And when it suits the moment and the issue, I make use of guided imagery, shared improvisation, and other evocative techniques for activating latent elements of your inner life that can help you to heal and to grow. My clinical use of music is patient centered, not music centered. The music has its place—but the central place is yours.

To learn more about starting therapy with me, call for a free consultation at (315) 529-9031.