Schiltz, L. (2002) Is the action of music therapy specifically linked to the underlying personality organization? Music Therapy Today (online), October, available at http://musictherapyworld.net Some illustrations of the musictherapeutic process
suffer for years by physical and mental violence and against classmates who had tortured him. After a psychoanalytically oriented music therapy of three years, he has made great progress in his psychological insight, in discriminating between reality and imagination, in his comprehension of other people and in the integration of social rules. He has made a professional choice according to his gifts and he is now successful in higher education. He never achieved to play in a musical manner, but music was nevertheless an important part of his psychotherapy. It was like an island where he could retire from his overwhelming destructivity. On the other hand, the artistic pleasure is very important for the neurotic structure. Toni, a young man suffering from obsessional compulsive disorder from the beginning reached a high standard in his musical improvisations, in melodic invention, rythmical and dynamic variability and in formal structuring, without any prior musical training. His music was free from any compulsional or obssesional marks and he seemed to draw an immediate artistic pleasure from it, as if the neurosis had not touched the creative part of himself which was at once available for his self-fulfilment. His obsessions had much diminuished after six months of treatment. In the borderline personality organization, music therapy shows its maximal effectiveness, as a real tool of metabolization of archaic fears and desires into the conscious self. In borderline adolescents, I have also encountered the greatest progress in the personal musical playing style and in the integration of the so far separated musical parameters; at the same time, there could be noticed a positive evolution in the pulsional and emotional control and in the power of imagination and symbolic elaboration.1 At the beginning, rythm and melody were often used to sat-
Is the action of music therapy specifically linked to the underlying personality organization?
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