Description
This book is the first original textbook on music therapy in the Hebrew language. The book introduces music therapy as a discipline that is composed of three areas: practice, theory and research. These three areas are strongly connected with and contribute to each other: practice – music therapists work with various people who suffer from problems and difficulties. Practice is necessary in order to gain experience working in the field and allows questions that are connected to the clinical work to arise. Research examines these questions and tries to give answers, to discover or re-discover meanings, to explain attitudes, etc. Research results can be used in order to create a theory or theoretical principles that often become the basis of clinical work. It can also contribute to clinical work in adding new knowledge or changing existing knowledge. Theory is necessary in order to give a basis and a rationale for clinical work. Theory as a basis provides security, language, and instruments for diagnosis and therapy.
Music therapy is a young interdisciplinary field that started at the beginning of the 1950`s in the United States and has developed in most of the world. The first chapter outlines the historical background of the profession, discusses various definitions, areas and goals of music therapy. The second chapter focuses on music psychotherapy. It contains a general explanation on psychotherapy, the musical and psychological meaning of various musical elements and instruments, the importance of the music therapy room as a clinical setting, and stages in the therapeutic process. The third chapter discusses theories of psychotherapy and its relation to music therapy.
The fourth chapter focuses on diagnosis and evaluation, and discusses various diagnostic tools, such as clinical-musical interview, diagnostic musical activities, etc. The fifth chapter is about the therapeutic process and explains, in depth, three music therapy approaches: song writing, the use of music and images, and improvisation. In the sixth chapter I show how the application of these approaches in two clinical examples from my own clinical work.
The seventh chapter is devoted to theory and it deals with the question of the importance of theory to music therapy and what kind of theory is needed for this profession. Various theoretical models in music therapy are described and discussed. At the end of this chapter I describe the holistic model in music therapy that I developed. The eighth and last chapter is devoted to research in music therapy. The need to do research is dealt with; the main research directions in music therapy are discussed. This chapter presents the main thoughts and principles of a qualitative research paradigm and brings examples of qualitative research studies that were done both in Europe and the United States. Towards the end of the chapter I describe my own research study entitled ``Meaningful moments in the music therapy process`` as an example of qualitative research.