(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

The “Musical Life Panorama” – A Music Therapy method for diagnosis and therapy of emotional and social realities

by Dr. Isabelle Frohne-Hagemann,

World congress for Music Therapy, 1996

Before the break, we heard some informative ideas from Dr. Maaz on the dissonances in the unification process between East and West and, on the basis of these ideas, I would like now to bridge the gap to music therapy. The question here is what contribution we music therapists can make not only to restoring health to sick individuals, but also to a sick society. The ideas sketched out by Dr. Maaz clearly show us that music therapy urgently has to get out of its ivory tower of “pure” psychotherapy, into the debate with its specific context in society. My feeling is that we – or at any rate we in – pay far too little attention in our therapies to diseases, crises and disturbances that arise not only from personal relationships that have gone wrong in the course of our development, but very importantly also from changes in society (e.g. unemployment, changes in social values, etc.). Work with MLP gives us an opportunity here to pay proper regard to these aspects. This is a way of combining psycho-therapeutic and socio-therapeutic work.

The term “Life Panorama” comes from Hilarion Petzold (cf. Petzold, 1993) and relates to biographical work in integrative therapy. From the present, we look back on the whole wide panorama of our life development, back into the past and forwards into the anticipated future, in order to understand ourselves in our identity, in our life in its entirety. In the course of that process, we look at individual stations of life in the form of cameo portraits, but always paying regard

(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

– 2 – to the societal and social context and the time in which we grew up. I have used and modified this concept for Integrative Music Therapy, which I have developed and thave been teaching at the Fritz Perls Institute since 1984, and would like to give you an example of this in a project which I have been conducting with a group of women, with whom I have worked for three evenings specifically with MLP. Mrs Kollacks will then give her presentation, going into the details of MLP in individual music therapy which I cannot cover here.

MLP emphasises experience with various kinds of music which have taken on emotional significance in the course of our lives. The effect of music is always dependent upon context and mood. It is never significant “in itself”. Music is always linked with emotionally significant events and periods in our development, and releases in the memory the feelings that were linked with the specific situations and events in our lives at the time. Thus if we want to look at our development, recollection with the aid of music has an important integrative role to play. If a client remembers and recalls “his” or “her” music, this inevitably brings his or her own story to life. That is how work with MLP makes it possible to obtain a synoptic overview of the client's life and a synergetic panorama of all the important events in it. This cameo work also makes it possible to work through terrible events in such a way as to inject meaning into them, and also to (re-)create awareness of healing experiences which had been forgotten.

Some of my colleagues in Germany, such as Karin Schumacher, Fritz Hegi and Dorothea Muthesius, likewise make use of musical biographies of their patients in their music therapy. Unlike their approaches, MLP as taught in Integrative Music Therapy also contains an active improvising component. In group therapy, we suggest a relaxed discussion of certain subjects (e.g. which pieces of music or what kinds of music have been important in the course of the patient's life), and this then provides points of departure for musical representation of certain phases or events in his or her life.

(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

– 3 –

The patient is a kind of film composer and director, i.e. someone who is working with sensitivity and empathy to test, select and implement musical means so as to define the emotional characteristics of certain events and periods or scenes in life. As in the film, music which is presented in this way tells us what is felt, how it is felt, and how it should be interpreted by the feelings.

MLP sets a socio-therapeutic accent within music therapy which seems to be becoming more and more an exclusively psycho-therapeutic method in West Germany. (In integrative music therapy, we even talk about four paths of healing.) Furthermore, there is an expansion in this country of active music therapy, which seems increasingly to become the exclusive form of music therapy. MLP here includes discussion and exchange about music as a value in itself and also improvisation in the sense of the creative solo improvisation (by contrast to the dyadic improvisation representing a relationship). Thus I understand the creative solo improvisation as a form of improvisation where the patient realizes his or her tonal ideas in a process of careful improvisation. The therapist, or just the group, give verbal support, and carry out the musical and instrumental instructions of the protagonist, like extras in a film. (The dyadic improvisation and group improvisation where the therapist joins in playing are in my view specific indications, so they are not always indicated, and not with all patients. I feel they should not be the exclusive or predominant features in music therapy.)

In MLP and within it in the creative solo improvisation, I use a variant of the technique of maieutics used by Socrates. Maieutics (the word comes from the Greek for the art of the midwife) was a technique developed by Socrates, using a skillful series of questions and answers to elicit the correct (better: the wise) insights which are within a person. For example, I structure the discussion by asking certain introductory questions and questions of understanding, then I create links with the participants' experience and summarise and give a name to the subjects raised.

(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

– 4 –

In the solo- improvisational part, I help the protagonist by asking questions and helping to select the instruments needed to orchestrate his or her life film. I accompany him/her into his/her world, and help to direct the performance, so as to give shape to the presentations or to achieve differentiation in them. The purpose is for the patient to really feel and taste the sound, shape and nature of the instrument selected for the symbolism intended, and to take seriously the emotions, moods, recollections, feelings and atmospheres that come up, and deliberately to set them into the proper relationship to the other instruments. The other group members play the instruments selected by the protagonist exactly as the protagonist demonstrates to them, so as not to mix their own contributions with those of the protagonist. I take great care to ensure that a participant who has played an active role as a protagonist in a group then first benefits from sharing (that is communication of their own emotional response) from the group, before getting feedback from me; this is intended to show that the subject presented is also an expression of the collective experience in the group, and to indicate in what way this is true. Group improvisations are also conducted. It is important to do these again and again, so as to generate coherence and to give expression to the group atmosphere, the development of relationships, etc.

What is the benefit of MLP? In view of the shortness of the time allocated to me, I can only very briefly mention a few diagnostic and therapeutic benefits. First of all, the discussion in the group about the musical experiences and recollections: this opens people's eyes to socio-cultural belonging, or the marginalisation or exclusion of participants from certain groups; it gives information on emotional styles and climates, and the socialisation processes the group members have undergone; it shows them the personal and societal values in the group, and the resulting views of the world; it also shows them the patterns of experience, behaviour and relationships, and our picture of ourselves. The most primary goal, and the therapeutic goal, of any group must be to create a climate of coherence, openness, tolerance, mutual esteem and mutual trust.

(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

– 5 –

MLP offers a very good opportunity of doing so. Because joint discussion, and the sharing of musical experiences is an extremely sensitive matter – nowhere else are people more intolerant than in matters of aesthetics and questions of musical taste. It is very easy for someone's taste to be devalued or excluded. The exchange of opinion on listening habits is, emotionally, a highly explosive matter, which also makes it particularly useful for the therapeutic process. Discussions about music that the patients have listened to must promote tolerance of and esteem for different musical socialisations and music tastes – and this is a therapeutic value in itself. In this way, MLP promotes processes of mutual responsiveness and consensus, which are fundamental to any efforts to achieve mutual understanding and acceptance. This makes it possible to experience a sense of community and solidarity – two values that are ambivalent, at least in the . Another goal is to recognise and deal with capabilities of influencing people's emotions to political and commercial ends. I believe the East Germans are in fact streets ahead of the West Germans in this respect, as they have much more awareness of manipulation by pop songs and songs conveying political ideologies and connotations.

The active-improvisation component of MLP enables us to identify more clinical aspects of individual patients – for example, it tells us something about the clarity of the patient's sense of identity, about damage, disturbances, conflicts and shortcomings in his or her identity, about the differentiation in his/her world of feelings and his/her emotional versatility, capacity to enter into relationships (empathy, defences and demarcation capacities, capabilities of contact and encounter, interaction behaviour, role versatility, etc.), and finally this part of MLP also tells us something about his or her creative and structuring capabilities and his or her abilities to restructure and re-shape problematic situations.

The primary goals of the active-improvisation component relate to the emotional differentiation work: remembering, reliving and integrating

(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

– 6 – emotionally unresolved memories, feelings that have been split off or repressed, and which are painful – and also in the integration of healing resources. A socio- therapeutic aspect is to experience through verbal exchange following the musical exchanges what it means to belong to a group and have a sense of being emotionally at home in it.

The process analysis of the course of the discussion and musical representation tells us something about the group subjects which are emerging and becoming more clearly defined. This is an expression of social realities, which are the backdrop to the crystallisation of individual themes for each of the participants.

For each of the various aspects of MLP I have put together a number of questions which help to get the participants in a group into discussion, and to exchange their memories and experiences. These refer to their listening habits in their parental homes, their earliest auditive experience, the way they experienced the voices of members of their family, recollections of singing and making music, questions of the development of their own musical taste and the personal philosophy which is linked with that, etc. These questions are a golden thread for the therapist. At the present time I can only point to the existence of such a thread, since our time does not permit me to give you details of it. Instead of that, I would now like to present the project to you.

For many years now, I have been working with West German patients and students in training, both individually and in groups, using MLP, though I have not documented this work. In 1992 I moved to Berlin, and gradually the idea grew in me of examining the social problems that have arisen after the fall of the Wall both in and West Germany. My idea was therefore to work with one group in East Berlin and one group in . My colleague Mrs Kollacks, who is an Integrated Music Therapist trained at the FPI, and who has been working in the East-Berlin district of Marzahn for four years, was kind enough to get together for me a group of 8 women from the former GDR who

(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

– 7 – were interested in this project. All of them had already been in individual therapy with Mrs Kollacks, for between 25 and 60 hours, and also continued this therapy after the project. But they did not know each other prior to the project. The project itself was limited to three evenings of 2½ hours each, and Mrs Kollacks was also present in her function of coordinator. Incidentally, it has not yet been possible to conduct the West Berlin group. I therefore have to limit myself to describing the East Berlin project, and simply adding comments from my experience with MLP with West Germans.

Marzahn is the largest prefab housing estate in Europe, with an extremely high proportion of socially disadvantaged people living there; the unemployment rate is 67% for women there, which is enormously high. A number of the group members were housewives or unemployed. All of them had at least 1 child, and 3 of these 7 women were single mothers. A word about their political affiliations: 3 of them had been Party members under the GDR regime (a 28-year-old mathematician, a 30-year-old journalist and a 40-year-old environmental engineer); 4 of them were not in the Party, but had been and still are active in the church community (a 42-year-old office worker, a 33-year-old medical technician, a 40-year-old physicist and a 40-year-old cosmetician). The sessions were held in the evenings at Mrs Kollacks' practice. The tape transcript of the three evenings runs to some 70 pages of closely printed typescript, which are naturally an almost inexhaustible source of material for a variety of research purposes.

For the purposes of this presentation, my main focus will be on the group process and the development of the subject, since this is the area that permits the clearest hypotheses. And I say hypotheses because the results of this project naturally cannot be representative of people in what was the GDR. And in a group like this, there can be no question of developing universally valid statements on the problems of the East Germans or the West Germans. One point that must be born in mind in any case is that the participants did not know me, a Westerner, and therefore refrained from talking about certain subjects, or if they did talk about

(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

– 8 – them they probably did not do so in sufficient detail. With that in mind, it is probably quite natural that one of the participants politely expressed some doubts at the end of the final evening as to „whether the scanty material gathered here was sufficient“ for me. These sessions cannot do justice to the complexity of this whole area. Nevertheless, I felt that the course of those evenings and the findings obtained from them do make a lot of sense, and are indicative of the German situation. Comparing my work with East Germans and West Germans, I cannot help noticing that music therapy with “Easterners” tends much more to embrace discussions of political and socio-cultural issues than the therapeutic work with “Westerners”, who have a much more individualist education. These sessions also taught me a great deal about where we “Westerners” tend to be very unaware and ignorant, what gaps we have, and where we are therefore vulnerable to manipulation. I have also noticed by observing myself as a “Westerner” how quickly “dissonances” can occur in the unification process. I had been rather naive in the way I embarked on the project with these East Berlin women, and rather innocently and automatically I ascribed to these Easterners certain typical “Westerner” values that really meant nothing to them. On the other hand, I often found I could make little of the concepts they were using, because I did not have the requisite background information. For example, simply as a matter of habit, I asked one of the participants, who had listened to much classical music or made classical music at home as a child, whether she came from the “educated classes” (which in the West would immediately mean she belonged to “the upper levels of society”); of course, this participant did not know what to make of that, because she had belonged to the “socialist society of workers and peasants”, and so it was not a question of educated classes or upper classes, but at most she was educated as a “comrade” in the working class.

But, she told me, she belonged to the “intelligentsia” (which for me as a Western intellectual would really be a compliment, but for a woman from the GDR this was also a form of exclusion – that is exclusion from the society of workers and peasants). We only gradually began to realise the kind of connotations involved in

(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

– 9 – terms like this, and what they mean for the system of values in society, quite simply from the fact that we did not understand one another. (By the way, you can probably guess what it meant if a stall at a Christmas market in the GDR did not sell “angels”, but rather “end-of-year figurines with/without wings”.)

I propose now to discuss the group process and to summarise the results of the work with MLP that seem to me to be particularly important.

The group process developed in the course of the first evening, chiefly by exchanges about music that they had sung, which surprised me at first. Talking about music which they had heard was evidently much less important than talking about the music they had joined in singing.

Singing has much more of a tradition in the GDR than in West Germany, and when I thought about this I was not surprised, since German singing culture was lost in the West following the collapse of the Third Reich. Songs expressing loyalty to particular regions, and songs of wanderers, such as those of the Wandervogel youth movement, had been misused by the Nazis for their ideological purposes, and after the war no-one sang any more. Singing was out. In West Germany, the only songs still heard were English or American songs, and it was not until the 70s that a few German songwriters plucked up enough courage to sing German lyrics; it was only then that new German songs were composed and sung in the schools. In the GDR, by contrast, there was a great deal of singing – though in the school it was once again linked with political and moral appeals, as it had been previously.

When the group members exchanged their experience of singing, I was struck by the extent to which they suffered from this subtle emotional linking of beautiful melodies and political drill. “They were hammering ‘GDR’ into our minds with every means at their disposal”, as one of group member put it.

(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

– 10 –

For example, the group sang me a delightful regional song, with lyrics about the beauty of the fields and woods, the animals and birds and so on, that called for them to be protected. And then in the last line, it said that all this has to be protected because “it belongs to the people, to our people”. Of course „people“ here includes only the people of the GDR and only those who were identified with the ideology of the system.

The way the GDR used school songs, including the songs of the Young Pioneers movement, produced ambivalent reactions among the women, because the songs were associated with wonderful memories (camping, young people's meetings at Whitsun, etc.), but these were emotionally linked with ideologically coloured messages.

On the other hand, there were also songs that represented practically an „emotional oasis“ as I would like to call it, and were traded secretly, so to speak. Pop singers and music groups such as Bettina Wegner or the “Puhdys” or “Karat” sang lyrics with a secret code – if you could decipher the secret code, you could recognise kindred spirits.

I was aware of the intense significance of such songs and their symbolic character. If a GDR regime critic or opponent sings “Mr. Paul McCartney, do you know what I'm suffering?”, or “Seven bridges that you've gotta cross”, this has a great deal more emotional significance than if a West German sings this kind of lyric. In the West, we have no such encoded songs or songs with symbolic character of such hidden political significance. Belonging to such emotional subcultures is not determined by solidarity vis-à-vis political manipulations as it was in the GDR. With us in the West, it seems that everything is very harmless and you do not have the impression that any kind of “necessity” is being forced into our minds. Of course it is annoying if they misappropriate the beautiful jazz melody “Night and Day” for coffee advertising. In point of fact, we in the West do not even notice the dangers of the subtle process of having some ideology or other foisted on us, because corresponding to our ideology of education and culture, we are quiet, uncritical consumers and we are quite happy to go and buy

(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

– 11 – our coffee. I was very impressed by the awareness of the East Berlin participants of the group – an awareness that all of them shared – and by the ambivalence with which they all perceived in the GDR; after all, we in the West are just beginning to question the brilliance of the affluent consumer society. In the East, it seemed much clearer than in the West that it was not possible to reconcile adaptation to the constraints of society and inner freedom, in other words you had to be outwardly conformist and inconspicuous, but secretly you had quite a different set of values, and it was essential to avoid letting that get out. Everybody – but everybody! – listened secretly to Radio Luxembourg – regardless of whether they were for or against the GDR. Radio Luxembourg brought them Western music, Western hits, and that was the symbol of all that was “progressive”. So it seems to me, that it was -strange enough- Western music that helped even the socialistic listeners to maintain some emotional liberty and hopes for better times to come.

The subject of ambivalence and hypocrisy, which meant that everything had to be quite different on the outside than it was inside, naturally raised further memories and subjects with the women. For example, the fact that music not only gives emotional freedom, but also forges links. This produced during the evening nostalgia and a sense of longing for childish vitality; alongside the prevailing image of Germans as formal, serious and intense people, this also produced the idea that – secretly – we are quite different. In the mass we are all grey and mousy, but individually we are colourful and lively.

The main problem as I see it lay not in any problem in taking up a stance in the GDR, either internally or outwardly – either for or against the system, or as a perpetrator, a victim or simply a fellow-traveller. Everyone had their own definable attitude, more or less consciously. One interesting question is of course how secretly or openly they held this view. However, the main problem, I believe, was rather that the emotional ties to values and ideologies were not tangible. People enjoyed singing the songs because they were simply beautiful songs, despite the fact that they had an authoritarian or inappropriate message packaged

(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

– 12 – in them. They sang about the beauties of the countryside to feel the emotional links with their own country, so as to have a sense of emotional belonging. They suffered from the ambivalence of the songs, but they sang them nonetheless, because that was the only way open to them of expressing emotions at all. No wonder that, in the chaotic situation in which they find themselves, some people of the former GDR still sing the old songs of combat so often today, as they associate with them the emotional links of the comradeship they experienced, the sense of belonging, and the shared experiences – not necessarily the political ideology. It is harder to untie an emotional bond with a person or an idea than to pick holes in logical arguments. Mostly, the theory is thoroughly interwoven with the emotions, and this turns it into an ideology. And this emotional tie via music is particularly effective in the political and commercial spheres. That is why it is so difficult to get away from an ideological “home”, overcoming the emotional links – and the same applies whether it is the GDR or the Third Reich or any other political system. This is something that has to be recognised, and lamented.

But back to our East Berlin group. No active improvisation was done on the first evening. We devoted the session exclusively to an exchange of ideas on music and its position in our own socialisation and the political system. Thus the 1st evening focused on articulating experiences of ambivalence (authority and compulsion versus freedom and emotional scope), with the respondents expressing their strong need for vitality and emotional expression. These subjects crystallised on the 2nd evening with an introductory group improvisation on the subject of “the river of life” with the subjects “in the face of adversity”, “crisis stations – keyed up to bursting point”, “isolated and misunderstood”. Following a brief exchange of reactions, we then listened to the improvised and taped music again together – an activity I often use – so as to experience it more consciously as a whole. This music was the expression of an underground river, which suddenly surged up, as expressed by strokes of the gong mixed with other sounds, and then calmed down again. I will come back to this in a moment.

(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

– 13 –

In the active creative phase of MLP, this subject complex was then taken up by Mrs L. as an individual musical subject. This subject was the expression of sexual abuse she had suffered in childhood; characteristically, though, she did not explicitly mention this fact until the 3rd evening. What was important for the group dynamics was principally the collective aspect of her subject. Abuse turned out to be the group subject, as all the subjects of the 2nd evening were concerned with feelings where the group members had been victims. Mrs L. was expressing on behalf of everyone the fact that she had been deprived of an emotionally healthy life, and that she could find no understanding for this fact. Then in a final group improvisation, the participants expressed their need for support, protection and security, in a joint rhythmic exercise which developed into a rendering of “Alle meine Entchen” (the well known German nursery rhyme “All my little ducklings”). This song was clearly the theme tune for the ideal of untroubled childhood – a subject that had already been raised on the first evening, when Mrs P. enthused about Australians and how good they were with children, quite unlike Germans; and she warned in a jocular aside that playing the didgeridoo is likely to get you pregnant. After the final improvisation on the 2nd evening, the same Mrs P. – who, as a former party member, was otherwise rather reticent and critical – started reminiscing about a rattle as the “first musical instrument in the kindergarten” and got the whole group started on lively imitation of baby-talk (very infectious!), and listening in rapt attention to a baby's musical box conjured up by Mrs Kollacks. This episode was clearly so supportive and stabilising that it was then possible for an even deeper subject to come up on the 3rd evening.

Mrs K.'s work on the 3rd evening took up the subject of “The intangible beneath the surface”. Mrs K. had very clear musical ideas about this: “Something rolls up, and then collapses, with a loss of orientation. There is something chaotic there, where the old order is no longer there, although the old tune does show through from time to time, and maybe something new as well“. But she was unable to say what that meant in concrete terms for her life. Her verbal expression of this was so chaotic that I began to feel quite chaotic myself, and realised that this was exactly the theme that we had to take up – a highly infectious subject.

(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

– 14 –

The links became clearer in the emotional differentiation work, with her very careful and well thought-out musical directions. After a while the revelation of a hidden dissonance (shrill flute tones, wrist bells) was used to represent the emotional relation with the disappointments and mental anguish, and it became evident to Mrs K. that fear had not been assigned an instrument, i.e. was given no expression. Release was not possible as long as fear could find no expression.

That, incidentally, is something we had already heard in the group improvisation on the 2nd evening. The group improvisation on the “river of life” on the second evening had produced a great upsurge, but no real release – merely calming.

Mrs K.'s work now showed clearly what the respondents were suffering from – the fact that it is not possible to obtain release from the intangible and from chaos and disorientation as long as fear finds no expression.

Looking at the nursery rhyme “Alle meine Entchen”, which played such an important part in the group process, and was to give them support, and comparing that with the actual situation of the participants, I had the impression that their emotional and social situation was expressed by the words of the song:

“All my little ducklings, Swimming on the pond On the pond so fair, Heads go under water, Tails up in the air.”

In other words, they were not swimming, or no longer swimming, happily on the pond they had always known, but now found themselves elsewhere, in fast flowing waters; they did not know whether the water was good, because it is deep and unfathomable, and not transparent, and there is no sign where it is going.

Mrs K.'s individual work set off an intensive exchange within the group on loss of values, the search for new values, and the preservation of the good old values of the GDR. The key subject was therefore their desperate struggle for a new identity

(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

– 15 – as women. It was quite clear that Mrs K.'s subject was by no means just a personal one, but rather this was the subject that concerned them all. They showed clearly through their enthusiastic and open sharing of their personal responses and of their own uncertainties that Mrs K. had been working for them all. This meant that a fruitful therapeutic process was already operating. Fortunately, it was possible for Mrs Kollacks to take up and continue this subject later with the various participants in individual therapy.

I am not sure whether the subject of an individual participant in a West German group would have had such a clearly political slant to it as in the East Berlin group, and whether work such as that of Mrs L would have been put under the headings of “problems of independence vs. dependency” or “closeness/distance conflict” in West Germany, and indeed in the West in general, or maybe it would have been called a “generation conflict”. I can only say from my own experience that group processes in West Germany seem to be much more characterised by individual-centred ideologies than in East Germany, where people are much more determined by society-related ideologies. In the West, the watchword is individuation – from the collective “we” to the individual “I”. In the East it is just the other way round. Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle.

I could say infinitely more on this subject, but I have to draw to a close now, and would like just to emphasise one thing at this point: this intra-German problem is not a purely German problem. It occurs wherever there are encounters between people who have grown up in States with different ideologies and images of humankind. This kind of German problem is familiar in Korea, too, and is already programmed for the situation next year, when Hong Kong is returned to China. The truth of the encounter lies in the middle, where we seek understanding without being too reserved, and without rushing forward too precipitously, or overwhelming the other side; but where we do not give up if we this does happen as a result of fear or uncertainty, ignorance or arrogance, or for any other reasons. Thus I hope that this work with MLP has encouraged you to take a music therapy

(2011). Memories from the VIII World Congress of Music Therapy. Voices: A World Forum For Music Therapy, 11(2). Retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/592/463

– 16 – approach to sweeping processes of societal change in your own countries – whether you are an Easterner or a Westerner, or just torn between two worlds.