Hello, dear colleagues all over the world! I was asked to open this discussion and I am pleased to have this honour. It gives me the opportunity to continue the intercultural discourse Thomas Wosch started with his column from November 5, 2001.
Although music seems to be a universal language music therapy concepts are very different in the various cultures. Thomas Wosch stressed the differences between East German and West German music therapy concepts. (You see, we still differentiate between East and West Germany!). The question that follows from this differentiation is whether a West German could work music therapeutically with an East German and vice versa. This is of course also true for all intercultural relations. What should German music therapists know about Japanese patients, what should American music therapists know about German patients (east and west) and vice versa, etc., in order to give justice to the culture concerned and not to "colonialize" it with one's own cultural values and ideologies? This touches problems of life styles, the role of feelings and the role of religious and spiritual beliefs, as well as in politics as in music therapy. A lacking discourse about basic human concepts makes it impossible to develop an intercultural understanding. So let us discuss common and different concepts.
Thomas Wosch compares, for example,. the East German concept of "Regulative Music Therapy" (RMT) and "Guided Imagery and Music" (GIM) and he heads the concepts of verbal description and reflection of perceptions versus the detecting of meanings of symbols. With that statement he brings into mind the old antinomy between materialistic and idealistic positions. In socialistic countries the social conditions and the context certainly were more important than supposed metaphysical ideas behind phenomena. Also, in countries where people - for political reasons - for years had to be careful what they said when and where it certainly was therapeutically right to focus on words in music therapy.
To me it is interesting how Thomas Wosch as an East German colleague experienced GIM. It is interesting, because he seems to understand GIM as an intellectual therapy concept of finding meaning by words. He sees GIM as a method in order to "accept unaccepted emotions" by "detecting the direct meaning of symbols and pictures." Being a West German - but of course I can only speak for myself - I would describe music therapy and, for example, GIM differently, and this is due to the fact that I come from a Gestalt therapy tradition that was focussed on the here and now in another way than seen with East German eyes. To me music therapy is not only a question of accepting and naming emotions. The therapy provides the possibility to process a problem by experiencing and feeling. Music helps to enter into and be carried through a process . The words are welcomed after the process is through. The images and symbols are only interpreted or discussed after they have been experienced and lived through. There is no meaning behind the symbols. The symbols speak for themselves. In this regard we have a common concept: the focus on the perception itself and the appreciation of what happens in the here and now. The difference to the East German tradition I see in the point of entering into feelings and experiences and not only admitting them.
It seems to me that the further you go eastwards from Germany the more therapy is meant to perceive, identify, classify and reflect feelings as something you have to admit and accept. The more westwards you travel from Germany, however, the more feelings in therapy are encouraged to be lived out. In fact Americans seem - to me - to be the ones that express and share their feelings most easily with anybody. When I worked with colleagues from the United States I was always perplexed by the eagerness of the participants to share their deepest feelings with people they did not know yet. Such an openness could easily in Germany be regarded as a lack of sensitivity for the context.
Another interesting observation I made is that music therapists I know from the USA have a quite different metaphysical culture than I sense (at least) in West Germany. Religion and spirituality are lived out much more publicly in the US. The president of the United States has to prove his religious engagement and if he is not religious enough he is not accepted as a president. To be religious and spiritual in a way seems to be a MUST in the USA. This is different in Germany. If Germany's chancellor would demonstrate in electoral contests his personal religious or spiritual beliefs people would rather not vote for him. Religion and one's spiritual aims are private and intimate things and it is impolite to investigate in a person's privacy. People believe in secularisation, at least in public. People are easily regarded as "naïve dreamers" if they dare to admit publicly they are on a spiritual path. They might be regarded as sectarians or false Gurus that lost the sense of reality. Of course this does not mean that German music therapists are not engaged in spiritual issues or that they lack an embodied and grounded way of spirituality. They simply don't talk so much about it and they do not take it for granted that everybody thinks in spiritual terms. If they work in that direction they generally would not call it "music therapy", but describe it, for example, as "sound-guided trance in psychotherapy" (Wolfgang Strobel). The mandate to give therapy to a patient in a clinical context and the mandate to encourage his spiritual development are not the same. The discourse needs further discussion in order detect the underlying "missions" and in order to find consensus about "therapy". Although I am enthusiastic about the transpersonal dimensions of GIM, I find it difficult to take spirituality as a concept that goes without saying into my clinical therapeutic work.
As I see it,
Intercultural experiences with music therapy
As I am a foreign student, Thomas Wosch asked me to share a bit about my intercultural experiences. Coming from another country, I noticed that a different mother tongue can be used as an extra tool. But first I want to tell you how I came to Germany (Magdeburg).
I come from the Flemish part of Belgium. That means that I speak Dutch as my mother tongue. In Leuven (Lemmensinstitute), I studied music therapy for four years. Through projects, we came in contact with music therapists from Israel, Germany, Italy and Denmark. I noticed a real difference in personalities and also in the way that they work with the medium music. I realized that music therapy is a very large field and that there is not one method but almost as many methods as there are music therapists, in which the culture determines a lot the way of working and thinking. To enlarge my view, I decided to go abroad for one year. In October I came to Magdeburg. I got the chance to do practice in a psychosomatic clinic. Here I noticed an interesting phenomenon.
I came in the group as a co-therapist; I only observed at the beginning. Slowly we switched roles. I became the leading music therapist. For me the talking part WAS not so simple. My German isn't perfect and as it becomes neccessary to express very precisely, words sometimes fail. At first I thought it was a negative point in the therapy: the patients are in music therapy to try to put their affects and feelings into words, but how can they do that, if the mother (therapist) doesn't know how to do it in their language? But then I realized that perhaps it could be used as an extra tool.
First of all, music therapy is a nonverbal method. In my case, the difference in language, the nonverbal part, gains importance. I can explain this best with a situation that happened in my practice. A man of 50 started to tell the group something of the relationship with his parents. At first he spoke clearly, but the more he told us, the more he began to speak faster and the less I could follow. As I knew more or less what he was talking about, I focused me on the nonverbal elements. I found anger and disappointment, although he verbally only expressed the anger. Later he told us a story where he expressed his disappointment. As I was hearing the nonverbal elements I could receive more information than what he was telling verbally.
The second advantage comes from what I thought at first was a disadvantage. When I don't know the right words in German, the patients help me to find the right word. We search for the right words together. This means that we in some way have the same goal.
But not everything is an advantage. For me, it is sometimes very difficult to understand what happened in the past, to understand how the people of East Germany lived during GDR times and how that influenced their lives and their way of thinking. It was a different world, a different culture that is still resonating.
Music Therapy in Ukraine
For rather long period of time, Music Therapy in Ukraine was understood as a passive perception of some pieces of music, preferably classical music, which was used for relaxation. This kind of music therapy was mainly used by psychologists. And as practical psychology was not widely used in our country we had more theoretical understanding than practical experience and application.
So last year when we started to work with Magdeburg University and instructors of the Department of Social Pedagogics and Psychology of Zaporizhzhye State University and had the possibility of participating in their music therapy training, conducted by German instructor Thomas Wosch, we were surprised and interested. It was so unusual and at the same time very new and interesting for us. But in the course of training we started to enjoy it. It helped us, as instructors, to better understand ways of communicating with each other and even hidden conflicts which we had not realized.
After the discussions with the colleagues and our German colleagues, we decided to develop the same kind of program in Ukraine. This fall we had a similar kind of training for the students of our Department.
I was sitting outside the circle and had the opportunity to observe the behavior of my students as well as their feelings. After the trainings, we had the possibility to share their ideas and thoughts. The first reactions of my students were very similar to the reaction of instructors. They asked questions like: How could adults play on simple children-like instruments? How can you accept it as a serious therapy? Does it really help people? Is this music therapy? How could patients play if they are not musicians? They had many more questions. But after a couple of days they started to enjoy the process of training.
My observations were similar to Thomas Wosch's: in playing, students tried to find harmony with sounds of other instruments. The main idea was to try to work as one orchestra. Group interests were more important than individual interests. They liked to work in dialogue as there they had more possibility to express their feeling. We often feel group pressure. This is the consequence of a collectivist mentality. But students tried to get more and more from the instruments during their work.
It was a very exciting experience and we look forward to continue this work and to see how the students will work with the instruments.