Hungarian Maltese Charity Service László Harmat
László Harmat:
Hungarian Maltese Charity Service László Harmat
Budapest 1126 Márvány st. 42. Tel: 355-0337 mobil: 20/324-2211
mentalhygienic expert e-mail:
International Pető Institute Budapest
Department of Pedagogy
Budapest 1125 Kútvölgyi st. 6. Tel: 224-1575
assistant professor ( teacher of music )
A CASE STUDY OF THE MUSIC THERAPEUTIC RESULTS IN A SELF-ANALYSING CLASS
I conduct a class with clients having psychosocial and behavioral disorders. Its main focus is to help people to bring up suppressed feelings with the help of music, relaxation, and creative activities. 6-8 individuals work together in one group for three hours in every second week. Music, related to a given theme (spring, fire, earth etc.) in each session, supports the clients to express their thoughts and experiences. They also acquire simple relaxation techniques that can help them in their lonely moments.
I demonstrate the progress of a young woman suffering from anxiety in discovering and expressing her inner suppressed dynamism by her drawings made while listening to music. We can follow the more and more confident delineation, the increasing usage of colors and drawing space. Music was found to be not only a source of resumption for her, but it also helped her to endure the every-day life burdens.
I am leading a self-analyzing class for the Hungarian Maltese Charity Service. In the past years I have had some clients in the group, who have been addicted, or have suffered from anxiety, some of them were under psychotherapy at the same time. This group helps them to overcome and handle the problems of their actual life, and to express their feelings about these through listening to music, relaxation, playing an instrument, and other activities: through drawing, painting and prepairing small objects. We usually work in small groups with 6-8 members and 2 group leaders.
Every sitting is organised around a certain topic (the spring, the way, the fire, the ground, etc.) These topics are present in our work both through their profane and through their symbolic meaning and they offer the clients an opportunity to talk about their thoughts and personal experiences related to the topic. The piece of music, which we are listening to, is also closely related to this topic. We ask the group members to give a feedback about their impressions during listening to the piece. Active music making means playing percussion instruments. Apart from the joy in making music together we also encourage the clients to try to express their feelings and thoughts through the instruments. The group members also learn some simple relaxation techniques, which they can also practice when they are at home and if they are lonely. In the past years we heve been working with ca. 50-60 clients. I know from experience, that for these clients music is not only a possible way of recovery, but also an effective means to bear the burdens of everyday life, and a source for a new beginning.
My client was a 24 years old young woman, who has been in the group for two years, and was also under the therapy of Dr. Judit Jánosi. When she started the therapy, she was in a fairly bad condition, she suffered from severe depression and anxiety. The beginning of the therapy it came to light that Anna’s parents were divorced very early, so she grew up without a father and the separation from her mother caused severe problems for her. Compared to her age Anna seemed quite immature, she suppressed the feminime features both in her dressing and in her behaviour. Her mother was a very smart and lively person, and her utmost wish/desire has been for years, that her daughter should obtain a university degree.
The problems with Anna started in secondary school, because her results were quite week. What is more, she attended the same school, in which her mother was teaching, so the mother could keep a firm hand on her, and despite the fact that she failed several times, she could take the final exam. Anna has been sorely tried by these years, because she realised, she could not fulfill her mothers expectations. She kept herself aloof from the others, and lost her fiends step by step.
The mother did not realise anything from her daughters difficulties, she wanted to see her own dreams fulfilled at any cost, so she enrolled the daughter to a college and paid the tuition fees. She had very high expectations towards her daughter, both regarding sports and school achievements. Anna could not live up to these expectations, so she took refuge in the field of arts. Instead of attending lectures, she went to the cinema. She grew fond of art movies, was often listening to music, and spent the tuition fee, which she did not pay in the second semester, on books. She fled in her own world of dreams, and the distance between her and her friends deepened, she got more and more lonely. Her situation was complicated by the feeling of guilt towards the mother, whom she swindled regularly. The complete downfall happened, when her lies were brought to light. This was the time she applied to the Hungarian Maltese Social Charity Service for a free psychotherapy.
At the beginning of the therapy she hardly spoke a word, she just sat still, and stared into vacancy. If she said something, she never looked into the eyes of the therapist. It was very hard to remove her from this inert stiffness. The reason for her feeling of guilt was not revealed for months. In the hope of a faster and more effective recovery the doctor sent her to our group in the firm belief that her sensitivity to music would help her to get a step further. The doctor and me consulted once a month, and we shared the experiences of the therapy and the group work.
I present Anna’s development in 5 steps. The first and most difficult phase lasted until she admitted during the individual therapy that she lied to her mother. This was a milestone towards the elimination of her feeling of guilt and meant also that she liberated her suppressed passions towards her mother, first of all her anger. At the beginning of the group work she remained in the background, she never opened up and did not look into the eyes of the groupleaders, or at the other clients. She covered her eyes with her long hair, and answered our questions only in one or two words. She could not be attentive to the music we were listening to, she was too busy with her own thoughts, as she told us.
Once we were talking about the connection between music and colours. We listened to musical compositions of different atmosphereand I asked the participants to associate the different pieces with colours. At the end everyone prepaired a rainbow of colours according to the various music compositions. The difference in the atmosphere was deliberately indicated by sharp contours - but this was not present in Anna’s drawing. Her suppressed dynamism appeared not only on her drawings but also in her sympathy towards the music she was listening to. She did not differentiate, said about each piece, that it was beautiful and that she liked it. In the next few sessions I asked Anna to try to consider her actual problems in isolation, and to focuse on the music. She should let the experience brought about by the music come closer to herself. At first this hardly ever happened, even if she was moved by the music sometimes, she could not communicate this to the members of the group. During the relaxation she regularly complained that she was not able to relax.
After four or five months the improvement in her condition was apperent. As I mentioned before, this change was in close relationship with the results of the individual psychotherapy that is to say with the decreasing intensity of she feeling guilty about her mother. And that was the time our role really began in her life. In this second period we concentrated on how Anna could express her emotions in a more differentiated way, and how she could make aware and use of her hidden inner energies. One time we dealt with the relationship of music and the emotions. We set the clients a task less familiar to them. On a table we placed different percussion instruments of which they could choose the one they liked and then they were asked to express their different emotions by them. So as to make the task easier, first we sounded the feelings of fury, pain, love etc. altogether but then the clients encouraged to express their own actual feelings alone by means of the instruments. We made the task even more difficult by asking them to identify the moods and emotions sounded by the others. It’s been a quite interesting experience for me to see how sophisticatedly Anna could interpret the feelings of others and at the same time how uncertain she was concerning her owns.
In this period her position in the group changed as well. She became more open towards the others, her manifestations became braver and sometimes she even put her hair behind her ears so that her eyes could be seen. The members of the group turned to be encouraging, loving and open towards her, while they used to feel sorry and aversion for her before. The following drawing tells us a lot about Anna’s condition that time. (1.picture) It represents a tree with its roots holding on to the ground like a spider. A possible interpretation of this is how Anna tries to hold on to her family connections – while the ground is infinitely dry. This drawing is very detailed and so are Anna’s other works in general. The leaves of the tree are drawn one by one in blue, the colour of water, instead of green, the real colour of leaves. It possibly means that those are not the roots that have some vitality in them, but the leaves only. And indeed it was the time Anna began to discover her inner strength and vitality.
1. picture
After three months the next step on Anna’s way to health was that she decided on going to work in the evenings for a few hours. One of her close relations gave her the job, and though she wasn’t payed for it, she spent less time at home, the contentment over a well-done job made her feel her own effectivness and her capacity to act. The third period passed in terms of Anna manifesting the antagonisms in both life and herself. This change helped her to further formulations of her own desires opposed to her mother’s.
Once we listened to Smetana’s symphonic poem, The Moldau. Anna expressed more times that the last two harsh and rude chords of this wonderful music made her feel quite unpleasant, and that it would have been a lot more relaxing for her if it had just faded away. This was a sign of the improvement of her attention and sensitivity. She often made negative remarks on harsher and louder music. Once she said she couldn’t cope with a dynamic movement of Bach’s Mass in b minor. At this point we must face the problem of aggression. Indeed she could not cope with either the anger inside she felt primarily towards her mother, or the aggression she had suffered. On the part of her mother she suffered mainly verbal aggression, but, as she slightly mentioned once during the individual therapy, she had vague recollections of occasional molestations on the part of her father when she used to meet him as a child on paternal visitings.
Further on I encouraged her to make hold of those feelings and conflicts she felt during listening to music and to express them either in words or drawings. While listening to Dvorák’s Romance I asked the members of the group to take a trip to the sky. Surprisingly Anna reached great heights and depths in a few minutes and she presented her trip with fairly colourful pictures. Then we made postcards. The clients were asked to draw a picture on both of the outer sides of a paper folded in two. One of the pictures was to represent their own sky as they saw it for the first time and the other represented the one they would have liked to see in the future. The difference between Anna’s drawings can be easily seen. The sky of her past is dark, stormy and quite dynamic with sharp, closed outlines. The future has soft colours and the outlines can be hardly seen. In the centre of the picture an eye that sends out yellowish beams of light seems to be delineated. (2. picture) And this is the drawing that leads us to the problem concerning Anna’s femininity.
2. picture
This is the next important phase in Anna’s life. From a more theoretical point of view it may be supposed that Anna’s very attractive and womanly mother can be the origin of Anna’s undeveloped behavior as a woman. This – and also the backwardness of becoming financially independent – may be a rebel against her mother. Fortunately later she reached that stage of her development when she wanted to find a new place of work by her own. She got job in a fast-food restaurant, and from this time she has been earning the money for her own coats. Her relationships become more colorful and richer in emotions. She often goes to movie – and never alone. In this phase she likes talking about men, love and dance in the therapy. Usually she arrives to the therapy session in good mood, where she feels really fine. She is able to draft in details her emotions and experiences emerged during listening to music, and she is also able to talk about her actual problems. In this phase her most interesting drawing was inspired by a symphonic poem, the Les Preludes composed by Franz Liszt. (3. Picture) The much differentiated usage of colors describes accurately the changes in the atmosphere over the music.
3. picture
Her progression, however, was not without hard periods. Her actual tasks often made her anxious. It was especially difficult for her to say no to her mother. Once we were listening to the Pictures at an Exhibition composed by Mussorgsky. One of its themes, The Great Gate of Kiev, caused her really depressive feelings by its monumentality. In her associations an enormous wooden gate appeared that she was not able to open. Our next topic was the human relationship for which we chose the bridge as a symbol. First we were discussing the role of music as a bridge between people, and then I asked them to draw a bridge on which they are keen on walking. The drawing of Anna was symmetrical and harmonic. (4.picture)The bridge runs between two trees with branches bending towards each other. On the bridge a nicely decorated, small building stands. The leaves of the tree are drawn the same way as one year earlier; however the roots of the tree can not be seen, since they are covered by a road. However, we do not know what crosses the bridge. The picture was drawn by black pencil and it is rather lifeless.
4. picture
13. Finally we reached the present phase of Anna’s development. She goes to a spanish language school and to a dance school. She became more relaxed and honest. Sometimes she is anxious to open up and talk about her problems and unfortunately she has not allowed us to ask her mother to take part in the therapy yet. Nowadays our most important task is to make her growing self-confidence stronger and stronger. The last drawing is from her last therapy session. It was also made with black pencil. The theme of that session was the winter, and she drew a landscape inspired by the music of Leopold Mozart and Vivaldi. On the drawing the winter was signed by the black color and the bare trees, on the other hand the sunshine, small flowers and birds on the tree also could be found. (5.picture) We hope that the trees will turn into green and flowers will become even more colorful an Anna’s further life.
5.picture