Music, trauma and silence: The state of the art

This joint-authored article explores the ways in which music can speak directly to the traumatic, and how music therapy offers a unique means of coming to an understanding of the traumatised patient. We take a musical and psychoanalytical theoretical stance. Drawing on case material from work with a young boy and an adult attending a psychiatric outpatient department, we show how a form of musical listening and thinking about what is emerging in the clinical room can help us to understand something about the patient, about the treatment of those traumatised, and also about the art of music itself. Our aim is to place the music and the therapeutic relationship as the central focus in the work.