Abstract
Born out of personal experience from my 9th semester internship at a nursing home, and with an emphasis on the qualities of empathy and presence, this Master’s thesis aims to investigate how music therapy, in treating people suffering from dementia, can be understood from psychodynamic perspectives, and applied in clinical practices. The investigation follows the hermeneutic approach.
Reviews of theories pertaining to dementia, music therapy, empathy and presence, and the psychodynamic approaches to treating dementia are presented alongside the main psychodynamic sources, D. W. Winnicott and C. G. Jung.
Inspired by adaptive theory, data was collected using an auto-ethnographic method applied to video clips recorded, and notes taken, during music-therapy sessions with a person suffering from severe dementia. The data was subsequently thematically coded, and the results are presented in a synthesis along with a model of ‘empathic presence’. Finally, the findings and method are analyzed and discussed.
The conclusion of the thesis is that the use of psychodynamic perspectives in music therapy with people suffering from dementia contributes to immerse the level of therapeutic, empathic presence towards the patient, as well as potentially contributing to the therapist’s self-development. In the long term, meeting the patient’s psychosocial needs might offer the possibility of an emotional reorganization taking place.
Based on the results from this investigation, a list of psychodynamic inspired interventions made in different domains of therapeutic empathic presence is presented. The three domains of empathic presence are 1) an outwards empathic presence towards the client, 2) an inwards empathic presence towards the therapist herself, and 3) an elaborate empathic presence, which simultaneously contains both of the other domains of empathic presence.