This master thesis is a qualitative and hermeneutic case study. Starting from a clinical case of music therapy with a pre-adolescent with anxiety, client’s emotional expressions about his self-perception and parental figures derived from the use of songwriting are described and analyzed. The study is based on six songs selected from a 26-session music therapeutic process conducted over eight months.
The method of analysis has been carried out in five stages: 1) Reviewing the video recordings for a better understanding of the context of the songs to analyse. The context of the songs to analyse will be described by showing the stage in which the song was created, the technique followed, and some music features. 2) Transcription of the lyrics. 3) Observation of the lyrics looking searching for emotional expression by the researcher and a peer group of four music therapists. These observations were compared and discussed afterwards. To complement this first level of observation, client’s presence and the appearance of parental figures were also observed in the lyrics by the therapist. 4) After the observation, categories were established. 5) After the analysis, conclusions and discussion are presented.

The results show that songwriting allowed the client to explore and express a wide range of emotions with different levels of valence and arousal, and sing about emotions of abandonment that non-previously told events of his early childhood aroused to him. It has been perceived, as well, changes in the way he addresses to himself and to parental figures.
This study provides information about a unique songwriting process. There is no possibility of generalizing from one process to another. However, the analysis provides a fair perspective about the benefits of songwriting for promoting emotional exploration and expression in a pre-adolescent with anxiety symptoms.