The inner power of music can cause an inner motion that sets the stagnant time of a depressed patient going. Music has the possibility to 'rythmate' the inner 'emptiness' of these patients and bring them back to 'experiences'.
This is a short description of what happens in the therapeutic proces with Magda, a depressed patient.
Magda plays a senso-motoric game. The only thing that sounds is the continuous, traumatic pattern on the xylophone. There is no inner or psychic space. This is the reason why there is nothing else perceptible than emptiness, an infinite emptiness.
Slowly, this emptiness makes place for experiences of sadness and melancholy. The music therapist tries to give form to this experiences and to contain them through the music she plays. After a period of time Magda withdraws from this two-dimensional (senso-motoric) world. She creates an inner space where we can play together (she can let go of her pattern).
These experiences of sadness and melancholy were at the beginning strange to the patient and only could be held by the therapist. In the inner space she created, she can talk now about her experiences or about her disease. Magda came to a symbolisation. The senso-motoric play that she used for not feeling the pain can be left behind.
My thesis is called 'Sonata for Magda' because the structure of the classical sonata is very similar to the process with Magda.
The first part of the sonata is called the 'exposition'. Typical for this part is that a theme will be presented and repeated. Nothing else happens, nothing can be developped. This is what also happens at the beginning of the process with Magda. The only thing that occurs is the repeating of the pattern (the theme) on the xylophone.
In the second part of the sonata there will be a space where other developments can take place. The theme of the exposition will be variated, not only be repeated. In the working with Magda the therapist experiences not only the emptiness of the repetition but a feeling of sadness, of melancholy.
The third and last part of the sonata is called the 're-exposition'. The auditor recognizes the theme. This implies that he can hold something, that it has a place in his inner space.
In this third phase of music therapy Magda creates an inner space. This means that she starts to experiment with the original theme, she gives it a new meaning.
Where it was traumatic at the start of therapy it becomes now more and more symbolised.
The same process will be explained in the theory part. The 'exposition' will be compared with the first scream of an infant, a scream without any meaning and a scream that will be a object of the jouissance. The next step is the crying and the wailing on funeral rites, the first step to a symbolization. The 're-exposition' is comparable with the more inner crying, a way of holing the grief. And just like Magda starts to talk now, the inner crying can be the step before the last symbolization of the language.