ABSTRACT
Art and music therapy are divisions of psychotherapy where art or music is the primary communication method. The most common use of music therapy with families is to facilitate communication among family members. The family is viewed as a system, with each family member playing a role in the functioning of the system and any change effecting the entire system. Pre-recorded music has also found a place in family therapy as an agent for promoting discussion around personal and interpersonal conflicts. Whereas the music therapy profession generally stops at modern ideas and comparisons in terms of their family therapy thinking, the art therapy world continues the journey into postmodern ideas. As family therapy models began to stress process over content, the active techniques that arts therapists (drama, dance, art) used, became popular: for example, rehearsals of interactions, drawings as representational of feelings, and expressive activity presenting a family's basic communication patterns.
