ABSTRACT
This chapter describes individual music therapy with a cohort of six young congenitally blind children, researching how music therapy could enhance their delayed ego-development and their abilities to initiate contact. The study’s base assumption was that the musical process in music therapy would improve the specific relationship between blind child and sighted therapist and the children’s ability to symbolise.
Evaluating data by using grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 2005), this chapter assesses changes in the children’s interactive processes and elaborates the stages they passed through towards symbol development: (1) creating ‘chains’ of formerly nameless and isolated musical sounds; (2) containing fragments such as disconnected individual sounds or gestures; and (3) overcoming an ‘emptiness’ in the relationship materialising as a state of being unrelated. These phenomena finally culminated in the children’s growing ability to develop presentative (musical) symbols. Also, the study found that the relationship between blind child and sighted music therapist took on an increasingly intersubjective quality. Referring to theories from psychoanalysis and philosophy, these findings are discussed and conceptualised. The chapter concludes with a description of music therapy interventions used in practice and a critical appraisal of their usefulness for instigating symbolic processes in the congenitally blind children participating in this study.
