ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues that adopted children described as having significant or profound learning disabilities benefit from psychoanalytic music therapy. Often with such clients, music therapy might be viewed by other professionals as a distraction activity, or something “fun.” However, the author asserts that all adopted children retain an internal, embodied, unconscious memory of their early felt sense of being relinquished and separation trauma. Working with this is the territory of music therapy. It had been thought that adopted children, but especially those with significant intellectual impairment, could not really know about such early life experience. The author argues that it is our wish to believe these adoptees are not-knowing because it is already potentially overwhelming to acknowledge the pain involved in the birth of a disabled child and the subsequent removal for adoption without also considering the difficulty experienced by the child. Defence mechanisms come into play when others deride value in a music therapy that attempts to provide adopted children with an opportunity to work with unconscious embodied memory or their internalised truth. The author might therefore be “tilting at windmills” in her belief in doing therapy with such. As a music therapist specialising in adoption/learning disability, she has to trust the unknown, embarking upon relationships within needs-led free musical improvisations. She draws heavily on the work of Winnicott and Stern suggesting that their concepts of holding and attunement are applicable to musical relational experiences. She cites a range of authors to form her theoretical approach which she describes as a contemporary approach to music therapy 181informed by psychoanalytic sources and with a focus on relationship, attachment and trauma. Theory is illustrated with a case study. She concludes that engaging in necessarily long-term therapeutic relationships is essential in order for adoptees with learning disabilities to be enabled first to express their trauma, and have it held and witnessed, before embarking on new ways of relating which sustain their adoptive placements.
