ABSTRACT
Archetypal music psychotherapy (AMP) as a new model is explored and described including various illustrations of how this involves accessing, amplifying and integrating unconscious material through musical means while exploring the dynamics that emerge along the way. This process takes many forms including explicitly attending to the musical qualities of the verbal exchange and listening together to personally potent music as if circumambulating a dream. Emergent content from the musical reverie is engaged, spontaneous improvisations are created and accompanying transferential interactions within the analysis are explored. Music is composed, imagined or remembered as a way to drop more fully into the places where memory lives within one’s personal history. The six main principles are outlined including explorations of perception as a creative act, the relationship between mastery and expression, improvisation as a manifestation of the inner world, sound as an image of wholeness, music-oriented active imagination and the analytic benefits of musical consilience. It is suggested that staying in relation with these six principles through the process orientation of the AMP analytic lens of receptivity allows multiple levels of living musical symbols to remain alive, active and symbolic, thus putting one in contact with the necessary and responsive symbolic attitude.
