By Silke Jochims, Music teacher for secondary schools (main instrument: voice), piano and percussion teacher, diploma in music therapy, trained in the U.K., licensed psychotherapist in Germany; 20 years of clinical practice as music therapist in the fields of psychosomatic diseases, child psychiatry and neurological rehabilitation. E-mail: jochims-musik@gmx.de
 

Being since 1997 the coordinator of the working group for music therapy within the European Association for Psychotherapy ( EAP) I gave a lecture about music therapy at the 11th EAP Congress in Lviv ( Ukraine) in 2003. Most of the 30-40 listeners had come from East-Ukraine so that my paper as well as the paper of a young Ukrainian music therapist (living and working in Germany) had to be translated into Russian as east-Ukrainian people obviously do not understand Ukrainian language.

There was a high interest in active music therapy, which seems to be unknown among the former east block countries. In these countries the medical profession used music solely in the receptive way. The specialisation of a music therapy profession is unknown. The same experience I had in Armenia, where I held a 10 days training course in the year 2000.

The politics of the EAP is in general to help free of charge the former east block countries in establishing psychotherapy by starting training courses. Therefore I offered at the end of my paper to give a workshop in music therapy free of charge if this would be of interest. Immediately I was asked by a young Gestalt therapist if I would come to Dnepropetrovsk to give a seminar about active music therapy with children. This was the beginning of a still-lasting contact with Ukrainian psychotherapists who are interested in our method.

In fact in February 2004 I started for a three days seminar to Dnepropetrovsk. Loaded up with two suitcases filled with instruments I had at the airport to open all cases for security reasons and to prove by playing that these are real instruments! At the end I was asked by the security personal: "Are you a music therapist?"! I was very amazed that they already knew about our profession! In Kiev I was collected from the Gestalt therapist as she was the only one speaking a little bit English. She and I organized together the whole seminar. We travelled by train all the night and arrived in Dnepropetrovsk in the morning, two hours before the beginning of the seminar. After two nights of nearly no sleep because of travel circumstances it was quite hard for me to concentrate for ten hours speaking in English and being translated after every sentence. My translator was very quick and very flexible, but she was neither a professional in music nor a professional in psychotherapy. Quite often she had difficulties translating special terms or she translated wrongly, which I did not realize because I cannot understand Russian. But one participant could speak German and Russian very well so that sometimes she asked me in German what I had said and then she translated into Russian for the rest of the group. The translator and I had a fulltime job as in the breaks everybody wanted to ask something and every question plus my answers had to be translated.

The room was quite small for the nearly 25 participants, most of them between 30- 50 years of age. I had asked them to bring some small instruments which nearly everybody did. However, they were all very difficult to play and nearly all wind instruments so that they would not give them to others. As a result, we had a lack of deep, bulbous and muffled sounds as for instance big drums or even a piano- necessary for moments of containing. On the contrary we had a too much of high frequency sounds which had an impact on the whole improvisational feeling.

The participants were professionals of Gestalt therapy, client-centered psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and family therapy. Their wishes for this seminar had been to go into case studies, to show how they could add some music in their professional child psychotherapy, to give a theoretical frame of music therapy. But within the three days their seminar goals changed quite dramatically: they asked less and less about professional advices and theoretical understanding, but more and more about personal and social issues. The last day they preferred just to play and could not stop it! When improvising with them and observing them I felt that the main task of these three days was to give them space for personal feelings of freedom, without controlling themselves and without the anxiety of attracting attention when their behaviour did not conform to that of others. From the relational perspective it seemed necessary for them to feel uncontrolled by me as the leader. For instance at the beginning of the seminar they waited for a sign to be allowed to play. Later on they played through the breaks observing me if I would stop their noises. The last day it was a tremendous noise in the room during the breaks, but when they saw me smiling about these noises, they started to behave like little children. Some asked to be allowed to take an instrument home in order to improvise at home in the evening. They gave me the feeling of being starved of freedom and joie de vivre, of letting go of control over their behaviour and of not being controlled by somebody. On the other hand I felt an incredible tension between the members themselves, which they were not able to express either in music nor in language. In my role as a leader I felt that I should not go into details of relationships. There was a feeling of danger around it. As a group they functioned very openly and freed, but as individuals within a group they were closed and unable to express relational problems. Concerning written material or even pre composed music they were like a sponge: they copied every single word I had with me for my own memory and taped all music cassettes I had with me, even those very well known pieces as the Air from Johann Sebastian Bach's orchestra suites. Obviously they have difficulties in accessing western style information, thoughts as well as music, although classical music is often performed and highly acknowledged in Ukraine.

As a result of the seminar I was asked to run a training course for professional psychotherapists to become music therapists. Just now we are in the planning phase, but we decided already to start in 2005 and to end two years later, with five to six one week phases of training. In case they decided later to want to be called music therapists I insisted on learning an instrument to play for everybody. This might be a problem, but I hope we get this solved. The main problem is actually a translator as this is money consuming. The participants will have a mixture of group and individual training, including classes in music theory, music psychology, practical playing on instruments and voice, practical improvisation on instruments and voice, different music therapy methods, praxis of music therapeutic intervention, music and movement, diagnostic and indication for music therapy, individual and group supervision of music therapeutic treatment of children and adults.