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It gives me great pleasure to review this book. Mary Priestley has trodden an at times isolated but important pioneering path in working analytically with music therapy. Here she gives us an all-encompassing descriptive offering of her work and techniques evolved and practised over many years. The publication of this book brings recognition to her originality and commitment.
It is notoriously difficult to communicate on paper musical experiences which are live, ephemeral and in themselves never quite reproducible, even on recording. Mary Priestley, with her large paint-pot of words, brings us experience-near. She describes the development of her method whilst working in a large psychiatric institution, concurrently with her own Kleinian analysis. With two music therapy colleagues, there were ninety-six sessions in which, at different times, each participant was paired with another as the designated patient or therapist, with a third as observer. Out of their improvisations, observations and discussion evolved ways of working analytically with individual patients and also ‘Intertherapy’ which uses this triadic formula as a training for prospective therapists.
Mary Priestley opens her book by saying … for some time now I have privately thought that there is no such thing as Analytical Music Therapy … as soon as you