Approaches: Music Therapy & Special Music Education | First View
© Approaches / ΕΕΜΑΠΕ 1 ISSN: 1791-9622
Book review
Group Music Therapy: A Group
Analytic Approach (Alison Davies,
Eleanor Richards & Nick Barwick)
Reviewed by Mitsi Akoyunoglou-Christou
Title: Group Music Therapy: A Group Analytic Approach | Authors: Alison Davies, Eleanor Richards & Nick Barwick | Year: 2015 | Publisher: Routledge |
Pages: 183 | ISBN: 978-0-415-66594-0
Mitsi Akoyunoglou-Christou is a registered music therapist (US), holds a Bachelor’s (1987) and a Master’s
(1990) in Music Therapy from Michigan State University as well as a PhD in Musical Sciences, Music
Therapy (2014) from Ionian University, Corfu, Greece. She received her piano diploma (Athenaeum
Conservatory) with pianist N. Semitekolo. She works as a piano instructor and a music therapist at the
Aegeas/Nakas Conservatory in Chios. Her research interests are on ethno-music-therapy, children with
emotional challenges and grief. She is a member of ESPEM and WFMT and a member of the advisory
editorial board of Approaches.
Email: ehristou@otenet.gr
“By the crowd they have been broken, by the
crowd they shall be healed” (Marsh 1933, cited in
Davies, Richards & Barwick 2015: 29).
As the title suggests, Group Music Therapy: A
Group Analytic Approach, this book provides a
bridge between the group analytic theory that
originated in Great Britain and its application in
group music therapy. Group analysis, a term coined
by Burrow in 1925, has evolved greatly since Pratt
(who is considered the founding father of group
therapy) conducted the first therapeutic groups in
Boston, Massachusetts, at the beginning of the 20
th
century (Behr & Hearst 2005). Group analysis is
also the formal label applied to the therapeutic
approach of the British psychoanalyst Foulkes,
where “the individual is being treated in the context
of the group with the active participation of the
group” (Foulkes & Anthony 1957/2003: 16).
Within the last decade, group music therapy has
become a topic of interest for researchers,
practitioners and clinicians, resulting in a
continuously growing body of literature (e.g.
Ahonen-Eerikainen 2007; Amir & Borden 2013;
Cho 2013; Davies & Richards 2002; Hessenberg &
Schmid 2013; Jackson & Gardstrom 2012;
Pavlicevic 2003). A great addition to this list is this
newly published book Group Music Therapy: A
Group Analytic Approach by Davies, Richards and
Barwick, which investigates analytic theories
behind group work and its relation to group music
therapy. The authors are clinicians and researchers
practising in the UK and they come from diverse
clinical backgrounds, which allow them to offer their
different perspectives concerning group work in
analytic terms within music therapy. Barwick, a
group analyst himself, draws mainly from Foulkes’
group analytic theory to set the stage for this book,
a theory which takes into account both individual
analytic approaches and ‘one-to-one’ practices as
well as group dynamics. Davies and Richards, both
music therapists and psychoanalytic
psychotherapists, focus on the exchange between
music therapy, group improvisations in music and