Matthew Steinfeld, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, is the author of a paper published in Clinical Psychology: In Session that addresses how musical metaphors can be useful in understanding the substructure of psychotherapy.
In the paper, The Acoustics of Therapeutic Subjectivity and Their Impact on the Resonance of Mutual Recognition, Steinfeld writes about the relationship between the musical and psychotherapeutic, with particular emphasis on resonance, including how people resonate with, and within, one another.
According to the paper's abstract, "This paper addresses how musical metaphors can be useful in understanding the substructure of psychotherapy by considering how our patients resonate inside us, what that resonance does to and for us, and how these acoustic properties seem to be foundational in the construction of the therapist as an instrument of healing. From this perspective, psychotherapy involves 'living music' with another person, as the process of psychotherapy always involves the passing of sound back and forth across an interpersonal divide. This requires both psychotherapist and patient to step into the roles of performer and audience member. Additionally, psychotherapists can be meaningfully thought of not only as an 'instrument' of healing, but also an 'instrumentalist' who produces unique 'therapeutic music.' Moreover, the patient and therapist co-create the concert space in which treatment is performed. This concert space has unique 'architectural,' and thus acoustic, properties within which we hear and remember one another."
Steinfeld, Associate Director of Clinical Training at the Connecticut Mental Health Center's Substance Abuse Treatment Unit, is a classically trained trumpet player who has done research on the psychodynamics of music making.
In September he also spoke about the intersection of art and psychotherapy at a symposium exploring the role of arts engagement in pain management. The symposium, held in conjunction with the International Association for the Study of Pain’s World Congress of Pain, was titled, “A(n)esthetics: The Art of Analgesia” and was organized by Steinfeld’s colleague and research partner, Ian Koebner, PhD, Director of Integrative Pain Management at the University of California, Davis, and a Cultural Agents Fellow at Harvard University.