Mary Priestley

Mary Priestley (born March 4, 1925 in London , died June 11, 2017 in London) was a British music therapist and is considered the founder of psychoanalytic music therapy.

Life

Mary Priestley was born in London as the illegitimate daughter of the British writer John Boynton Priestley and the pianist Jane Wyndham-Lewis. There was contact with both parents, who both had other children. Priestley grew up with music and got her first piano lessons at the age of 7. During her school days she stood out for her musical as well as drawing talent. Therefore, after completing primary school, she attended a secondary school with an artistic focus, where she learned the violin as a second instrument .

With the threat of invasion during the Second World War, the school relocated to Herefordshire . She received composition lessons from Arthur Villner and founded a string quartet with friends . Through this she met her future violin teacher Isolde Menges, who brought her to the Royal College of Music in London. So she came back to London at the age of 16, where she also witnessed Hitler's bombing raids on London. She studied violin (further with Isolde Menges) and composition with Gordon Jacob . After the war she attended a violin class at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève ( Switzerland ), where she met her future husband, the Danish violinist Sigvald Michelsen. After the marriage in 1949, the couple went to Denmark , where, according to Priestley's memories, the situation arose that, even in the audition, she did better than her husband, but he got a job as a conductor and she got a second fiddle. In 1951 the couple had male twins and in 1954 another son. Two and a half years later they divorced, Priestley returned to London and had to leave the twins with the father due to Danish law . She earned her living with various assignments in the musical, artistic and church environment. With the help of her father's agent, she published her first book, Going Abroad . Due to her ex-husband's addiction problem , the now 13-year-old twins were awarded to her and came to her in London.

illness

Manic-depressive episodes occurred repeatedly in Priestley's life, sometimes at long intervals , for the first time when she was in her early twenties. The early psychiatric hospital stays, during which she a. She found treatment with insulin shock therapy and electroconvulsive therapy traumatizing. In 1968 she started psychoanalysis and got the impulse to help people who are suffering from psychosis .

Music therapy

Around 1969 she came into contact with music therapy , attended the further training of the London music therapist Juliette Alvin at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and began her own music therapy work at the psychiatric clinic St. Bernhard's in London, where several music therapists were already active. Musically, the discovery of free improvisation was central to her later work, which Alfred Niemann taught at the Guildhall School. In 1975 she published the book Music Therapy in Action . which was also published in German in 1982. She worked as a music therapist in London, conducted teaching music therapy with music therapy students and taught at various institutions, including abroad. From 1978 to 1980 she repeatedly worked as a guest lecturer on the Herdecke music therapy mentor course , and later also at the Hamburg University of Music and Theater .

For the last few years she lived in retirement in London.

Work and reception

Mary Priestley is considered the founder of psychoanalytic music therapy. She understood music therapy as an exploration of the patient's unconscious with the help of free improvisation by therapist and patient and introduced essential basic ideas of psychoanalysis into music therapy, such as: B. Defense mechanisms , resistance , the unconscious, preconscious and conscious . She drew on the theories of Sigmund Freud , Melanie Klein , Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott . She gave a major impetus to consider the processes of transference and countertransference in music therapy treatments. She introduced teaching music therapy, comparable to training analysis in psychoanalytic training, as an essential feature of music therapy training, which later became the standard in many national and international music therapy associations.

Her influence on the development of music therapy in Germany arose on the one hand from the fact that some of the first German music therapists learned from her in London. B. Johannes Th. Eschen, Hans-Helmut Decker-Voigt and Ole Teichmann, on the other hand through their own involvement in the first music therapy training in Germany, the mentor course Music Therapy Herdecke (1978–1980), in which the analytical music therapy together with the Nordoff - Robbins music therapy was taught. Her lectures held there in English were later translated and also appeared in Germany as a book. In the first few years she was also involved in music therapy training at the Hamburg University of Music and Theater . In other countries, too, the psychoanalytic orientation of music therapy was established through its students, such as B. Colleen Purdon in Canada , Benedigte Scheiby in the USA and Inge Nygaard-Petersen in Denmark.

Publications in German

• Music therapy experiences. Basics and practice. G. Fischer-Verlag, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-437-10754-2 .
• Analytical music therapy. Lectures at the Herdecke community hospital. Klett-Cotta-Verlag, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-608-95186-5 .

literature

• Meike Aissen-Crewett: Analytical Music Therapy. The Mary Priestley model. (= Aisthesis, Paideia, Therapeia. 6). University library , publication point, Potsdam 2000, ISBN 3-935024-06-1 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Mary Priestley in the catalog of the German National Library
• Interview on Voices - A World Forum of Music Therapy , accessed July 8, 2015
• Article in the MusiklaborNetzwerk , accessed July 8, 2015
• Excerpt from Music and the Shadow with Mary Priestley on Youtube , accessed on July 14, 2015

Individual evidence

1. ^ Susan Hadley: Exploring Relationship Between Mary Priestley's Life and Work. In: Nordic Journal of Music Therapy. Volume 10/2, p. 129.
2. ^ Susan Hadley: Exploring Relationship Between Mary Priestley's Life and Work. In: Nordic Journal of Music Therapy. Volume 10/2, p. 121.
3. ^ Mary Priestley: Going Abroad. Collins-Publisher, 1965, ISBN 0-00-411550-3 .
4. ^ Susan Hadley: Exploring Relationship Between Mary Priestley's Life and Work. In: Nordic Journal of Music Therapy. Volume 10/2, p. 122.
5. ↑ Voices: A World Forum of Music Therapy ( Memento of the original from December 22, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ^ Priestley, Mary: Music therapy in action. Constable, London 1975, ISBN 0-09-459900-9 .
7. ^ Mary Priestley: Music Therapy Experiences . Gustav Fischer, Stuttgart 1982.
8. ↑ Meike Aissen-Crewett: Analytical music therapy. The Mary Priestley model. (= Aisthesis, Paideia, Therapeia. 6). University Library, Publication Office Potsdam 2000, ISBN 3-935024-06-1 .
9. ^ Rosemarie Tüpker : Self psychology and music therapy. In: Bernd Oberhoff: Music as a Beloved. For the self-object function of music. Psychosozial-Verlag, Gießen 2003, p. 105 ff.
10. ^ Mary Priestley, Transfer and Countertransference in Music Therapy. In: Musiktherapeutische Umschau . Volume 6, 1985, pp. 17-36.
11. ↑ cf. Website of the German Music Therapy Society
12. ↑ Hans-Helmut Decker-Voigt: My success has many fathers - but many more mothers. An interview with Ms. Musiktherapia about the development of music therapy using the example of some of her memories from music therapy history since 1948. In: Yearbook Music Therapy. Volume 9, Reichert Verlag, Wiesbaden 2013, p. 24f.
13. ↑ Johannes Th. Eschen: My way into music therapy. In: On the beginnings of music therapy in Germany. Herdecke music therapy mentoring course. Reichert Verlag, Wiesbaden 2010, pp. 9-13.
14. ↑ cf. Johannes Th. Eschen: Musiktherapeutische Umschau - a new magazine. Programmatic notes on the situation of music therapy in Germany and the function of this journal. In: Musiktherapeutische Umschau. Volume 1/1980 issue 1, p. 2.
15. ↑ cf. Rosemarie Tüpker: Mary Priestley - Music therapy in action / Paul Nordoff - Creative Music Therapy. In: Musiktherapeutische Umschau. Volume 31/2010, Issue 4, pp. 391-394.
16. ^ Mary Priestley: Analytical Music Therapy. Lectures at the Herdecke community hospital. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1983.