[Music therapy single case process research--development and organization of a research field]

Music therapy yet to be discovered as a target of psychotherapy research. A first step consists in creating adequate samples of significant musical dialogues. Video-recording is an essential requirement for establishing such data. To test the clinical view that the emotional content of the musical dialogue in music therapy reflects the basic relationship issues of a patient was the objective of this study. By using ratings of significant musical dialogue sequences with the instrument of semantic differential comparing groups with varying clinical expertise (music therapists, psychoanalyts, lay persons) the results demonstrate that there is considerable stability of the judgments; however, systematic differences exists among the three groups of raters.