(Excerpt)

Singing is an experience involving deepened breathing, mobilized body movement, heightened sensing, intense emotional expression and sustained contact with the environment through sound and breath; and singing lessons may provide a rich relational field between singing teacher and student...What I hope to show in this paper is how singing lessons may have profoundly therapeutic effects. With case illustrations, I draw upon my work as both a Gestalt therapist and a singing teacher...My intent is to illustrate a creative way of working with expressive activity which is grounded in Gestalt therapy theoretical concepts...

Case vignettes are organized under the following headings:
Field...
Contacting through gaze...
Support...
Anxiety and breathing...
Figure/ground...
Personality functioning...
Confluence...
Awareness...
Self...
Bringing background forward...
Creative adjustment...
....studying and teaching singing, when undertaken as a series of experiments, is very like the practice of Gestalt therapy.

Readers may obtain the complete article from The Australian Gestalt Journal where it will appear in 2001, volume and number to be posted.

 

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