In the first chapter, we discussed the legitimacy of concerns voiced by certain music therapy scholars regarding the appropriateness of current theoretical status of the field. When compared with the identified genuine requirements of scientific development, the authors’ demands were found to be conducive for the development and establishment of music therapy as a science.
Theoretical emphasis on “a priori universal order” was then identified as the common point which answers similar demands within other established scientific disciplines. In the fourth chapter, we investigated how such emphasis is able to provide solutions to aforementioned issues, which were now identified to be essentially linked to each other as different aspects of the same scientific necessity that is universality.
Firstly, we have clarified how the much criticized diagnostic categories of the “medical model”
of therapy shares common properties with the critiquing “positive” models. And contrary to the popular argument about the problematicness of the symptomatic classifications themselves, we argued, these common epistemic properties to be the main issues underlying many of the critiqued problems of the symptom based classifications. We then have examined how such an epistemic framework may work against the sensible efforts of emphasising client capabilities as opposed to treatment techniques.
We have then shown how the knowledge of the underlying principles of the notions of interest is an essential requirement for addressing the manifold problems with exclusively descriptive categories. We suggested that emphasis on such principles could assist the theoretical work within the field to transcend being helpful perspectives to music therapy practitioners and students, and render them valuable also for the public as well as related scientific fields.
Furthermore, we outlined the relation among such principles with issues which may previously be believed to be unrelated to their knowledge, such as stigma, misconduct in research, high recurrence rate etc. Therefore, we suggested the ascertainment of universal principles to be the chief purpose of the scientific investigation of disciplines concerned with human mental health, and consequently of music therapy.
During the process, we have investigated in detail as to how an act of unification provided by such principles is able to assist with the issues of fragmentation brought about by exclusively descriptive categories. With the examples provided from the field of physics, regarding our understanding of the nature of the world prior to and after the discovery of certain laws, parallel issues with non lawful notions employed in music therapy were indicated.
As such, issues regarding the incompatibility of diagnostic notions with the therapeutic actualities of music therapy, as were also noticed by a number of the music therapy scholars opposing the positivist therapy research, have shown to be resolvable within the current scientific framework. As such, it is indicated that there is no need for music therapy’s emancipation from the unified system of science, in order to stay congruent with the actualities of its content; that it can safely establish itself in this system without compromise, as the system of science provides that the holistic relationality between health, music, the therapist and the client not only can, but must be objectively ascertained.
Accordingly, ‘Professional consensus’ as the sole certifier of legitimacy for exclusively descriptive categories, due to its inherently subjective nature, is found to be insufficient in ensuring scientific objectivity. The notion of provability is identified as the necessary requirement for objectivity to be genuine. The “pragmatism” of approaches with and without a provable foundation is discussed, in order to further emphasise the undesirability of goals posited in absence of the knowledge of their objective nature. The adequate nature of the evidence of success therefore is shown to be primarily linked to ascertained universal principles, which alone provide the possibility to differentiate between actual and imagined success. To support this, the widespread positivist assumption of “cumulative experimental rigor being the key for achieving objective causal relations’ is challenged, and shown to be incongruent with the history of scientific development.
It is shown that the relationship between objectivity and observability is not mutually affirmative and that with necessary objectivity in the form of proof, the need to observe e.g.
“celestial matter” as essentially separate from “earthly matter”, or mental health from mental disease from ‘floating matter’, as discontinuous categories is eliminated.
In the same manner, present thesis claims, through establishing necessary objectivity in explaining the formative principles of mental health and therefore its healing, first and foremost, the deceptive categorical discontinuity between mental disease and health can be overcome; a discontinuity which, like many others, exists solely in perception and not in the essence of human beings. Accordingly, alongside dignifying human beings’ inherent relational as well as political capacities for health, theories may also dignify human beings’ rational capacities by producing coherent and provable reasons for their statements. Consequently, restraining scientific efforts as well as institutional and educational resources to the continuation of the unwarranted as well as unwarrantable disempowering of clients of mental health care, can be history.
Moreover, it is our conclusion that the same principles of mental healing will also serve the elimination of the alleged discontinuity between musical healing and non-musical healing of the human psyche. As many music therapists point out, clients who attend to music therapy have needs no other than the essential human needs that other people have, and what music therapy inherently means is to employ musical interactions in service of such needs. Such an understanding of music therapy outlines it to be an application of musical interactions where their implicit health promoting properties of music are understood and made use of explicitly, rather than a strange medium of therapy in need of recognition. Then, once the objective reasons as to why this millennia old practice has always been ameliorative to the human psyche are proved on rational grounds, music therapy can cease to be an “alternative method” trying to
“squeeze in” the medical literature through methodologies which demand its decontextualization.