An Introduction
Psychologists and neuroscientists confirm what ancient Greeks already knew: music both moves the soul and takes care of the body.
Nowadays we almost all agree that music promotes self awareness and improves the quality of interpersonal relationships. It helps handle emotional and relational fragilities, together with communicative difficulties issuing from them.
But, as any powerful tool, it must be handled carefully.
In these pages we sketch the guidelines of an ambitious protocol of intervention, the Relational Singing Model (RSM).
RSM has been developed by Giorgio Guiot, musician and choir conductor, and Cristina Meini, philosopher of mind, but has a long history rooted in the collaboration with other people. We started our research and practice working with Maria Teresa Sindelar, psychoterapist and expert in the DIR-Floorime model (see our book Autismo e musica (Erickson, 2012)). In more recent years, the RSM protocol has been consolidated through our collaboration with two systemic psychoterapists of the Istituto IMePS (Naples), Giuseppe Ruggiero and Stefano Iacone. Together, we brought RSM in a clinical setting with couples and families, raising new promising theoretical expectations described in the book Il Pentagramma Relazionale. Le forme vitali nella psicoterapia familiare e di coppia (FrancoAngeli, 2017).Our sources of inspiration
This section is devoted to some data and hypotheses issuing from different theoretical contexts and jointly capable of stimulating a mature reflection on the beneficial effects of music.
We are thinking about the contour theory developed in a philosophical context; the notion of forms of vitality proposed by the psychologist Daniel Stern, as well as the DIR-Floortime Model put forward by Stanley Greenspan and Serena Wieder. In different ways and to different extent, these reflections all influenced RSM. Nevertheless, in a more “practical” perspective, it is useful to look also at the models proposed by Patrick Juslin, Michael Tomasello, and Katie Overy e Istvan Molnar-Szakacs.
