Bereavement, the BAMT and the Cardiff Course

Abstract

There are two aspects to this essay, which uses the idea of bereavement processes to explore both the development of a bereavement policy in a special school and also the loss of the music therapy training course at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Both sections of the essay are connected by the concept of the unspeakable. The first section follows a clinical case of a music therapy group during which the death of a group member was not acknowledged, while the second section looks at our professional organisation's difficulty in acknowledging the loss of a UK training course. Both aspects are discussed in terms of unspeakable elements which if left unexpressed can hinder a reparative process. The thinking about this leads on from the findings of two previous BJMT articles, both from Volume 24 (2010): ‘Organisational Anxiety, Envy and Defences: In and Out of the Music Therapy Room’, by Louise Neale (2010: 42–48) and ‘A Death in the Family’, by Rosanne Tyas (2010: 22–28).