Archetypal Music Psychotherapy: A Depth Approach to the Creative Expressive Arts (6 credits)

With Joel Kroeker, RCC, MA, MMT, MTA

What happens when you listen beyond what a client is playing and begin exploring the imagery, emotions, patterns, and meaning emerging through the music?

Archetypal Music Psychotherapy (AMP) offers music therapists a depth-oriented approach to understanding and working with the creative process. In this experiential 6-CMTE course, you’ll explore how improvisation, composition, performance, and active music listening can become pathways to self-exploration, personal insight, and therapeutic growth.

Rather than focusing only on techniques or interventions, AMP invites you to deepen the way you listen, notice, and respond to what unfolds within the music and the therapeutic relationship. Through experiential exercises, case examples, research, and discussion, you’ll gain a new perspective you can bring to your clinical work as well as your own creative and reflective practice.

You’ll also explore applications for mindfulness, music-based self-care, culturally responsive practice, and working across cultures, helping you develop a richer understanding of both the music and the people you serve.

In this workshop, you will learn:

How to recognize and explore imagery, emotions, patterns, and meaning that emerge through musical experiences.
How to approach improvisation, composition, performance, and active music listening from a depth-oriented perspective.
How creative musical processes can support self-exploration, insight, and therapeutic growth.
Ways to use music for mindfulness, reflection, and your own professional self-care.
How a depth-oriented perspective can broaden your awareness of the therapeutic relationship and your work with clients from diverse cultural backgrounds.

Here’s What People are Saying:

“I was blown away with the depth of the information and have been thinking about it since then!” Leslie M.

“I think it will help me to explain to my colleagues we aren’t just “banging on drums”, that improvisation is an inner state being expressed as outer form. I work in a medical model setting, and I don’t think many people understand this” Linda K.

“I think it was a step beyond the behavioral approach to which we so often limit ourselves. It reminded me that music making has great value.” Patricia M.H.

“So many nuggets to pull out to use with people.” Leslie M.

“Oh my gosh – so much.positive about this course! The link between improvisation and the subconscious is fascinating. I love the process of recording an improvisation and then experiencing it through listening, journaling, drawing. Have never thought to do this. Also so many great ideas of things to read to support this type of work.”Leslie M.

“Fabulous course. I loved the pacing, the thoughtful and scholarly and deep material, the gentle interactions. Joel embodies a therapeutic presence, yet also full of information too.” Sangeeta S.

Learning Objectives:

1.Participants will be able to identify at least three of the main principles of Archetypal Music Psychotherapy (AMP).

2.Participants will be able to apply at least two specific depth psychological strategies for working with unconscious material through sound-based processes (integrated with visual expressive processes).

3.Participants will be able to describe at least two ways that applying an effective therapeutic symbolic attitude to common clinical material enhances their own clinical understanding.

4.Participants will be able to apply at least two of these AMP principles to their own personal clinical work.

CBMT Domain Areas:

Domain III Implementation: 3A-6 Theoretical frameworks for music therapy treatment implementation (e.g., educational, developmental, neurological, psychological)

Schedule:

There are 4 hours and 15 minutes of recordings to watch, and an hour assignment to turn in.

Archetypal Music Psychotherapy (AMP): A Depth Approach to the Creative Expressive Arts is approved by the Certification Board for Music Therapists (CBMT) for 6 CMTEs-Continuing Music Therapy Education credits. The Spiegel Academy, CBMT Approved Provider #P-106, maintains responsibility for program quality and adherence to CBMT policies and criteria.

Class Description