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This article examines the re-signification of trauma and the reconstruction of meaning at the end of life through active and receptive music therapy. Using Juliane Koepcke’s limit experience as a phenomenological metaphor, it proposes a parallel with the inner journey of palliative patients, for whom music becomes a symbolic map and a mode of existential orientation. Drawing on the concept of total pain and on contributions from existential psychology and logotherapy, the article analyses how musical expression supports emotional regulation, biographical integration, dignity and non-religious transcendence. It develops the Soul Sound Map as an affective, symbolic and spiritual cartography that emerges from the patient’s musical history, integrating memory, identity and resonance within the therapeutic process. Active interventions such as improvisation and songwriting, and receptive methods that access deep emotional memories, are presented as pathways for reorganising traumatic experience and restoring narrative coherence. Through an analysis of Mozart’s Lacrimosa, the article illustrates how music evokes universal emotions that facilitate a shift from rupture to structure and from collapse to meaning. It concludes that music, in its creative and receptive dimensions, allows patients, even in extreme fragility, to preserve an inner map capable of guiding the final transition toward a meaningful, inhabitable and coherent sense of self.
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Title At the Threshold of the Inner Jungle (Re-signifying Trauma through Music in Palliative Care) Corrected Version
This article examines the re-signification of trauma and the reconstruction of meaning at the end of life through active and receptive music therapy. Using Juliane Koepcke’s limit experience as a phenomenological metaphor, it proposes a parallel with the inner journey of palliative patients, for whom music becomes a symbolic map and a mode of existential orientation. Drawing on the concept of total pain and on contributions from existential psychology and logotherapy, the article analyses how musical expression supports emotional regulation, biographical integration, dignity and non-religious transcendence. It develops the Soul Sound Map as an affective, symbolic and spiritual cartography that emerges from the patient’s musical history, integrating memory, identity and resonance within the therapeutic process. Active interventions such as improvisation and songwriting, and receptive methods that access deep emotional memories, are presented as pathways for reorganising traumatic experience and restoring narrative coherence. Through an analysis of Mozart’s Lacrimosa, the article illustrates how music evokes universal emotions that facilitate a shift from rupture to structure and from collapse to meaning. It concludes that music, in its creative and receptive dimensions, allows patients, even in extreme fragility, to preserve an inner map capable of guiding the final transition toward a meaningful, inhabitable and coherent sense of self.
Work type Article
Tags affective attunement; existential meaning; music
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Identifier 2511243811585
Entry date Nov 24, 2025, 6:02 PM UTC
License All rights reserved
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Author. Holder Erica Flavia Alio Warr. Date Nov 24, 2025.
Information available at https://www.safecreative.org/work/2511243811585-at-the-threshold-of-the-inner-jungle-re-signifying-trauma-through-music-in-palliative-care-corrected-version
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