Musical Efficacy in Medical Humanities Care - Focusing on a Case of Music Care for Cancer Survivors

The purpose of this study is to explore the efficacy of music in the field of care. Music has the ability to express and reproduce emotions in the unconscious that words can not express. Music that expresses human emotions inspires people with hope through reminiscence of the past and openness to the future. Therefore, music can be used as a transitional object to provide care to people who have experienced physical or mental loss due to illness. In the field of healing, music plays a mediating role in helping people recover from loss to take care of their minds, and through musical activities, clients materialize their future hopes from fictional imagination to representation. This process was applied to a music-based medical humanities care program run by cancer survivors, and the emotional responses of cancer survivors were observed. As a result, the clients simultaneously expressed music’s nostelgic perspective and future openness, and embodied their emotional expression about the future through performance.