At the Threshold of the Inner Jungle: from Juliane Koepcke´s Trauma Re-signification to Music Therapy in Palliative Care
Erica F. Alio-Warr
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Abstract:
This conceptual-theoretical 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. Based on the concept of total pain and on contributions from existential psychology and logotherapy, the article adopts a conceptual and phenomenological analytical approach to examine how musical expression supports emotional regulation, biographical integration, dignity and non-religious transcendence. It draws on the Soul Sound Map framework 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 song writing, and receptive methods that access deep emotional memories, are presented as practical implications for reorganising traumatic experience and restoring narrative coherence. Additionally, 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.
Keywords:
Affective attunement; Existential meaning; Music therapy; Palliative care; Phenomenology; Resonance; Soul Sound Map; Trauma re-signification; Total pain.
Citation: Erica F. Alio-Warr (2026). At the Threshold of the Inner Jungle: from Juliane Koepcke´s Trauma Re-signification to Music Therapy in Palliative Care. Horizon J. Hum. Soc. Sci. Res. 8 (1), 185–195. https://doi.org/10.37534/bp.jhssr.2026.v8.n1.id1336.p185
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