In 1961, the year of Carl Gustav Jung’s death, American music therapist Margaret Tilly wrote a memorial essay in tribute to this influential psychiatrist, whose work had left a profound and enduring mark on the field of Psychoanalytic Studies. This recollection was published in a memorial booklet in the same year and was later documented in William McGuire’s C. G. Jung Speaking in 1977.
Historically, this recollection has fascinated many music researchers because it offers a rare insight into Jung’s perspective on music therapy. Based on Tilly’s account of her encounter with Jung, this article invites you to discover what took place during their meeting and why this remarkable encounter matters to the history of music research.
The Music Therapist
Margaret Tilly’s remarkable career brought together many different worlds. She was a music therapist, concert pianist and violinist, teacher, researcher and a devoted Jungian scholar. She had an excellent reputation for her performing skills. The New York Times praised her piano playing for its “sustained singing tone” and “imaginative and sensitive artistry”. Yet her achievements extended far beyond the concert stage. Her innovative use of music in psychotherapy was also widely praised in contemporary newspapers. One report described her work with a young woman with schizophrenia, in which the patient performed a difficult piano duet with Tilly in a broadcast. The performance offered a remarkable glimpse of how Tilly was able to awaken the young woman’s interest in learning music.
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Her interests, however, extended beyond the therapeutic use of music. In 1947, she published her remarkable paper, “The Concept of Masculine and Feminine Aspects in Music Composition,” in which she explored how the qualities of anima and animus are reflected in musical composition, and how these relate stylistically to a composer’s early life experiences, including the mother complex.
The 1956 Meeting
This historical meeting took place in 1956, while Tilly was travelling to Geneva for a music performance. Before leaving London, she sent Jung a letter together with her paper, expressing her desire to discuss her musical methods with him and to offer him a music therapy session. A few days later, she received a reply from Jung’s secretary, Aniela Jaffé, inviting her to visit Jung at his residence in Küsnacht.
As Tilly recalled, before the music therapy began, Jung asked Tilly to treat him as her patient. Yet he expressed a certain reluctance towards music, explaining that the archetypal images evoked through music could leave him profoundly exhausted.
What happened next is particularly intriguing. According to Tilly’s recollection, after reading her paper and experiencing the two-hour music therapy session, Jung said, “I began to see what you are doing—show me more.” His attitude towards music appeared to shift as he continued:
“This opens up whole new avenues of research I’d never even dreamed of. Because of what you’ve shown me this afternoon—not just what you’ve said, but what I have actually felt and experienced—I feel that from now on music should be an essential part of every analysis. This reaches the deep archetypal material that we can only sometimes reach in our analytical work with patients. This is most remarkable.” (McGuire, 1977; Tilly, 1961)
Here, we should note that although this quotation may provide fairly strong evidence that Jung was receptive to the therapeutic use of music as a way of engaging archetypal psychic material, but it does not fully mean by that Jung had explicitly endorsed a formal theory of “music archetypes” as a treatment method.
Alternatively, for Tilly, this encounter seems to have marked a remarkable moment: through the experience of music itself, Jung was not merely hearing about her therapeutic method but experiencing something of its psychological power first-hand. Tilly also recalled that Jung was very excited during the therapy sessions and was “as easy and naïve as a child to work with”.
This shift raises an intriguing question: what was different about Tilly’s approach? Jung had already discussed music and its therapeutic possibilities with Margaret Braband-Isaac in 1953. Yet his encounter with Tilly appears to have produced a strikingly different response. What, then, happened between Tilly and Jung that allowed music to reach him in a way that earlier discussions had not?
From Music Therapy to Music Education
As a music teacher, I believe that Tilly’s experience of applying Jung’s psychological concepts to her musical methods not only contributed to the development of music therapy, but also opened a door to new possibilities for music education research. I became particularly interested in discovering what specific methods Tilly employed in her music therapy, and how Jungian concepts informed the way she worked with her patients.
With these questions in mind, I conducted an archival study of Margaret Tilly and Margaret Braband-Isaac, seeking to contextualise how these music therapists of the Jungian era incorporated music into their clinical practice. Through their archival records, I explore how their musical approaches intersected with Jungian psychology and what these historical encounters may reveal about the relationship between music and the psyche.
My forthcoming publication in the Journal of Analytical Psychology, expected in November 2026, examines their methodologies through findings from my archival research and considers their relationship to Jung’s psychological theories. This research forms part of my doctoral thesis, Music Therapy within Jungian Depth Psychology: A Theoretical Contextualisation, which is due for completion in July 2027.
Keywords: Carl Jung, Margaret Tilly, music therapy, personality, individuation, typology, archetype, psychology
Read the full article: Jungian Approaches to Sound and Music: A Critical Review of Margaret Tilly’s Music Therapy Practice – Yeung – Journal of Analytical Psychology – Wiley Online Library
References
Margaret Tilly in Piano Recital. (1919). The New York Times.
Margaret Tilly’s recital: Pianist gives proof of fine imagination and individuality (1930). The New York Times.
Miss Y Makes Piano Debut (1946, March 18). Sedalia Democrat.
McGuire, W., & Hull, R. F. C. (eds.) (1977). C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters. London: Thames and Hudson.
Piano Performance May Help Girl Mental Sufferer (1946, March 19): The Havre Daily News.
Pianist Proves Musical Sanity (1946, March 21): The Wilmington Morning Star, Wilmington, N.C.
Tilly, M. (1947). The psychoanalytical approach to the masculine and feminine principles in music. American Journal of Psychiatry, 103(4), 477–483. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.103.4.477
Tilly, M. (1961). Margaret Tilly. In memoriam Carl Gustav Jung 1875–1961. In M. Oakes (ed.) San Francisco: Analytical Psychological Club of San Francisco.
Tilly, M. (1977). Therapy with music. In W. McGuire & R. F. C. Hull (eds.), C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters. London: Thames and Hudson.
© 2026 Chi-Yan Yeung. All rights reserved.
This article contains original research and analysis by Chi-Yan Yeung. No part of this article may be reproduced, distributed, or adapted without prior written permission, except where permitted by law. Historical quotations and archival materials remain subject to their respective copyright and attribution requirements.
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