Summer, Lisa
Biography
Lisa Summer, PhD, LMHC, MT-BC, FAMI is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and Board-Certified Music Therapist who is a leading practitioner of Guided Imagery and Music (GIM), a music therapy method developed by Helen Bonny in the 1960s at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center while programming music for psychedelic research.
Summer was a student of Helen Bonny at the Institute for Consciousness and Music in Baltimore in the 1970s and then served as the Coordinator of her GIM Training at the Bonny Foundation in Salina, Kansas from 1988 until Bonny’s retirement in 1997. She then took a position of Anna Maria College in Massachusetts, where she was director of music therapy for nearly three decades. Prior to that, she held clinical music therapy positions at a school for children with developmental disabilities, an inpatient psychiatric hospital, several nursing homes, and a Head Start Early Intervention Program.
As a clinician in the 1980s and 90s, Summer pioneered the Continuum Model of GIM which expanded GIM’s scope of practice from well adults to those suffering from depression, anxiety, and addiction.
She has written prolifically on the clinical use and applications of GIM, has compiled Bonny’s publications into a textbook, and edited a volume of an online journal dedicated to Bonny’s life and work.
She leads GIM seminars and trainings internationally and has played a critical role in applying her 40 years of experience as a music therapist to GIM-informed protocols for the current psychedelic research landscape.
Citation:
Montgomery, Erin Anne. “An Interview with Lisa Sumer: Discussing GIM and its Adaptations,” Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, Volume 12, Number 1, 2012Biographical info provided by Lisa Summer https://voices.no/index.php/voices/article/view/2039