Transpersonal Sandplay Therapy Center

Presentation for Association for
Play Therapy Conference-1995

I have chosen to present the theories of Dr. Margaret Lowenfeld and Frau Dora Kalff together because I feel that they form a more complete picture of sandplay, sandtray therapy, the world technique, etc, as we use it today. For convenience I will use the term Sandplay to mean the totality of this method. Dr. Lowenfeld incorporated the theories of early child psychiatry of Freud, Winnecott and others and added her own insights. Frau Kalff introduced the theories of Carl Jung and Eric Neumann to her use of Sandplay. Thus we have had two distinct and separate theories of this method which I will attempt to prove are actually extremely compatible.

A history of Sandplay, Past, Present and Future has just be written by Rie R. Mitchell & Harriet S. Friedman. I will not go into too much historical detail here as I am more interested in focusing on some main theories and applying them to a case. Dr.Lowenfeld developed this method in London in 1926, at the very beginning of the field of Child Psychotherapy. She was trained as a Pediatrician before turning her attention to the emotional issues of children and she had enormous influence on the Kindergarten movement in education by introducing sand and water play into the curriculum. I am going to concentrate on three main contributions that Lowenfeld made to this form of therapy, other than discovering it as a tool for the observation of the child’s mind. The first is the quality of observation of the child which I will call Child-Centered, the second is her theory of Pre-Verbal Thinking and the third is her theory of "Clusters".

Frau Dora Kalff studied with Dr. Lowenfeld at her Institute Of Child Psychology in 1956 for one year and then integrated what she had learned within a Jungian framework. This was a natural development as she was in analysis with Emma Jung, and studied with Carl G. Jung in Zurich, before exploring the Lowenfeld method. Her main contributions to this work are her concept of a "Free and Protected Space" for the therapy process, the appearance of the "Self" in the tray and her inclusion of Eric Neumann’s "Stages of Development" as an important developmental background.

Let me begin with Lowenfeld’s "quality of observation" which I am calling Child-Centered. Lowenfeld developed her World Technique as a method of studying the processes of a child’s mind as he or she placed the toys in the tray with sand. Her interest was in giving that child her full attention and communicating to that child, that what was made was important. In this way she entered into the child’s world. She created a method where the child was able to fully express him or her self. She did not try to fit what she observed of the child’s mind into an already existing theory, as was practiced by her psychoanalytic contemporaries Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. Instead, she carefully noted down what the child did and said and made in every session. Lowenfeld translated a quality of "being there" and understanding what was expressed in a very profound and fundamental way. No attempt was made to alter the play, influence the choices the child made or to modify the child’s behavior. She held a belief in the healing power of play and she was convinced that if given the opportunity, children will express what is important and what is healing for themselves. In the tray, the child is confronted with his own thinking and feeling made manifest. Lowenfeld considered the communication through the Sandplay process to be first a communication from the child to his or her self, i.e. objectifying an inner reality and then secondly, from the child to the therapist. In order  to define her method as distinct from psychoanalysis, she even went so far as to say that there was no transference in her form of therapy. However, taken out of this context, this statement has been seriously misquoted and misunderstood, most of all by the horrified psychoanalysis's of her day. If you take into consideration Lowenfeld’s orientation as a researcher, then her method of objectively studying the child’s mind without influencing the child directly, as verbalizing transference issues in psychoanalysis inevitably does, then Lowenfeld’s position becomes more understandable and therefore, more credible. Lowenfeld also began exploring her method in a clinical setting where therapists followed their child patients from room to room, depending on what the child chose to work on: water play, doll house area, painting, drama area, etc. Children often had different therapists from one session to the next. However, as time went on, it became evident that the continuity of the same therapist was important and gradually the treatment changed into what we have today, a traditional client - therapist relationship. This evolution has also been misunderstood. A Lowenfeld Therapist of today is trained in the importance of the client therapist relationship and practices a Child-Centered approach.

Frau Dora Kalff, in formalizing her method of therapy, used the term "Free and Protected Space". "Free" refers to her concept that the child must feel free to express whatever necessary in the process of treatment. She believed in the innate healing abilities of the psyche and she saw the Sandplay process as a method by which the client could rediscover and reintegrate split off parts of themselves, what has been repressed, what has been feared. The concept of "Protected Space" has both the obvious meaning that the child will come to trust the therapist as a safe person and also that the Therapist will not tell anyone what the child has communicated. This latter issue of confidentiality was strictly adhered to by Kalff and today the rules of confidentiality are similar from country to country. If you put Lowenfeld and Kalff’s method together, as I have explained them, you can see that they are actually more similar than different. And taken as a whole, I believe, both perspectives closely describe a modern Sandplay Therapist’s approach.

Before, I present a case which will give you the experience of what Lowenfeld meant by Preverbal Thinking and "Clusters" or what Kalff meant by the "appearance of the "Self", I need to explain both of these concepts. Preverbal Thinking was the term that Lowenfeld gave to what she considered to be her discovery of a part of the mind. She believed that the Sandplay process accessed a different form of thinking than that used for logical, rational thinking used by language. She was referring to what today we would call Right Brain Thinking which had not been defined in the early thirties. Lowenfeld maintained that the infant thought in pictures before the acquisition of language. She called this thought Pre-verbal therefore to distinguish it from what we now understand as Left-Brain thinking which is logical, rational and verbal. Lowenfeld believed that this was the form of our earliest memories as infants and that precisely for this reason, many of our early memories fade as language acquisition takes place. She was convinced that artists, creative writers, musicians etc. called on this aspect of thinking when creating a work of art. Her favorite example was the artist Chagalle. If you imagine his pictures, you will remember that he has people flying and animals appearing in dream like sequences, not rationally logical at all. Pre-verbal thinking has it’s own set of rules. There is no time or space but many concepts are presented together and are multidimensional. If you look at the sandtray work of your clients from this viewpoint, you will suddenly realize that it is constructed with Pre-verbal thinking, not rational thinking. In other worlds, Lowenfeld believed that to understand this form of language was much like learning to understand dreams. And there is a common element at work here. We dream in images and dreams have a different logic as well. The writer Proust is another example of Pre-verbal Thinking. His memories of walking down a garden path and suddenly a smell or sight would evoke a specific time when he remembered a whole event of feeling, touching, smelling, tasting, seeing and movement combined. This is the experience of the young child. Lowenfeld was convinced that children could not possibly put their experiences into words but they could convey them in Sandplay. She was particularly intent on the tactile quality of the sand, water and toys which she felt was key to accessing Pre-verbal Thinking. Lowenfeld had a deep distrust of verbal communication as she herself spoke several languages. She believed that Preverbal thinking was essentially idiosyncratic and that the meaning for instance of a white bull was specific to the maker which only he could explain. For this reason she was careful to elicit from the child the meaning to them of the placement of figures in the sand. This method of story telling or verbalizing what the tray contents mean to the maker is in direct contrast to Kalff’s Jungian approach. Lowenfeld believed that her discovery of this aspect of thinking was a major contribution to child therapy.

The concept of "clusters" is critical, I believe, to understanding certain crucial trays. Lowenfeld described this as a pivotal point in therapy where a certain traumatic event is described in terms of everything that was going on at the time. It is as if the psyche pours all kinds of illogical and supposedly unrelated perceptions together which, when carefully decoded, explains exactly what was going on in the mind of the child at the time of the trauma. Cluster trays follow the same logic of Preverbal Thinking, in that all the associations with the trauma are idiosyncratic and are locked into a whole construct. Psychotherapy has traditionally advocated reworking this material with the client in order to unlock the energy that became bound up with the trauma, the theory being that the client expends enormous energy attempting to defend against it, to relive or even remember it. I will explain this process further in the case presentation.

Kalff begins her book on Sandplay written in 1980 with a statement that her work with children and adolescents convinced her " that analogies occur which can be compared to the dynamics of the individuation process during childhood as they are described by Carl G. Jung". She goes on to explain that her observations are in agreement with Jung’s belief that "the Self directs the psychic developmental process from the time of birth" (p23). And she quotes from E䁲ic Neumann’s theory that man is born as a totality which is kept preserved at birth by the mother’s Self or within the mother-child unity. At one year of age the Self of the child (the center of his totality) separates itself from the mother but experiences itself in relationship to her. Through the mother’s love the child experiences a sense of unconditional security and safety. Thus a relationship of trust grows out of this experience. At the end of the second year and beginning of the third, the next phase begins where the center of the Self is stabilized in the unconscious of the child. This is manifested by the child in symbols of wholeness. Many therapists who work with children’s drawings or Pre-school teachers can attest to this universal symbolic stage. However, if something has happened to disrupt " this manifestation of Self, this inner order, this pattern of wholeness" from developing, a week or neurotic ego development is the result. Kalff says that this could happen because the motherly protection has not been given or because environmental factors such as war, illness, depression or lack of understanding from caretaker substitutes which interfered with normal development. As therapy with children involves the latter problems for the most part, she saw her work as giving the child’s Self the possibility of manifesting in the tray material. Through the transference, the therapist aims to protect and stabilize the relationship between the Self and the ego. Kalff felt that this was the most crucial point in the therapeutic process. She believed that it was not necessary to discuss the tray material or interpret it to the child until this manifestation of Self had occurred. This was true for adolescent and adult clients as well. Instead the material is looked at and interpreted symbolically by the therapist who keeps a vigilant look out for the manifestation of the Self. She also maintained that these stages follow Neumann’s theory that the developing personality is an essentially unconscious archetypally determined process. Neumann in his work The Child, describes the three stages as (1) vegetative and animal, (2) fighting or confrontational and (3) the phase of adaptation to the collective. Being aware of these stages is helpful to the Therapist in knowing what to expect of the sandplay process in general although each path of each client is individual. At some point in this process, Kalff saw a majority of her clients create of tray in which the manifestation of the Self occurred. It could be in the formation of a circle within the tray or a mandala form. It could be the finding of a treasure or gold representing the true inner worth of the Self manifestation, or in the forming of quadrants in the tray as a means of centering. In contrast, aspects of the self (small s) in psychotherapy refer to the ego identification of many personalities the parent, mother,teacher, wife, etc. In her book, Kalff gives many examples of symbols of wholeness or expressions of the Self: the painting of a sun as a symbol of god (from Jung’s Symbols of Transformation) , for instance, the ancient Chinese symbol for Heaven (round) and Earth (square) or the cross within a square. Once the Self - ego axis had been restored, the prognosis for a positive outcome of the therapy is good. Most of us have experienced this as the point when in therapy the child is able to disidentify himself as bad and view his problems as having solutions. The last stage of the process is the adaptation to the collective in which the child having recovered his or her wholeness is able to return to the world of reality with a new energy for meeting the every day challenges of life. Kalff saw this process as a personal and even religious quest or "opening" within each individual. She felt that the making of this particular tray or trays, was so intense that it had a "Numinous" quality.This is a word that Jung used to describe the presence of Spirit as a palpable experience. Both therapist and client are deeply aware of and touched by the experience. In Martin Kalff’s address, he quoted from a letter of Jung’s that "the existence of the numinous can be the point of therapy, as it’s existence can be the end of illness". (Keynote address, Sandplay Therapists of America ‘95) In his prologue to Frau Kalff’s book Sandplay, Harold Stone, Ph.D says , "Mrs. Kalff brings us a way of objectifying ,in the form of sandplay, the energy of the unconscious... The effect is healing in the traditional sense, but even more importantly, it leads to the deepest connection to the center within which is the source of the human spirit." (p15) Identifying and describing this aspect of the Sandplay process, was I feel, Kalff’s main contribution to the field of Sandplay.

I am now going to present the case of a 13 yr., 11mo. old male client whom I will call Jo. I have chosen this case because it encompasses much of what I have explained as a sandplay process. And yet, each client is different. I will attempt to explain the individual characteristics of Jo’s non-verbal work in the context of an overall Sandplay process.

Jo’s Mother asked for therapy for her son because of his failing grades, lack of friends and intense rivalry with his brother who is 2 years older. Jo’s Father died of cancer when he was three and his Mother went to work shortly thereafter as an Executive in an Advertising Agency in NYC . Jo’s brother was getting straight A’s in High School and was very popular with his peers. In order to better understand Jo’s academic problems he was tested. The results revealed a minor problem with motor-co-ordination which affected writing but otherwise his IQ score was very high. Jo’s learning problem was emotional and therapy was therefore appropriate.

Usually in the first three sessions, the sandplay will reveal the major issues that the client has brought into therapy. In addition, the developmental history and parent’s perspective of problems, helps one to develop goals for therapy.

Slide#1: Wet Sand only

He made a pool of water with five balls of sand; above it but erased were the words "Beware of the Undertoe". He states that this is a play on words. The toes are in a pond of water and lead in a line, from large to small, to a structure on the left. He describes this as a "Castle in the Desert".

My initial impression of Jo from this session is that he is emotionally very remote. He avoids talking very much, often shrugs his shoulders in answer to a question and does not look at me, but stares at the floor instead. My attempt to elicit any more information about his sand picture was met with silence and shrugs. I commented that the Castle looked like a face, to which he nodded in agreement.

Nevertheless, it is possible to glean information from his first tray. The warning of the undertow and his hint at a double meaning, I interpreted to be both a fear of his own unconscious or shadow and a warning to me as therapist that I might not like what I would find out about him, i.e. he has bad thoughts that he wants to hide. The Castle in the desert gives me the clue that he feels himself to be in a wasteland, where life is meaningless. He has succeeded in walling himself off from everything and his Life Force or" E " is spent defending himself from the outside world.

This is hardly the kind of tray one would expect an almost 14 year old boy to make. The balls of sand can be seen as anal products which signifies that he has not moved beyond the anal stage of Freudian developmental theory, i.e. age 3-4. It is likely that Jo reacted to his father’s death and his mother’s return to work as a double abandonment. Each individual experiences a death, an accident,etc, differently. For Jo, this event was a shock to his psyche and it caused him to become blocked at the developmental stage he was in at the time of the trauma. For his older brother, this was not the case. Jo was put into a preschool environment while his mother worked which he apparently disliked. This situation contributed to his present problem because early on he must have made up his mind that authority figures were to be disposed. This attitude becomes clearer in the next two sessions.

Slide#2: Mass Murder theme w\Lone Soldier

On the right there are 6 German soldiers and 2 artillery men who are squared off against 4 American soldiers and 2 artillery men. In the center he pours some water and puts a lone soldier. He calls the area "quicksand" and says that the soldier is suicidal. In the action that follows, the German artillery men kill everyone else, even there own men. Jo laughs as he shoots each soldier, obviously enjoying carrying out the killing. I commented on the lone soldier, saying that he probably feels everyone is against him.

I interpreted this tray to symbolize Jo’s feelings of helplessness, isolation and depression. He, like the lone soldier, feels he is in the line of fire from everyone around him. Quicksand is often used to symbolize depression and helplessness which can drag one down if therapy is not made available. The killing of everyone is Jo’s fantasy which he was warning the therapist of in the first tray. He is furious at everyone and he wants to kill. Even his own men are the object of his wrath, showing me that he has no loyalty towards anyone. Jo’s suicidal feelings could even be a desire to join his dead father, a common reaction of children who have lost a parent.

Slide #3: Killing Townspeople

In this tray, the four artillery men have attacked what Jo called "townspeople", for target practice. "I know it’s cruel", he said, "but they are using innocent people". 

In the right center area, a nurse kills the man on the stretcher and one of the soldiers. A woman with a bandana retaliates against the soldiers and kills both of the German artillery men. She then strides the gun and shoots the last soldier.

I reframe the action in the tray by commenting that the target practice is very effective (each figure was carefully hit with a toy bullet). I then said that those women were so angry that they were able to kill the soldiers. I refrained from discussing the death of the sick man even though it made no sense at the time that a nurse would kill a patient. I made a note of it however, to see if more clues would evolve in later trays.

I have been careful to convey to Jo that I am empathetic about his feelings of isolation and depression and that I am not judgmental about his fantasy of killing innocent people without remorse. This allows him to feel comfortable enough with me to play out his fantasies. The woman with the bandana symbolizes Jo’s fear of castration and his belief that he deserves to be punished, probably for his oedipal fantasies around mother.  It also gives me an understanding of his image of mother\the feminine as angry, murderous and emasculating. Looking at these three trays together, the picture of a depressed and hostile adolescent becomes clear. His blocked development seems to have fixated on vengeful fantasies towards authority figures and women. In asking Jo for information about his daily activities, I found that he felt hated and picked on by classmates and teachers alike. He came home to an empty house until his older brother drove home from high school. The boys often made dinner for themselves as their mother came home around 7PM. Jo’s comment about his life was "boring". In talking to Jo’s teachers, I discovered that his failure to turn in homework was the central problem. Obviously Jo’s refusal to cooperate was due to a deep seeded resentment which he was unaware of consciously. At this point in therapy I discussed Jo’s emotional problems with his mother and outlined the goals for therapy. I felt confident that Jo would make good progress in Sandplay therapy as he seemed to enjoy it and he was able to express himself well with non-verbal materials.

Jo continued to play out scenes of innocent people being gunned down by army artillery men. However, each scene changed slightly giving me the insight into the gradual healing process which took place over the three years that I worked with Jo. The next slide is an example of how Jo expressed these shifts in his non-verbal language process.

Slide #4: (3 mo. into therapy)

On the right we have the Green and Red Barret soldiers who are mixed together so that one can’t tell who is killing who. First the Red Barret Officer is shot because, Jo says, "men don’t like to be ruled". I reflected back to Jo that he was finding it hard to put up with adults always telling him what to do.

Here the issue of killing is more diffuse and less charged.The problem with authority figures however is is clearly stated and acknowledged. The lone soldier, a self image, is not in the crossfire but not completely out of danger. He is not quite on land, as bear ground can be water, but he is not in quicksand. Jo has made progress in recognizing his problem with authority and is beginning to see himself outside of direct danger.

Slide #5A: Family Session (8 mo. into therapy)

The family, Jo, his brother and mother, are given a choice of how to divide up and those working together are asked to choose a theme. In the first tray we see mother on the right and brother on the left. The theme is "what I like to do". Brother has made a mandala form of motorcycles going around a tree. There are four fences defining his space and he has a bird to the left and a monkey in the tree ( the observer function). A black van right is put on Mother’s side. He says, "It belongs to the farm". Mother has a house and pond with ducks and geese and a peacock around it. "It is a peaceful place where she likes to go in the mid-west". It is her white cat which has strayed into her son’s area. This tray depicts what happens often to sons when the father is absent. Mother is slightly seductive and the son tries to be a masculine caretaker.

In tray two, Slide #5B, Jo reacts to his mother and brother’s alliance, by first making a river which turns into a swamp. He puts a mother alligator and her baby in the center and then a second baby far to the left. He says, "It is not hers". This baby has a wide open mouth denoting oral needs unmet and there is a stork nearby, symbolizing that Jo is expressing in poignant terms his feelings of early childhood rejection. He has two snakes between the unwanted baby and the mother and child, both meaning danger and awareness of the oedipal aspects of the alliance. Notice that this is the first time that Jo has expressed the Animal\Vegetative stage, in Kalff’s terms. He went from the earliest form of sandplay, pure sand, into the 2nd stage, Fighting. Now as expresses his earliest memories, the first stage becomes evident.

Slide: # 6: Cluster (1 mo. later and 9 mo. into therapy)

In the foreground we see the familiar 2 German artillery soldiers. In the center rear a stone marks a grave with 4 grave diggers in front and to the left a group of people. The action began in the lower left corner where a school boy carries the stretcher of "a man who died in the hospital". A Priest and a Nun, a woman with a basket (called the wife) and 10 townspeople are in a procession leading towards the left rear.

Jo pours water on the procession and says, "the boy is caught in quicksand but is pulled out". The woman then tries to carry the stretcher through the water but it is buried in "quicksand"(left mound ). The procession continues to the Center left. The boy then climbs the tree, "because", Jo says, "no one will see him up there". The artillery men however, shoot him and he falls along with the tree. The artillery men shoot the 4 grave diggers as well and would have killed the townspeople to but Jo says, "they are spared because a man throws dynamite at them and kills them".

As this figure of the boy has been used before as a self symbol, it is clear that Jo is here describing his reaction to his father’s death in a hospital and his burial. The man on a stretcher is the same figure from the third session where the nurse kills him. The meaning of that act now becomes clear. This is a cluster of Jo’s confused memories and feelings of his father’s death. He assumed, as a three year old might, that the nurse killed his father in the hospital and the grave diggers ‘finished off ‘ the job by burying him. Therefore they are killed.

Jo also here explains that he tried to carry the weight or memory of his dead father and it almost took him down into the quicksand (suicidal depression) but someone pulled him out (possibly the therapist). He sees his mother as trying to carry the load i.e. unable to complete the grief process as well, but the body is buried in the quicksand, not in the grave. Jo’s perception is accurate that his mother has not completed the grief process. Jo’s reaction at three to this traumatic experience was to try and become invisible (no one will see him), but he is shot down. Perhaps his own anger, projected onto the artillery men, leaves him exposed as well.

You can see that this tray represents a cluster of Jo’s confused and conflicted feelings of loss. This material carried a dynamic charge which Jo could never have expressed in words because of the idiosyncratic and multidimensional nature of his early childhood memories. I was able to refer to this tray in future sessions, as clarifying and bringing Jo’s confused feelings into his awareness was an important part of processing his reactions to the traumatic experience. Note also that the Vegetative state is included in this early memory. Two trees are standing (mother and brother) and two are down (his father’s and his).

I am now going to jump ahead and show you a tray from the third year of therapy.

Slide #7: Self -Worth

On the far bank, four men with shovels are mining gold. Three tanks are positioned on top of the mound to protect the operation. In the road in front of the main mine, four trucks have been loaded and are ready to transport the gold to the factory. In the forefront, a mail truck and other equipment contain "men who are hiding and preparing to attack". It is interesting that the four grave diggers are here used as gold diggers. Jo is showing progress in that he is now able to use his previous blocked energy to mine his inner resources.  Gold is a symbol of alchemy or transformation.  In other words a symbol of contacting the "Self" or "Higher-Self" potential.  The work has to be done under vigilance and protection as there is still danger from attack. This tray represents a constellation of the Self for this particular child. I have seen other examples of the manifestation of the Self as mandala constructions. It is important to keep in mind that these theoretical concepts are in fact expressed idiosyncratically.

The last slide ( # 8A) is a follow-up session i.e. the fall of the third year. It gives a us an insight into the process of "adaptation to the collective" and a resolution to the trauma of loss.On the right, 4 skiers are coming down a hill. The car in the right bottom corner is protecting them. To the right of it, a rabbit is called, "something small" and is on the side of protection. In the left corner a wolf and buck deer between trees are called, "something from nature".

Slide #8B: In the upper left corner is a space ship, constructed from shells. 3 Aliens have come to earth to take "the man on a stretcher" away "to another universe". This tray represents a resolution of Jo’s traumatic experience of his father’s death in that now he is transported to a place which Jo can accept. Finally, in Jo’s mind, he has resolved the dilemma and the trauma of his father’s death.

The skiers represent Jo’s ability to adapt to his peer group who go skiing for the weekend during the winter. He is now able to access "E" energy for growth and normal development. Even though protection is important, it is minimal . Notice that the Animal\Vegetative Stage (1) has now been integrated into Jo’s mature process of Adaptation to the Collective ( Stage 3). Jo is also able to integrate both the masculine left and feminine right aspects of his nature in normal and positive images. The healing of his early childhood trauma is complete.

    Many years later I received a note thanking me for helping her son and telling me that he was on the honor roll in college but more important, he was a happy, well-rounded young man. 

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