Old and New Horizons of Sandplay Therapy

Mindfulness and Neural Integration

Martin Kalff, Paolo Ferliga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367756734
• eBook ISBN: 9781000453119
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This thoughtful and comprehensive book sheds new light on Sandplay Therapy, a method founded in the 1960s by Dora Kalff. It is based on the psychology of C.G. Jung and Margaret Lowenfeld, with inspiration from eastern contemplative traditions. This method is effectively used for psychotherapy, psychological counselling and development of the personality with children and adults.

This book grew out of the collaboration of a supervision and research group with Italian therapists which regularly met for a period of over 10 years under the guidance of Martin Kalff. It focuses on how to understand in more depth the processes clients experience in Sandplay Therapy. An important feature of Sandplay is the possibility to create scenes in a box with sand. Worlds arise through the shaping of the sand and the use of miniatures, humans, animals, trees, etc. These creations manifest inner conflicts as well as untouched healing potential.

This book discusses a number of techniques based on mindfulness such as 'spontaneous embodiment', the use of colours, spontaneous poetry, 'entering into the dream', to understand the work done in a Sandplay process and dreams and presents examples of clinical cases. These techniques are not only valuable for supervision but can also be used in therapy to help clients reconnect with body and feelings.

Part 1

A new perspective: The individuation process in Sandplay Therapy: Neural integration, resonances in soma and psyche

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163503-1

Chapter 1

Historical premises

Martin Kalff

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163503-2

Margaret Lowenfeld: body and preverbal thinking

In order to place the ‘Experience-Related Case Studies’(ERCS)¹ into the theoretical and practical context of Sandplay Therapy, it is worthwhile to briefly review the main steps in the origins of Sandplay as, at present, many of its original elements find new meanings and applications.

Since its very beginning, Sandplay has encompassed bodily perceptions and experiences. Sand is offered to children to be touched, experienced, formed, shaped, explored, felt. However, any direct contact with sand may be easily avoided by placing the figures onto its surface without touching the sand itself.

The idea of using sand in therapy dates back to the ‘World Technique’ devised by Margaret Lowenfeld (1890–1973). Her approach may be rightfully viewed as one of three roots of Sandplay Therapy – the other two being Jungian psychology and Eastern contemplative traditions, which will be delved into in the following chapters. Dora Kalff (1904–1990) combined these three approaches within Sandplay Therapy. However – whereas the influence of both the Jungian approach and of Margaret Lowenfeld’s work are distinctly recognisable – the Eastern contemplative traditions still remain somewhat concealed.

Dora Kalff had studied at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich (1949–1953).² Her talent in working with children had been noticed by her analyst Emma Jung as well as by C.G. Jung himself, who both suggested she should study Margaret Lowenfeld’s World Technique in order to develop an analytical approach to this technique geared towards children. Accordingly, in 1955 Dora Kalff spent one year in London to study in depth this up-and-coming technique for children.³

Through the World Technique Margaret Lowenfeld created a powerful tool for the treatment of ‘nervous and difficult’ children at her clinic in London and, later on, also of adults.⁴ The discovery and the use of ‘playing’ as a means of healing within therapy was a yet further contribution made by Lowenfeld. Her approach was based on the use of sand in a box measuring about 75x52cm, with a depth of 7cm (29.5x20.5x2.8 inches).⁵ It may be noted at this point that the dimensions of the box used later by Dora Kalff were 49x72x7cm (19.3x28.3x2.8 inches). In addition, there was a large collection of figures. Children were offered the chance to plunge their hands into the sand, play with it and shape landscapes, mountains, valleys, or whatever would spontaneously emerge, and then populate the emerging scene using figures of humans, animals, houses, cars, bridges, trees, etc.

Margaret Lowenfeld presented the children with the materials along with the explanation that “many things are more easily said through images and actions, rather than through words”.⁶ The exhortation to play is therefore based on an important insight concerning the limits of verbal expression (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Margaret Lowenfeld, courtesy of the Dr Margaret Lowenfeld Trust

Lowenfeld made an important distinction between what she called the ‘primary’ and the ‘secondary’ mental system. The ‘primary’ mental system (also referred to as ‘protosystem’) is described as “all mental processes between age zero and the age where cognitive processes occupy a normal field of the mental activities”. The ‘secondary’ system designs “all thought that can be expressed in prose”.⁷ Furthermore, the primary system can be defined as:

personal, idiosyncratic, massive and multidimensional, by its very nature, incommunicable to others in words. The development of the Primary System goes hand in hand with the development of the Secondary System, which is reasonable, practical, governed by causality, shared with other people and, to a large extent, describable through language.⁸

Emotions are among the chief organising principles through which children experience the world according to the primary system. Lowenfeld explains: “things which made me feel bad” belong together, as do “things which made me feel warm”, etc. She also discussed “emotionally-toned” clusters in terms of the building blocks of the primary system. Lowenfeld concluded by adding that the “contents of the primary system” cannot appear in the secondary system⁹, which enables us to fully grasp the importance of her World Technique as a tool for the expression of the contents of the primary system.

At the same time, Margaret Lowenfeld discarded the terms ‘unconscious’ and ‘conscious’ introduced by Freud and Jung. Indeed, Lowenfeld believed that it was incorrect to name something as ‘unconscious’ just because it is not expressible through words. Moreover, Lowenfeld was mainly working with children whose consciousness was not yet fully developed.

Lowenfeld’s argument appears to be valid and of great importance. Indeed, we often tend to identify ‘being conscious’ with the ability to express ourselves through language. If anything, it is necessary to pay more attention to those forms of consciousness which are not verbal, as those that arise during creative activity or through gazing at an image – be it through painting, working with clay or Sandplay. The perception of the image, its realisation intended as the external manifestation of an inner content, and the awareness of the sensations which are involved in this process, are a yet further way to develop awareness through a creative activity. These ways to develop awareness are closely related to what Erich Neumann defined as the ‘matriarchal consciousness’,¹⁰ different from the ‘patriarchal consciousness’, which, by contrast, is connected to abstraction and distinguishing abilities. According to Neumann, matriarchal consciousness can be compared to the activity of contemplation. Neumann’s comments on this matter are indeed enlightening, and correspond in many respects to what has emerged from our research and supervision group with regard to creative methods:

Here understanding is not, as for patriarchal consciousness, an act of the intellect as a rapidly comprehending organ that perceives, work through, and organizes; rather it means ‘conceiving’…. [T]he whole person is gripped and moved by the contents…. Matriarchal qualitative time is unique and singular as gravid, pregnant time in contrast to the quantitative time of patriarchal consciousness…. Hence, symbolically, matriarchal consciousness is usually not situated in the head, but rather in the heart. Here ‘understanding’ also means an act of feeling that comprehends. In contrast the process of thinking and abstraction typical of patriarchal consciousness is ‘cold’, since the ‘cold blooded’ objectivity demanded of it necessitates establishing distance that presupposes a ‘cool head’.¹¹

Neumann also discussed a perception accompanied by a process of mindfulness and attentiveness. He wrote:

Typical for this observing consciousness is the act of contemplation where energies are guided towards a content, process, or midpoint while the ego establishes a participation with the emotionally coloured content and lets it impregnate and permeate. This differs from the extremely patriarchal consciousness that distances and abstracts itself from the content.¹²

The consciousness which arises during Sandplay seems to correspond to the ‘matriarchal’ one described by Neumann. As proposed by Estelle Weinrib, the author of Images of the Self, ‘healing’ occurs on this level. In her words: “Psychological healing … is an emotional, non-rational phenomenon that takes place on the matriarchal level of awareness hypothesised by Erich Neumann”.¹³

The understanding that developing awareness requires going through different chronological phases – including becoming emotionally aware of preverbal levels – does not necessarily entail the necessity to go as far as Lowenfeld in completely rejecting the terms ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’. Accordingly, I propose to conceive of Sandplay as an approach capable of opening a window on both the personal and the collective unconscious, as hypothesised by C.G. Jung. The personal unconscious comprises forgotten, repressed and dissociated contents, which used to be conscious at some point in life. Jung’s view of the personal unconscious corresponds to the Freudian definition of the unconscious, meaning that it is of a personal nature and contains what Jung referred to as ‘feeling-toned complexes’. By contrast, the collective unconscious is not a personal acquisition and has never been conscious. Its contents are archaic imprints coming from a common human heritage, which Jung named ‘archetypes’. Archetypes themselves represent the mind’s tendencies, similarly to instincts, and they do not have a specific form. They are the bedrock of common cross-cultural motifs to be found in religion, mythology and fairy tales.¹⁴ These motifs are based on fundamental notions regarding the feminine, the masculine, the figure of the mother and the father, wisdom, spirituality and experiences such as birth and death, etc. Accordingly, they make a cross-cultural psychic common ground even while making cultural differences more visible.

As creative activities ease the development of awareness, Sandplay – but also active imagination, dreams and the understanding of co-transference – can provide privileged access to the covert world of the collective unconscious, and may eventually guide its contents towards a more verbal or ‘solar’ level of consciousness.

Furthermore, Lowenfeld’s distinction between the primary and secondary system – one being more emotionally toned and preverbal, and the other more language-related – could be seen as a harbinger to the distinction between ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit’ memory. Implicit memory, according to Bonnie Badenoch, is the only type of functioning memory during the first 12 to 18 months of our lives. Among others, implicit memory also encompasses behavioural impulses and affective experiences that are based on repeated experiences and become mostly unconscious mental models setting expectations about life. They are, as we may add, non-verbal in nature. Therefore, we may define them as psychic contents of non-verbal nature. In the brain, the central site of implicit memory is the amygdala, which plays an important role in creating meaning, and distinguishing what is dangerous from what is not. The amygdala develops early on in ontogeny and continues to be active throughout life.¹⁵

Explicit memory starts to function only once the hippocampus reaches its maturity and the middle prefrontal region is activated. One of the main functions of explicit memory is the memory of facts, then followed by autobiographical memory which enables each individual to tell the story of one’s own life in words.

According to Peter Levine, implicit memory plays a key role in trauma. He has pointed out that: “Indeed, persistent maladaptive procedural and emotional memories form the core mechanism that underlie all traumas, as well as many problematic social and relationship issues”.¹⁶ This also highlights the limits of a therapy mainly based on a verbal approach. Levine continues:

However, conscious, explicit memory is only the proverbial tip of a very deep and mighty iceberg. It barely hints at the submerged data of primal implicit experience...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1: A new perspective: The individuation process in Sandplay Therapy: Neural integration, resonances in soma and psyche
• PART 2: The method and the group
• PART 3: Clinical experiences
• Bibliography
• Index