How Sandplay Works

Sandplay therapy uses the symbolism of three-dimensional figures in a hands-on, non-verbal process. The sand itself, water and the therapist’s collection of miniatures provide natural and cultural symbols. Adult and child clients working with sandplay therapists may or may not create a sand scene in every session, but sometimes work with talking therapy, play objects, art, or other techniques. But the trays of wet and dry sand and the powerfully symbolic miniatures remain available, stimulating whatever form of therapy occurs. Clients may complete a few, or as many as 50, sandplay scenes to fulfill their process of allowing the unconscious to communicate its meaning. The process can help heal psychic wounds that have divided the individual from the deep source of their being by allowing the psyche to express itself through their heart and hands.

Sandplay therapists do not interpret sandplay images during the sandplay therapy session but observe them with the adult or child client and listen and respond to their comments. Throughout the work, the therapist facilitates the process by holding the sacred space, or temenos.  This is the “free and protected place” that Dora Kalff said was critical for the client to connect with and express the deep psyche. Each sandplay scene is left intact until the client leaves, at which time the therapist photographs the tray and makes sketches and notes. Clients as well as the therapist tend to know when a process is complete, but, in order to allow the work to integrate fully in the psyche without critical analysis, photographs are not released nor is the process interpreted with the client until several years later. 

Sandplay therapy can establish an inner peace which contains the potential for development of the total personality, including its intellectual and spiritual aspects…It is the role of the therapist to perceive these powers and, like the guardian of a precious treasure, protect them in their development (Kalff, 1980, p. 30).

Sensory Therapy and Attachment: Before Sandplay

When a therapist sees that a child or adult is unable or unwilling to engage in sandplay, she is alerted to attachment and/or sensory development problems that may stem from trauma before, during, or after birth. The child who cannot play with full abandonment is not adequately embodied, and needs the opportunity and the safety to come more fully into the world through his or her senses. Agnes Bayley, an Irish sandplay therapist, has developed an attachment and sensory integration therapy called "In Touch Again," which helps a child develop a sense of his or her own reality and engage in imaginary play. In Touch Again therapy follows the individual's instinctual needs to engage the world on a sensory level.

Through seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, movement, and memory, a child empirically enters a more complete sense of self-identity. This post-birth birth occurs in the same way an infant enters the world through the senses; as the baby tastes, is touched, spoken to, presented with faces, he or she emerges into the world of the senses as a separate being, securely attached to the caregiver and to his or her inner and outer realities. Similarly, through their senses, sandplay clients develop a sense of safe attachment to the therapist (as archetype of mother), and thus to inner and outer life. Some individuals first begin to express themselves while smelling an orange or pounding a nail.

How Sandplay Therapy is Different from Sandtray Therapy

Sandplay therapy is specifically Jungian and differs from sandtray therapy.  Sandtray therapy is a more generic form of play therapy employing a variety of methods and theories, depending on the preferences of the individual therapist.

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