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The author describes her own application of M. Lowenfeld's ‘world technique’ to the treatment of nine cases aged from nine to twenty-five years. In the ‘sandtray game’, as she calls it, toy figures of all kinds are arranged in the sand, and express the phantasy life of the patients. The interpretation of the arrangements is based on the Jungian method of amplification.
The astonishing success of all the treatments described seems to be due to Kalff's intuitive gifts in supporting the self-healing tendencies of the psyche. She constellates the positive accepting mother-figure, using her beautiful old farmhouse to help to create an atmosphere in which patients can feel free and protected at the same time. In her experience, the turning point in the treatment takes place only after the ‘manifestation of the self’ (p. 14) in the symbolic form of a circular figure.
It is a lively, artistically written book with good illustrations of sandtray arrangements and of the farmhouse setting. Some readers, myself among them, would have liked to hear more about the author's theoretical assumptions and the personal psychological implications of each case, but this is a book of a purely intuitive kind and, as such, very enjoyable.