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This promised to be an interesting and exciting book. It is a collection of papers written by members of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, with photographic illustrations of the sand worlds of both children and adults.
In her foreword Dora Kalff, a Zürich-trained analytical psychologist, writes: ‘In my experience sandplay constitutes in itself a method whereby the individuation process is lived through and expressed. I personally have never considered it an adjunct to verbal analysis, to be used only at certain points in the therapeutic process’. She maintains that the decisive characteristic of sandplay is that it is in itself ‘a mediator between the poles of the visible and the invisible’, and also between the body and the mind. ‘The picture is formed physically in the sand so that we can say the inner contents (of the psyche) find a physical form. Since the figures used in the sand tray are made in the material world, an unconscious content is immediately transformed in the conscious world, thereby giving the patient experience of the transformative qualities of energies.’
Tribute is paid to the originators: first to H. G. Wells who, as a result of playing many fascinating games with his two sons, published Floor Games in 1911, secondly to Margaret Lowenfeld, the founder of the Institute of Child Psychology, London, and to her development of what she called her ‘World Technique’, the basic elements of which were imaginative activity with sand, used with or without objects, within a circumscribed space in the presence of a therapist.
Dora Kalff has been the inspiration behind the development of sandplay (her word) in San Francisco, where it holds ‘a special place as a paradigm of Jung's active imagination. Sandplay mirrors the mysterious presence of the Eternal Child playing his archetypal games and slowly but surely bringing to consciousness a new awareness of the child within the archetype’. That is the background.
The middle section of the book is mainly a