Jungian Sandplay: The Wonderful Therapy. By Joel Ryce-Menuhin. London:  Routledge. £35 hardback £12.99 paperback.

Ryce-Menuhin's book describes the practice of sandplay — a therapy in which the patient, adult, or child, uses a sand-tray and objects (toys, figures, coloured bits and pieces) to express aspects of his inner world. The therapist sits with the patient, sketches the process, and after the session photographs the finished product.

It is a ‘classical’ Jungian therapy, in that the therapist's interpretations explore the personal and collective unconscious through active imagination and amplification, using alchemical, archetypal, and mythological motifs. It is not clear how much these interpretations are offered to the patient. Sandplays are made frequently by some patients, as the major aspect of their treatment, but the author's preference is to use sandplay ‘in conjunction with a long, deep, verbal Jungian analysis of many years’. He also offers sandplay sessions to the patients of other analysts, with special techniques to avoid transference conflicts in such cases. Unfortunately, he does not tell us what these are. Like many ‘classical’ Zurich Jungians, Ryce-Menuhin does not emphasise the transference/countertransference aspects of analysis, so that despite his four long clinical examples, one has little idea about the therapeutic relationship.

The author has some odd ideas about psychosomatics and ‘the involuntary nervous system’ (related, he says, to the archetypal image of the snake). He uses strong language to vilify some Freudian and Kleinian play therapists. But I liked his warning to fathers who want to compete with women in mothering babies, suggesting that they may have a pathological need to offer nurturing and that this may not be experience by the baby as good-enough care. A point worth making in these days of the NEW MAN.

Those who are interested in non-verbal forms of transference may enjoy this book; ordinary psychoanalytic psychotherapists are, I suspect, likely to be unimpressed.