--- title: "Speaking about the Unspeakable: Non-Verbal Methods and Experiences in Therapy with Children" description: "Dennis McCarthy's clinical anthology follows children speaking through sand, clay, movement, silence, nature, and imaginative play when adult question-and-answer language cannot hold experience." author: "Dennis McCarthy, editor" year: 2008 shelf: trauma-and-healing purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Dennis+McCarthy+Speaking+about+the+Unspeakable" content_type: book-commentary related: - allen-art-way-knowing - moon-art-and-soul - cobb-ecology-imagination-childhood collections: ["art-voice-and-imagination"] key_takeaways: - "The volume reframes nonverbal expression as children's primary field of therapeutic action rather than a preliminary stage that must be translated into adult speech." - "Witnessing is active and material: therapists contain intensity, mirror movement, protect boundaries, introduce possibilities, and help play develop without imposing a final interpretation." - "Its cases are demonstrations of clinical attention, not controlled evidence; their force lies in showing how different media afford different actions—burying, centering, pounding, moving, hiding, growing, dissolving, and rebuilding." references: - "McCarthy, Dennis, editor. Speaking about the Unspeakable: Non-Verbal Methods and Experiences in Therapy with Children. Foreword by Priscilla Rodgers. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2008. ISBN 978-1-84310-879-5 (paperback); ISBN 978-1-84642-796-1 (PDF eBook)." glossary_terms: - play-therapy - trauma - imagination - sandplay - selective-mutism - embodiment scholar_prompts: - "How can a therapist actively develop a child's play without converting suggestion into control or interpretation into certainty?" - "What does each medium—sand, clay, movement, garden, puppet, image—permit a child to do that the others do not?" - "Which claims in this anthology are supported by clinical observation, and which would require comparative or controlled research?" seo_title: "Speaking about the Unspeakable — Dennis McCarthy" seo_description: "Commentary on Dennis McCarthy's anthology of nonverbal child therapy through sandplay, clay, movement, silence, nature, imagination, and witness." last_updated: 2026-08-28 --- **The problem is not that the child has failed to speak** The title of Dennis McCarthy’s anthology can be misread as a promise to extract words from children. Its actual argument is more radical: sand, clay, bodily movement, silence, gardens, drawing, puppetry, and imaginative play are already forms of speech. The clinical failure occurs when adults recognize only linear question-and-answer language and treat the child’s medium as an obstacle to information. Across ten chapters, the contributors reverse that hierarchy. The task is to meet a child where experience is being organized, rather than require translation into the therapist’s preferred channel. McCarthy’s introduction states the case broadly. Pivotal experiences exceed literal speech even for adults; children live closer to sensation, emotion, instinct, and play and have less reason to separate those domains. The nonverbal brings therapist and child into a liminal field in which forms are less fixed and change is possible. A sandbox world can be destroyed and remade; clay can be pounded, hollowed, centered, broken, dissolved, or joined; a body can rehearse distance, rhythm, collapse, force, and recovery. What matters is not only what a child represents but what the medium lets the child do. **A grammar of materials** The anthology is most persuasive when it stays close to these affordances. Jenny Bates’s chapter on sandplay treats hiding, burying, guarding, and discovering treasure as actions through which a child can negotiate the value and protection of an emerging self. The symbol is not presented for the therapist to solve. Its location in a sequence of scenes, and the behavioral changes accompanying that sequence, carry more weight than a single verbal interpretation. Michelle Rhodes’s chapter on clay is still more materially precise. Clay records pressure and gesture. It can expose interior space, preserve a boundary, accept an imprint, or move between wet, dry, powdered, fired, and reconstituted states. Rhodes uses those transformations as metaphors for separation, grief, integration, and renewed form. She also refuses a sentimental picture of the medium. Clay can invite regression, breach a person’s felt boundaries, or overwhelm weak psychic structure; the therapist must be ready to contain both psychic intensity and literally collapsing work. Material freedom does not remove the need for judgment. The movement chapters begin from a different fact: before speech, relationships are conducted through muscle tension, breath, rhythm, gaze, posture, gesture, approach, and withdrawal. Therapists observe and sometimes mirror these qualities to establish bodily attunement with children and caregivers. Movement is thus assessment, communication, and intervention at once. It can make a pattern visible without first asking the child to explain it. **Silence is not defiance** Brenda Lawrence’s chapter on selective mutism gives the book one of its clearest ethical applications. Children who speak in safe settings but become silent in school or other social environments are easily misread as stubborn or oppositional. Lawrence treats the silence as an anxiety-bound strategy and states plainly that pressure for speech makes children shut down. Her playroom uses sand, puppets, clay, drawing, sound-making, vigorous movement, humor, and the temporary presence of a trusted family member. Speech often emerges obliquely—through animal noises, laughter, toy telephones, recorded sounds, or conversation with someone else—after the therapist has entered the child’s circle of safety. The importance of these cases is not that play provides a clever route around resistance. It is that the child retains agency over when and how a voice becomes audible. In one case, taped mouths, monster sounds, and pretend telephones create graduated distance from direct address. In another, imaginative scenes and carefully supported aggression let a highly inhibited child become loud and assertive without defining assertiveness as bad. The spoken sentence confirms a change already underway; it is not the sole engine of that change. **Witnessing is active, not mute** Priscilla Rodgers’s foreword emphasizes witness: art-making creates an inner position from which experience can be seen, while the therapist supplies an outer witness able to hold emotional charge without rushing to interpretation. Yet McCarthy’s concluding chapter complicates any idea that the good therapist merely watches. Provocative images may need help developing. A therapist can invite the next scene, embody a movement, offer a figure, protect a boundary, or align with the energy of an image so that it can be used. The recurring quicksand scenes make this active stance concrete. McCarthy reads quicksand not through a universal symbol dictionary but through its actions and paradoxes: solid ground becomes liquid, struggle deepens entrapment, relaxation can assist release, a sinking figure calls helpers into motion. In the cases, quicksand can interrupt lifeless arrangements, mobilize aggression, or disappear after its function has been served. The interpretation remains contestable, but the method is clear: follow how an image changes the play, the relationship, and subsequent scenes. This balance between following and intervening is the volume’s real clinical problem. Too little participation leaves the child alone with material that may require containment; too much turns play into the adult’s story. McCarthy locates therapy in an overlap: the child plays and the therapist must also be capable of play, responsive enough to enter without taking possession. **Clinical testimony rather than an efficacy trial** The book is a collection of practitioner accounts, theoretical reflections, and case narratives. It is not a controlled comparison of modalities, and some contributors explicitly write from experience rather than systematic literature review. Claims that the nonverbal is children’s only adequate language, or that bodily and dream images disclose truth directly, are larger than the cases can establish. The outcomes are usually described by the treating clinicians, without standardized measures, comparison groups, or long follow-up. Readers should also distinguish respectful symbolic attention from certainty that a particular scene has one latent cause. Read with those limits, the cases offer unusually detailed demonstrations of how attention changes when words stop monopolizing evidence. Bruce Moon’s [*Art and Soul*](/library/the-body/moon-art-and-soul/) calls this field meta-verbal rather than anti-verbal. Pat B. Allen’s [*Art Is a Way of Knowing*](/library/the-body/allen-art-way-knowing/) explains why attention and witness need not culminate in interpretation. Edith Cobb’s [*The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood*](/library/the-psyche/cobb-ecology-imagination-childhood/) supplies the larger account of childhood world-making through body, material, and place. McCarthy’s anthology turns those propositions into a varied clinical craft: listen to the form the child is already making, learn the grammar of its medium, and let words arrive without making them the price of being heard.