Who is Dora Kalff and what is her Jungian sandplay method?

Dora Kalff was a Swiss analytical psychologist who trained directly with Jung and completed her studies at the Jung Institute in Küsnacht in 1955. She is the originator of Sandplay — a therapeutic method that translates the Jungian understanding of active imagination into a tactile, spatial medium, and that has since become one of the most widely practiced expressive approaches within analytical psychology.

The method's origin story is itself instructive. Jung had long understood symbolic play as a healing function — his own building games with stones during his confrontation with the unconscious in 1913 were, he later recognized, the experiential root of what he would call active imagination. When he encouraged Kalff to develop a method of symbolic play for child therapy, he sent her to London to study Margaret Lowenfeld's "World Technique," a sandbox-based approach Lowenfeld had developed from children's floor games. Jung had encountered Lowenfeld's work at a 1937 congress in Paris, and it seems he recognized in her technique something continuous with his own early discovery of the healing power of play. Kalff adapted Lowenfeld's materials — a shallow tray filled with sand, hundreds of miniature human, animal, mythic, and natural figures — to the Jungian framework, and coined the term "Sandplay." The International Society of Sandplay Therapists was formed in 1982, and affiliate groups have since spread across Europe, the United States, and Japan.

What distinguishes Kalff's approach from guided imagery or structured play therapy is precisely what it refuses to do. As Chiara Tozzi, a scholar of active imagination, observes, "it is the utter lack of intent which distinguishes Sandplay Therapy and Active Imagination. Both approaches are more akin to a creative process." Nothing is predetermined; the therapist does not guide the content. The psyche is trusted to produce, with what Tozzi calls "almost somnambulistic certainty," precisely what it needs at that moment — what Jung named the compensatory function.

The central condition Kalff identified for this to occur was what she called "a free and sheltered space." This phrase carries more weight than it might first appear. It echoes Jung's concept of the temenos — from the Greek, meaning the precinct of a sacred temple, a bounded area set apart from ordinary use. Jung used the term to describe the protected container required for deep unconscious work, and Sedgwick, writing on the therapeutic relationship, notes that Jung also invoked the alchemical vas bene clausum, the well-closed vessel, as a metaphor for the same necessity: the enclosure must be tight enough that what is within cannot escape prematurely. Kalff's sandtray is a literal temenos — a bounded, shallow rectangle within which the soul can dare to play without fear of harm or censure.

The process itself is bodily before it is symbolic. Tozzi describes patients who, with eyes closed and palms resting on the sand, encounter psychic material through sensation before image: a woman who felt, for the first time, something solid beneath her hand that "held" her; a man born prematurely who experienced an unexpected coldness in the sand, as if the psyche were determined to raise his earliest difficult encounter with the world into consciousness. In these moments, the first three of Jung's four phases of active imagination — the arising of unconscious content, its conscious confrontation, and the initiation of transformation — collapse into a single gesture.

I therefore took up a dream image or an association of the patient's, and, with this as a point of departure, set him the task of elaborating or developing his theme by giving free rein to his fantasy. This, according to individual taste and talent, could be done in any number of ways, dramatic, dialectic, visual, acoustic, or in the form of dancing, painting, drawing, or modeling.

Sandplay is one instantiation of this invitation. Its particular genius is that the sand offers material resistance — it can be moist, hard, or loose — and this resistance grounds the imaginal in the physical in a way that purely internal active imagination cannot guarantee. The hands create; the image is not recalled afterward and then painted, but is itself made in the moment of encounter.

Winnicott's concept of potential space — the intermediate area between inner and outer reality where creative living originates — illuminates what Kalff was building. The sandtray is precisely such a space: the patient encounters the figures, but also creates the world; the inner and outer become one. Samuels notes that Winnicott himself saw the workings of this transitional area as "reminiscent of Jung's transcendent function in which symbols can hold together contents which the intellect cannot." Kalff's method is, in this sense, a structured invitation into that intermediate zone.

The fourth phase — ethical confrontation, the drawing of conscious conclusions from what has arisen — remains the work of reflection after the session. But the session itself asks nothing of the ego except presence. The psyche does the rest.

Active imagination — the broader Jungian method from which sandplay descends
Temenos — the sacred enclosure as psychological concept
Marie-Louise von Franz — Kalff's contemporary at the Jung Institute, who first proposed a subdivision of active imagination's stages
Donald Kalsched — on the role of play and imaginal space in trauma recovery

Sources Cited

Chodorow, Joan, 1997, Jung on Active Imagination
Tozzi, Chiara, 2017, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training
Papadopoulos, Renos K., 2006, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology
Sedgwick, David, 2001, An Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy
Jung, C.G., 1947, On the Nature of the Psyche (CW 8)
Samuels, Andrew, 1985, Jung and the Post-Jungians
Winnicott, D.W., 1971, Playing and Reality
Kalsched, Donald, 1996, The Inner World of Trauma