What is sandplay therapy and how does it work?

Sandplay therapy is a psychotherapeutic method in which a person creates three-dimensional scenes in a shallow tray of sand using miniature figures — human beings, animals, mythological creatures, buildings, natural objects, vehicles — while the therapist maintains a particular quality of presence that Dora Kalff, the method's founder, called "a free and protected space." That phrase carries the whole theory in miniature: the work is simultaneously unstructured enough to allow the unconscious to speak and contained enough to prevent the person from being overwhelmed by what emerges.

Kalff developed sandplay in the 1950s after training with Jung and studying Margaret Lowenfeld's earlier "World Technique" in London. Jung had encountered Lowenfeld's work at a 1937 Paris congress and later encouraged Kalff to develop it within a Jungian framework. The result was a method that fused Lowenfeld's nondirective, noninterpretive stance with Jung's understanding of the unconscious as a constructive force — one that produces symbols and presents them to ego-consciousness through dreams, fantasies, and spontaneous creative acts. As Roesler (2019) summarizes the theoretical premise: the sandtray picture makes unconscious material accessible, and the act of expressing conscious and unconscious material while creating a coherent form is considered therapeutic in itself.

The practical setup is precise. The tray measures roughly 57 × 72 × 7 centimeters — a dimension chosen because it allows both client and therapist to take in the entire scene in a single glance. The interior is painted blue so that when sand is moved aside, water appears to emerge from beneath. Hundreds of miniatures line the shelves of the therapy room, waiting, as Joan Chodorow (1997) puts it, "until it is time for them to enter a shallow tray filled with sand as someone chooses or is chosen by them." Water may be added to mold the sand or create rivers and lakes. The client may speak, remain silent, tell a story, or simply build.

What distinguishes sandplay from related approaches — and from most psychotherapy — is its insistence on the preverbal and the noninterpretive. Kalff's classical approach asked therapists to use interpretation only very cautiously, if at all. The therapist functions primarily as witness and container. This is not passivity; it is a specific therapeutic stance grounded in the conviction that the psyche's self-regulating capacities, given adequate containment, will do the necessary work. Wiersma et al. (2022) describe the mechanism in neurological terms: sandplay activates multiple brain systems that regulate sensory input and the stress response, and provides conditions for healing at a preverbal, body-based level. Emerging neuroimaging studies have found that sandplay improved synchrony in frontotemporal networks, potentially facilitating the retrieval and reprocessing of memories with an optimal amount of cognitive control.

The connection to active imagination is direct. Chodorow (1997) is explicit that sandplay is a form of active imagination — the hands' impulses moving in the sand are analogous to the visually imagined images of Jung's classical method. Eva Pattis Zoja (in Tozzi, 2017) calls this a "kinaesthetic imagination": every gesture, however seemingly insignificant, can carry symbolic weight. One patient, stroking the sand with eyes closed, said: "I can't believe it, the sand is responding." As she caressed the sand, it felt as if she were being caressed — a preverbal discovery that no amount of talking had reached.

Sandplay allows traumatized people to safely access and reprocess traumatic memories while preventing retraumatization. Working nonverbally in the sand also appears to enhance treatment engagement and provides those who have difficulty verbalizing their feelings and experiences a tangible means to express themselves and work through their struggles.

The evidence base has grown substantially. A 2022 meta-analysis by Wiersma et al. examined 40 quantitative studies from eight countries representing 1,284 participants and found an overall effect size of Hedges' g = 1.10 — large by any standard, and consistent across internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms, and ADHD. Individual format outperformed group format, though both showed large effects. The method has been applied to anxiety, depression, trauma, addiction, autism, borderline personality disorder, and populations facing migration and displacement.

What the numbers do not capture is the quality of the encounter the method creates. Nichols (1980) invokes the temenos — the sacred precinct — to describe the walled enclosure of the sandtray: a bounded yet free space where something dark and hidden can safely be brought into the light. Von Franz, writing about the inferior function, observed that it cannot be organized or forced; it requires whole afternoons given over to nothing in particular, a sacred grove where one can play. The sandtray is precisely that grove — a space where the soul's contents can arrange themselves without the pressure of verbal articulation, and where the therapist's witnessing presence holds what the client cannot yet hold alone.

Dora Kalff — portrait of sandplay's founder and her development of the free and protected space
Active imagination — the broader Jungian practice of which sandplay is a kinesthetic form
Individuation — the process of psychological wholeness that sandplay is understood to serve
Temenos — the sacred precinct as a concept in Jungian thought and therapeutic practice

Sources Cited

Wiersma, Jacquelyn K. et al., 2022, A Meta-Analysis of Sandplay Therapy Treatment Outcomes
Roesler, Christian, 2019, Sandplay therapy: An overview of theory, applications and evidence base
Chodorow, Joan, 1997, Jung on Active Imagination
Tozzi, Chiara (ed.), 2017, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training
Nichols, Sallie, 1980, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey
Papadopoulos, Renos K. (ed.), 2006, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology