Sandplay Therapy: An Overview

Sandplay Therapy: An Overview is a work by Christian Roesler (2019).

Core claims

• Roesler provides the first comprehensive scholarly overview of sandplay therapy’s theoretical foundations, clinical applications, and empirical evidence base, establishing sandplay as a Jungian-derived modality with growing research support across diverse populations and conditions.
• The paper traces sandplay’s theoretical lineage from Dora Kalff’s synthesis of Jungian psychology, Lowenfeld’s World Technique, and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, positioning it as a non-verbal therapeutic modality that accesses pre-verbal and somatic levels of psychological organization.
• Roesler identifies sandplay’s distinctive therapeutic mechanism: the creation of a ‘free and protected space’ in which the patient’s unconscious can express itself through three-dimensional symbolic composition, bypassing the verbal defenses that talk therapy must laboriously dismantle.

Related questions

• How does sandplay’s non-verbal access to the unconscious relate to van der Kolk’s thesis that trauma lodges in the body and cannot be reached by talk therapy alone — does the tactile, three-dimensional medium of sandplay constitute a somatic intervention disguised as symbolic play?
• In what ways does Winnicott’s concept of the ‘transitional space’ — the intermediate area of experiencing between inner and outer reality — illuminate the therapeutic mechanism of Kalff’s ‘free and protected space,’ and where do these two spatial metaphors diverge?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-clinic/roesler-sandplay-therapy-overview/

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