Sand try Therapy/play therapy - Essay Example

As she added, voluntary play exertions assert that external forces, which restrict the children, are significantly lifted in such activities. The key to therapy, then, is the tactical removal of societal lines that sets good and bad behaviors in cultural context, and instead, children are free to extensively express themselves. Within such assumptions, the play therapy using the sand tray had been constructed and considerably polished to satisfy the individual needs of the subjects. In this paper, concepts in sand tray therapy are simplified to reveal its wide-range significance to children in need of psychologically guidance.

Historical and Theoretical Perspective Developed in the early 1900s, the sand tray therapy had been a novel discovery by Margaret Lowenfield, who had been struggling to bridge the gap between therapists and their young clients in the absence of any external biases, both in experiential and theoretical forms. During the extensive search, Lowenfield came across anecdotes relaying the experiences of a father and his child, where the former enhances his relationship with the latter through a series of games using a variety of toys.

Buoyed by such interactions, she began to collect small toys as her props and utilized them to relate with her young clients--termed as “The World Technique.” This is adapted and modified by Dora Kalff, and added her own versions based from the theoretical concepts that she had polished as a Jungian psychology therapist. Having a close academic contact with Lowenfield, Kalff had been able to incorporate her own theoretical ideals in the said play techniques; hence, the broad concept of sand tray therapy had been specified into the sand play therapy through particular play principles (Drewes, 2009).

Theoretically, the sandtray therapy had integrated a number of theoretical paradigms, but the most prominent one is the therapeutic frameworks of Jungian play therapy. As emphasized by Corsini, Wedding, and Dumont (2008), the primary methods assigned in the sand tray therapy had been consistently grounded on Jung’s analytical constructs, where the goal of self-analysis had been elaborately assimilated to form the foundations of sand, tray, and the self in such activities. To appoint, the theoretical process takes into account several points in Jung’s position.

As conceptually posited, the therapy approaches the psychological concepts through symbolic analysis. As founder, Jung believed in the distinctions possessed within the children’s psyche, where they form transcendent function of “innate striving for personality integration--occurring by symbolic identification” (O’Connor, & Braverman, 2009, p. 83). The basis formed in such analysis depends on interpretative contexts borne from play activities performed by the young subjects. It mainly projects the “self-healing archetype,” where recognition of symbolized structures, spiritually and culturally, should be executed in order to maintain interactive balance between logical reasoning in the ego and individual personality in Self.

The therapeutic goal, then, is to resolve psychological conflicts (good versus evil, or reproach versus acceptance) between the two distinct concepts in ego and Self. In such instances, the symbols observed as children play in the sand tray denote a number of actual