(Expressive sandwork in resource-constrained communities) 

Primary investigator: Carien Lubbe-De Beer

The Expressive Sandwork project is a new project that started in 2013. Two sites were chosen for the project, namely a primary school in the Bronkhorstspruit region and a secondary school in Mpumalanga (part of Prof Liesel Ebersöhns’ FLY project).

Postgraduate research activities

Three students are conducting research at Bronkhorstspruit (two case studies on the learners’ experiences and another on the psychology students’ experiences) and two at a secondary school in Mpumalanga (The utility of sandplay to assess and enhance psychological resilience). Another student is working on the experiences of private practitioners’ utilisation of sandplay in therapeutic practice.

What is this project all about?

Expressive sandwork is an adaptation of sandplay therapy with the aim of maximising psychosocial care in situations in which individual psychotherapy is impossible. Expressive sandwork usually takes place in groups, but individual care is ensured throughout the process. Each child works with an adult, who observes and documents the child’s sandwork (Pattis Zoja, 2011). The main difference between sandplay therapy and expressive sandwork is that the accompanying adults are not psychotherapists or psychologists, but students, social workers or, most often, volunteer community workers.

Sandplay offers the individual the opportunity to portray, rather than verbalise, feelings and experiences that are often inaccessible and/or difficult to express in words. The aim of sandplay is to activate healing energies at the deepest level of the psyche through the use of miniatures and the sand tray in order to reflect the client’s inner world. Through this symbolic activity and the experience of free and creative play, unconscious processes are made visible in three-dimensional form. A basic premise of sandplay therapy is that the psyche possesses a natural tendency to heal itself, given the proper conditions (Ammann, 1991; Bradway & McCoard, 1997; Kalff, 1980; Mitchell & Friedman, 1994). Dora Kalff developed sandplay based on Margaret Lowenfeld’s world technique and Jungian psychology, with influences from Winnicott and Neumann’s contributions to developmental psychology (Mitchell & Friedman, 1994). The premise that is so promising in working cross-culturally is that the preverbal and nonverbal modalities of play are actualised, so that a common verbal and expressed language is not a necessity.

The intervention

• Postgraduate students (M2 volunteers as well as intern psychologists) from the Educational Psychology Department are assigned as a counsellor to each child, engaging with each child on a short term basis.
• The children create a story or merely play with the sand.
• We ask the child what his/her picture or story is about, but they don’t even have to answer that.
• There are no right or wrong answers, only what they feel is best.
• We also photograph each sandplay.