The Role of the Body in Jungian Sandplay Therapy

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Sandplay Engages the Sensorimotor System Before Words Can Tell the Story

The Importance of the body in Jungian Sandplay Therapy become evident as a child enters the Sandplay room and puts both hands into the sand.

There may be no miniature figures. No story. No recognisable scene.

The child pours sand from one hand to the other. Digs. Smooths. Buries an object and uncovers it again. Perhaps the sand is sifted repeatedly through the fingers or pushed into a mound, only to be flattened and rebuilt.

From the outside, this may appear to be simply sensory play.

But in Jungian Sandplay Therapy, we need to consider another possibility:

The body may already be doing important psychological work.

This brings us to Principle 6: The Importance of the Body.

Sand engages the sensorimotor system. Touching, shaping, burying and revealing bring body and psyche into relationship—often before verbal cognition can organise the experience.

This is particularly important when working with young children, children who have experienced overwhelming events, and children whose developmental or neurodivergent profiles mean that experience may be expressed more readily through sensation, movement and play than through language.

Sometimes the hands begin where words cannot.

Sandplay Therapy Is an Embodied Experience

Jungian Sandplay Therapy is often associated with its rich symbolic world: houses, bridges, dragons, snakes, trees, caves, water, warriors and images of death and rebirth.

Yet before a child creates a symbolic world, there is something more fundamental.

There is sand.

Sand has texture and weight. It moves. It can be dry or wet, soft or resistant. It can be contained and shaped, yet it can also slip through the fingers.

The child does not merely look at the sand. The child enters into a bodily relationship with it.

Hands dig. Fingers sift. Palms press. Arms push. Water changes the consistency. Objects disappear beneath the surface and can later be discovered again.

Sandplay is therefore not only symbolic and psychological. It is also tactile, sensorimotor and embodied.

This matters because children’s emotional experiences do not begin as words. Long before a young child can explain an experience, the child encounters the world through sensation, movement, affect and relationship.

The body comes before the story.

Jung: When the Hands Know Before Words

Although C. G. Jung is commonly associated with dreams, archetypes and symbols, his psychology does not treat psyche and body as entirely separate worlds.

For Jung, important psychological processes can emerge before the conscious ego understands them.

This offers an important perspective on Sandplay.

A child may not know why a hole needs to be dug or why a particular figure must be buried. There may be no conscious explanation for repeatedly pouring, pushing or flattening the sand.

The therapist does not need to provide that explanation prematurely.

Instead, we allow the process to unfold.

The hands may begin giving form to something that has not yet become conscious thought.

Movement can precede image.
Image can precede language.
Meaning may emerge later.

Dora Kalff: The Body Within a Free and Protected Space

Dora Kalff developed Sandplay Therapy from Jungian psychology and Margaret Lowenfeld’s World Technique. Central to Kalff’s approach is the free and protected space.

The child has freedom to create without being directed toward a predetermined outcome. At the same time, the physical boundaries of the sand tray and the containing presence of the therapist provide protection.

This has a bodily dimension.

Within the tray, the child can dig, pour, destroy, rebuild, hide, uncover and experiment.

There is both freedom and containment.

For a child who initially engages mainly through the senses, this bodily encounter with sand may be more important at that point than constructing an elaborate symbolic scene.

Instead of immediately asking:

“What does this symbol mean?”

we might first ask:

“What is the child doing with the sand, and what appears to be happening in the child’s body while doing it?”

This distinction is important in both clinical observation and research.

How Sandplay Engages the Sensorimotor System

Sensorimotor experience involves the interaction between sensation and movement.

When children dig, scoop, press, pour, smooth, sift, bury or uncover sand, they receive tactile and proprioceptive information while simultaneously organising movement.

Repetition can also become prominent.

One child may repeatedly allow sand to fall through the fingers. Another fills and empties a container. Another buries and uncovers the same miniature.

However, an important clinical caution is necessary:

Not every sensory action is symbolic, and not every repetitive behaviour indicates trauma.

Sensory activity may be pleasurable, exploratory, developmentally appropriate or regulatory. In neurodivergent children, sensory-seeking and sensory-avoidant behaviours may also form part of the child’s individual sensory profile.

We therefore observe before we interpret.

Does movement become slower or more rhythmic?

Does agitation decrease?

Does the child remain engaged for longer?

Does repetitive movement gradually become purposeful construction?

Does sensorimotor activity precede greater organisation in the tray?

These observations allow us to distinguish what we see from what we think it might mean.

Daniel Siegel: From Sensation Towards Integration

Daniel Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology provides a useful contemporary perspective.

Siegel places integration at the centre of psychological well-being, drawing attention to the relationships among body, emotion, mind, brain and interpersonal experience.

This offers a useful way of considering what may unfold in Sandplay.

A child’s experience may initially be primarily bodily. Through sensory activity, experience begins to acquire form. Form may develop into image. An image may acquire symbolic significance. Symbols begin relating to one another. Eventually, a narrative or verbal understanding may emerge.

We might conceptualise this as:

Sensation → Movement → Form → Image → Symbol → Narrative → Integration

This is not a rigid developmental formula. Children can move backwards and forwards between these modes.

Rather, it reminds us of an important therapeutic principle:

We should not demand verbal understanding before the child’s experience has become sufficiently organised to be represented.

Sandplay, Trauma and The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk’s work provides another perspective on the relationship between body and psychological experience.

Overwhelming experiences are not necessarily available to a child as coherent autobiographical stories. Trauma can affect physiological arousal, attention, bodily awareness, sensory experience and emotional regulation.

A child may therefore communicate distress through restlessness, withdrawal, aggression, freezing, bodily tension or sensory behaviour long before being able to explain what is happening internally.

This helps us understand why therapy cannot always depend on talking and intellectual insight alone.

Experiences of safety, bodily awareness, movement and regulation can also matter.

However, we need to be clinically precise.

Playing with sand does not automatically “release trauma from the body.”

Nor does repetitive digging, sifting or burying prove that a child has experienced trauma.

Instead, trauma-informed perspectives help us understand why a therapeutic medium that permits safe sensory engagement, movement and non-verbal expression may be valuable when experience is not yet available in words.

From Sensorimotor Play to Symbol Formation

This is where the sensorimotor and Jungian dimensions of Sandplay become particularly interesting.

Imagine a young child repeatedly pouring sand from one container into another.

There is no story. No family scene. No hero.

Only:

Fill → Empty → Pour → Repeat

It would be easy to regard this as immature play and encourage the child to choose miniatures.

But suppose we wait.

Over time, pouring becomes digging.

A hole appears.

Later, an object is placed inside it.

The object is buried and subsequently uncovered.

Eventually, the child constructs something around this place.

Something observable has changed.

Movement has become form.
Form has become image.
Image now has the potential to become symbol.

We still cannot assume we know what the buried object means.

But we can observe that the organisation of the child’s play has changed.

This is why longitudinal observation in Jungian Sandplay Therapy is so important. Meaning may lie less in a single behaviour than in the movement occurring across sessions and across trays.

The Body and Regression in the Service of Healing

Principle 6 also connects with Principle 4: Regression in the Service of Healing.

A child capable of organised symbolic play may sometimes return to simple sensory engagement.

The child may dig, pour, cover the surface or repeatedly bury objects.

From a Jungian perspective, we can remain open to the possibility that the psyche is returning to a more fundamental mode of experience or organisation.

But again, we should observe before interpreting.

What happens afterwards?

Does the child’s play become more organised?

Do boundaries appear?

Does construction begin?

Do figures develop relationships?

Does symbolic organisation become more complex over subsequent trays?

Process over time is more informative than an isolated behaviour.

https://rinalouwclinical.co.za/regression-service-healing-jungian-sandplay/: The Role of the Body in Jungian Sandplay Therapy

What Should the Sandplay Therapist Observe?

When working with children, we therefore need to observe not only what the child builds, but how the child uses the body while building it.

Notice the child’s contact with the sand: hesitant, forceful, delicate, repetitive, avoidant or exploratory.

Notice movement: fast or slow, fragmented or rhythmic, impulsive or increasingly organised.

Notice digging, sifting, smoothing, pouring, burying and uncovering.

Notice pressure and force.

Notice the use of water.

Notice whether sensory activity appears to settle or intensify the child.

Most importantly, notice change over time.

A single sensorimotor behaviour may tell us relatively little.

A developing pattern across sessions can tell us considerably more.

https://rinalouwclinical.co.za/activation-self-jungian-sandplay-therapy/: The Role of the Body in Jungian Sandplay Therapy

Before Words, the Hands

A child who spends much of a Sandplay session moving sand through the fingers has not necessarily “done nothing.”

The child may not yet be creating a symbolic tableau, but something important may be occurring at the sensorimotor level.

Our task is not to manufacture symbolism or demand a story.

It is to provide the conditions within which experience can gradually acquire form.

Sometimes the first psychologically meaningful event in the sand is not a dragon, bridge, house or hero.

Sometimes it is simply:

a hand moving through sand.

Before the story, there may be sensation.

Before the symbol, movement.

Before meaning, form.

Before words, the hands.

https://rinalouwclinical.co.za/10-core-principles-jungian-sandplay-therapy/: The Role of the Body in Jungian Sandplay Therapy

Principle 6: The Importance of the Body

Sand engages the sensorimotor system.

Touching, shaping, pouring, burying and revealing bring sensation, movement, affect and emerging psychological meaning together within the free and protected space of Jungian Sandplay Therapy.

In Sandplay, we therefore listen not only to the symbols.

We also listen to the hands.

Because sometimes the body begins the story long before the child can tell it.

References

Jung, C. G. (1960). The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 8. Princeton University Press.

Kalff, D. M. (1980). Sandplay: A Psychotherapeutic Approach to the Psyche. Sigo Press.

Kalff, D. M. (1991). Introduction to Sandplay Therapy. Journal of Sandplay Therapy, 1(1), 9–15.

Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Siegel, D. J. (2012). Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology: An Integrative Handbook of the Mind. W. W. Norton & Company.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.