A five-year-old boy recently taught me about PJ Masks.
To him, these little figures were already familiar. They belonged to a world he understood: heroes and villains, extraordinary powers, danger, rescue, battles, transformation and the possibility of saving the day.
For me, as a Sandplay therapist, they opened another question:
What happens psychologically when a five-year-old brings a modern superhero into the sandtray?
Superhero figures can easily be dismissed as commercial toys or television characters. Yet children do not necessarily experience them that way. Once a figure enters the sandtray and becomes part of the child’s spontaneous story, it may acquire a deeply personal symbolic function.
In Jungian Sandplay we therefore do not ask only:
Who is this character?
We also ask:
What is this character doing in this child’s inner world?
Who are the PJ Masks?
At the centre of the PJ Masks story are three young children who live ordinary lives during the day but become superheroes at night.
Catboy has extraordinary speed, agility and hearing.
Gekko is physically strong, can climb and cling to surfaces, and can camouflage himself.
Owlette can fly and see over great distances.
They repeatedly confront figures such as Romeo, the inventive and controlling scientist; Luna Girl, associated with the moon and nighttime power; and Night Ninja, a stealthy and competitive adversary. The series consistently revolves around children encountering difficulties, using different capacities and eventually working together to restore order.
Already we can hear themes that are highly relevant to childhood:
small and powerful
ordinary and extraordinary
visible and hidden
day and night
good and bad
vulnerability and mastery
chaos and restored order.
These are also archetypal themes.
Why superheroes matter around five years old
At five, a child is still developing the psychological capacities needed to manage an increasingly complex external and internal world.
He is discovering:
I can act.
I can choose.
I can make things happen.
I can be strong.
I can defend myself.
I can be frightened and still continue.
For many young boys, superheroes provide imaginative forms through which these emerging capacities can be explored.
The superhero may therefore function as what we could describe as an ego-supportive symbolic figure.
The child does not have to say:
“I wish I were stronger when I feel frightened.”
Gekko can be strong.
He does not have to explain:
“Sometimes everything happens too quickly and I need to react.”
Catboy can run extraordinarily fast.
He does not have to verbalise:
“I want to see what is happening from somewhere safe.”
Owlette can rise above the situation and see from a distance.
The symbolic figure can temporarily carry a capacity that the developing child is still learning to experience within himself.
Catboy: movement, alertness and emerging agency
Catboy’s principal powers involve speed, agility and highly sensitive hearing.
In a child’s tray, Catboy could therefore become associated with themes of:
movement, rapid response, vigilance, competence, escape, pursuit or control.
But we should resist concluding:
“Catboy means vigilance.”
That would turn a living symbol into a symbolic dictionary.
Instead I would observe:
Where does Catboy begin?
Does he move?
Is he running toward danger or away from it?
Is he protecting somebody?
Is he alone?
Does he repeatedly patrol the tray?
Does he ever stop?
A Catboy racing constantly around the perimeter of a chaotic tray may have a very different symbolic function from Catboy confidently crossing a bridge toward another figure.
The meaning lies in the relationship between figure, action and structure.
Gekko: strength, embodiment and “I can”
For a five-year-old boy, Gekko may be particularly compelling.
His power is physical.
He is strong.
He can grip.
He can climb.
He can hold on.
In early childhood, physical mastery and psychological mastery remain closely linked. Children experience much of the world through their bodies.
A strong superhero can therefore provide an image for an emerging feeling of:
“I can.”
In Sandplay, I would be interested in whether Gekko:
lifts or moves things;
protects weaker figures;
breaks structures;
holds something together;
fights continuously;
rescues someone;
or simply stands powerfully in the landscape.
Strength itself is neither positive nor negative.
The important question is:
What is strength being used for?
When raw power gradually becomes protection, building, boundary-making or rescue, we may be observing something different from repetitive destructive force.
There may be movement from power as discharge toward power as organised agency.
Owlette: perspective and another way of knowing
Although boys may identify strongly with the male superheroes, Owlette can be equally interesting.
She flies.
She sees from above.
Symbolically, height frequently introduces the possibility of perspective.
Instead of being trapped entirely inside the action, there is the possibility of seeing the larger field.
From a Jungian perspective, I would not automatically label Owlette as the child’s “anima.” That interpretation would be premature, especially at five.
But I would notice if the child repeatedly gives the female figure capacities involving perception, guidance, rescue, mediation or knowledge.
The question becomes:
What function does this feminine figure perform in this particular child’s world?
Then come the villains
Heroes need adversaries.
And this is where superhero play becomes psychologically fascinating.
Young children live in a world where opposites are often sharply divided:
good/bad;
strong/weak;
hero/villain;
safe/dangerous;
obedient/naughty;
winner/loser.
Developmentally, this is understandable.
Jungian psychology, however, reminds us that psychological development eventually involves learning to hold opposites rather than simply eliminating one side.
The villain may therefore give form to qualities that cannot yet comfortably belong to the child’s conscious identity.
Aggression.
Envy.
Power.
Destructiveness.
Control.
Trickery.
Grandiosity.
The desire to win.
The wish to break the rules.
These aspects need somewhere to live.
Sometimes they live in Romeo.
Sometimes in Night Ninja.
Sometimes in the monster at the edge of the tray.
The Sandplay therapist does not rush to remove them.
Romeo: intelligence, invention and control
Romeo is characterised by machines, inventions and attempts to control situations.
A child may simply enjoy him because he is a familiar villain.
But if Romeo becomes central to repeated Sandplay narratives, I might become curious about themes of:
control;
cleverness;
machines;
domination;
creation;
destruction;
and the use of intellect as power.
Again, context matters.
A child building an elaborate laboratory for Romeo is showing us something different from a child repeatedly imprisoning Romeo beneath the sand.
Night Ninja: shadow, competition and hidden power
Night Ninja operates in darkness and through stealth.
Jungian therapists may immediately think about the shadow.
That can be useful—but it should remain a hypothesis rather than an interpretation imposed upon the child.
The shadow refers broadly to aspects of personality that are excluded from conscious identity.
A five-year-old who understands himself as “good” may nevertheless contain enormous aggression, competitiveness, jealousy and the desire to dominate.
Superhero play gives these qualities a legitimate character.
Night Ninja can do what the child cannot consciously claim.
The child can battle him.
Defeat him.
Bury him.
Become him.
Rescue him.
Or perhaps, eventually, allow him to join the story differently.
That development may be more psychologically informative than the presence of Night Ninja itself.
The importance of night
One of the most compelling features of PJ Masks is the transformation from ordinary daytime children into extraordinary nighttime heroes.
Symbolically, night belongs to a different psychological territory.
Day is associated with ordinary consciousness: school, rules, parents, social identity and expected behaviour.
Night belongs to dreams, imagination, mystery, fear and the unknown.
In Jungian language, we might say that the nighttime world resembles the territory of the unconscious.
The ordinary child crosses a threshold.
He becomes something larger.
He encounters danger.
He meets strange forces.
He returns.
This pattern is ancient.
It is found in myths and fairy tales across cultures.
PJ Masks may therefore look thoroughly modern, but psychologically it contains a very old pattern:
departure → transformation → encounter → struggle → restoration → return.
The costume has changed.
The archetypal drama has not.
A modern form of the hero motif
Jung viewed myths and fairy tales as collective expressions of recurring patterns in human psychological life.
Children today may encounter those patterns not only through traditional fairy tales.
They encounter them through Batman, Spider-Man, Pokémon, Minecraft, PJ Masks and many other contemporary symbolic worlds.
A superhero therefore does not have to be an ancient mythological figure to participate in an archetypal pattern.
The hero motif concerns the encounter between a developing centre of consciousness and forces that appear larger, darker or more dangerous than itself.
For a five-year-old, that psychological task is very real.
The world is still enormous.
Adults are powerful.
Emotions can feel overwhelming.
Fear can become a monster.
Anger can feel stronger than the child experiencing it.
And yet, in imagination:
the small child can become the hero.
What should we observe when PJ Masks appear in a sandtray?
For me, the most useful question is not:
“What does this figure symbolise?”
I would rather observe the developing structure of the whole tray.
I would look at:
Selection — Which PJ Masks characters does the child choose?
Identification — Who seems to carry the child’s point of view?
Placement — Where are the heroes and villains positioned?
Movement — Who moves, pursues, retreats, crosses or becomes stuck?
Power — Who has power at the beginning, and who has it at the end?
Opposites — How are hero and villain, strong and weak, safe and dangerous organised?
Containment — Are battles contained, or does destruction spread throughout the tray?
Relationships — Do characters cooperate or operate alone?
Transformation — Does anybody change during the story?
Resolution — Can the child create an ending?
Repetition — Does essentially the same conflict return across several trays?
And perhaps most importantly:
Does the structure of the story develop over time?
From character analysis to structural development
This is particularly important when working with young children.
A first tray may consist largely of:
battle;
collision;
movement;
burying;
chasing;
crashing;
winning and losing.
We should not automatically interpret this as pathology.
At five, symbolic organisation is still developing.
Across subsequent trays, however, we may begin to see changes.
Perhaps the hero who could previously only fight now rescues someone.
Perhaps a bridge appears.
Perhaps two opposing groups develop a boundary.
Perhaps the villain is captured rather than annihilated.
Perhaps houses are constructed.
Perhaps chaotic movement begins to acquire direction.
Perhaps the child creates a beginning, middle and ending.
This is where Sandplay becomes especially valuable.
The individual figurine tells us something.
The changing organisation of the whole symbolic field may tell us considerably more.
Superheroes may support the emerging ego
From a Jungian-developmental perspective, superhero play may provide a temporary symbolic container for capacities the child’s ego is developing: https://rinalouwclinical.co.za/understanding-symbols-childrens-sandplay-therapy/
agency;
courage;
strength;
boundary formation;
decision-making;
protection;
problem solving;
mastery;
and the ability to confront fear.
This does not mean that every superhero represents “ego strength.”
Sometimes the opposite may be occurring.
A hero may have to remain permanently omnipotent because vulnerability cannot yet be tolerated.
That distinction matters.
The clinically useful question becomes:
Can the hero encounter difficulty?
A psychologically developing hero does not necessarily become increasingly invincible.
He may gradually become capable of:
receiving help;
cooperating;
losing;
recovering;
protecting;
solving;
negotiating;
and surviving uncertainty.
That is a much richer developmental movement than simply winning every battle.
The child taught me first
There is another important lesson in all of this.
The five-year-old knew the PJ Masks world.
I did not.
He became the teacher.
This reversal is valuable in Sandplay.
The therapist does not need to know every superhero, game or television character before therapy begins.
When we do not know, we can become curious.
“Who is this?”
“What can he do?”
“Who is stronger?”
“What happened here?”
The child’s explanation often gives us far more clinically relevant information than an internet search or symbolic dictionary ever could.
Because he is not merely explaining PJ Masks.
He is showing us his PJ Masks.
And that is where Sandplay begins.
Final reflection
When a five-year-old places Catboy, Gekko, Night Ninja or Romeo into a sandtray, we do not yet know what they mean.
We watch.
We listen.
We follow the movement.
We notice the opposites.
We observe where power is located, how danger is approached, whether relationships develop and whether chaos gradually finds structure.
A mass-produced plastic superhero can become something entirely different once a child places it into the sand.
It can become a carrier of fear.
Strength.
Aggression.
Hope.
Shadow.
Protection.
Or the emerging conviction:
“I am small, but I can act.”
And perhaps that is one of the central developmental tasks hidden inside the superhero stories of early childhood.
Clinical note: Symbolic interpretations in Sandplay should remain hypotheses grounded in the individual child’s developmental history, play sequence and wider relational context. A figure should not be assigned a fixed psychological meaning in isolation.
References for character information: Official PJ Masks material describes Catboy as fast and agile, Owlette as able to fly and see over distance, and Gekko as strong and capable of camouflage; Romeo, Luna Girl and Night Ninja are recurring antagonists.
Rina Louw💕
Clinical Social Worker & Jungian Sandplay Therapist