Integrative psychosynthesis therapy and the sand tray approach

Integrative psychosynthesis therapy is a holistic therapeutic approach that engages multiple facets of a client’s life - emotional, psychological, creative, and spiritual. By offering a flexible and adaptive process, this approach supports clients in addressing concerns from the past, present, and future.

This method integrates humanistic, psychodynamic, archetypal, and transpersonal perspectives, creating a collaborative space where therapist and client work together. Within this creative therapeutic container, clients can explore their wounds, challenge limiting beliefs, and uncover new insights and pathways toward self-healing.

Sand tray therapy: A multidimensional tool

As part of my therapeutic practice, I use sand tray therapy - a dynamic and experiential method suitable for both children and adults. Through this approach, clients externalise their inner experiences, building symbolic representations of their emotions, memories, and hopes.

Origins of sand tray therapy

The roots of sand tray therapy trace back to the 1920s, when Margaret Lowenfeld, a London-based paediatrician and child psychoanalyst, pioneered its use with children. Lowenfeld’s “world technique” provided a safe, experimental environment where children could express themselves freely. Using small objects and models within trays of sand (to which water could be added), her approach became a foundation for modern sand tray therapy.

Today, sand tray therapy has evolved to serve individuals of all ages, offering a powerful tool for addressing a variety of emotional and psychological challenges.

Experimental space

As a therapist working with sand tray with both children and adults, I value the process that enables clients to be supported to build images of preferred futures and revisit past experiences, memories and hopes in a creative way. The client may make a series of scenes over a number of sessions or within the same session. In therapy, the sand tray lends itself easily to many theoretical styles - Jungian narrative, solution-focused and gestalt. I locate the use of sand play within the context of Gestalt experimentation.

The sand tray process is a dynamic and creative one. The client expresses certain preferences, in the choice of figures which are valued over others. It is not random or arbitrary. Objects are placed in this way, rather than that and new, deeper, hidden or lost meanings are often discovered or created.

The figures and sand tray

The box is traditionally wooden with a blue bottom (to represent the sky). The therapist builds a collection of miniatures for clients to work with that includes:

• fantasy creatures
• human figures
• domestic animals
• natural elements (fire, water, earth, air)
• everyday objects
• culturally diverse symbols

The sand tray process

The therapist can have a purpose/intent in inviting the client to use the sand tray. For example, pick some figures to represent your family of origin or your hopes or your fears. Or it can naturally be used as the session develops, "Would you like to show me this feeling in the sand tray?" or "Show me what you might like to say to that person next time you have the opportunity." The therapist may even simply invite the client to demonstrate how they are feeling.

The sand tray can be used following a visualisation or a whole family could recreate the conflict that they had the previous night to use the figures to consider ways forward. In this way, the sand tray becomes dynamic and a co-created space with the therapist.

The therapist can simply be the witness to what happens for the client by holding space and being quiet, or ask questions and be a part of the creative process by also building. Clients can be invited to speak from the position of the particular figures in a particular scene: “I am the horse and I am feeling free", "I am a feather and I am feeling light", or "I am fox and I am feeling hunted."

The process can be immensely powerful and, in staying within the scene and the language of the scene, the sand tray becomes a container for the complex range of human emotions, thoughts, metaphors, ideas and feelings. I have worked with clients who recall their sand tray work in amazing detail from months, even years before.

Clients may want to interpret what they have created or keep it in process and not talk about meaning. It can also be used as a dialogue between the client and therapist regarding what the client wants to take from the process into their life.

The therapist’s role is to be sensitive to what is unfolding for the client, but not dominate or take over. As with working in other mediums and with other creative therapeutic techniques, what happens is what needs to happen for each individual client.

The possibilities for the use of sand play experimentation are endless. At the end, I usually encourage the client to dismantle the scene themselves, though some prefer for me to do this for them.