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Relational Sandplay Therapy
Author:
"The first book on sandplay to focus on the clinical relationship, Relational Sandplay Therapy provides both beginners and experienced sandplay therapists with a new perspective on the healing power of sandplay/sandtray. This perspective is relational, intersubjective, and deeply explores the interwovenness of mutual unconscious processes and how they may be harnessed in the service of healing. In a truly creative synthesis, Linda Cunningham, Ph.D. brings to the forefront the importance of the therapeutic relationship in sandplay, and also explains in detail how to work within the relationship. Focusing on the importance of the therapist's subjective experience, she describes four archetypally based fields of human experiencing: Original Oneness/Merger, Twoness/Rupture, Differentiated Oneness/Transitional Space, and the Numinous Field of the Transcendent Function. The first two fields shed light on preverbal trauma revealed in more difficult or stuck sandplay therapies and how to understand it symbolically through the therapist's subjective experience. Through vivid clinical examples, Cunningham illustrates how silent understanding and containing may be the other--and at times the only--source of the symbol."
Author:
"The first book on sandplay to focus on the clinical relationship, Relational Sandplay Therapy provides both beginners and experienced sandplay therapists with a new perspective on the healing power of sandplay/sandtray. This perspective is relational, intersubjective, and deeply explores the interwovenness of mutual unconscious processes and how they may be harnessed in the service of healing. In a truly creative synthesis, Linda Cunningham, Ph.D. brings to the forefront the importance of the therapeutic relationship in sandplay, and also explains in detail how to work within the relationship. Focusing on the importance of the therapist's subjective experience, she describes four archetypally based fields of human experiencing: Original Oneness/Merger, Twoness/Rupture, Differentiated Oneness/Transitional Space, and the Numinous Field of the Transcendent Function. The first two fields shed light on preverbal trauma revealed in more difficult or stuck sandplay therapies and how to understand it symbolically through the therapist's subjective experience. Through vivid clinical examples, Cunningham illustrates how silent understanding and containing may be the other--and at times the only--source of the symbol."
Cunningham's fields relate to development in personality- these are self states as well as positions. The first has autistic-contiguous qualities; there is a mama baby oneness here, felt in the body. The second; twoness/rupture is paranoid schizoid. The third is differentiated oneness and relates to Klein's depressive position. I think of psychotic, borderline and neurotic levels of functioning... oral, anal, oedipal. There is so much to say about these positions. Read the book!
Most interesting to me here is the numinous field of the transcendent function. Jung's thinking on this was that when the unconscious and conscious meet a third space is created. The mandala is a symbol of this meeting place where the tension between two opposites are brought into a complementary relationship. I think of this as the rare golden and light filled moment in the work where therapist and client have a very cosmic simultaneous aha moment- both feel timeless- the lighting is good and everything is slowed down, in synch and very beautiful.
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