Sandplay Therapy: From Alchemy to Neuroscience
Authors: Napoliello Balfour Rosa 
Published: November 2024

From the literature of the twentieth-century, it emerges that playing is an essential element for psychotherapy because psychotherapy itself is a creative game that happens in a confined space-time, and because even though it is at the limits between reality and imagination, psychotherapy is a real experience for the patient. With sandplay, the body of the patient enters actively, even with its motion, in the game (play) of the relationship, allowing the therapist to access, first with his body then with his mind, progressively from "non-verbal non-symbolic," through "non-verbal symbolic," to "verbal symbolic" contents experiencing in himself emotional memories from the more archaic to the most evolved. This generates an important tie between the patient and the therapist, a co-transference that is necessary for a transformative process to occur in the patient. This is well expressed in the images of the alchemic process described by C. G Jung in "Rosarium Philosophorum" (in Psychology of the Transference, CW 16), in which it appears that just from "coniunctio" can emerge a new symbolic capacity that can activate a process of individuation. New neuro-scientific studies concerning three important fields can help us to reflect on the therapeutic process that happens in the co-transference relationship of sandplay. The first important research is in the field of implicit memory, an emotional experience of the early years of life, that does not allow easy access to symbolization. The emotional experience may be transformed not through interpretations, but through a new experience of relationship. The second important field of research is on the embodied-self. The sense that we have of our body seems to derive from an affordance with the surrounding environment. This sense is given by the possibility and the ability to accomplish an action, i.e. from an "intentional movement," that begins with a representation of the action that we already have through mirror neurons. Tactile, visual, and auditory sensations would seem to function only as positive or negative feedback for action, and would not seem to be the primary elements on which we come to have a sense of our body. The third important field of study is the empathetic capacity of the mirror neurons of the observer to recognize the motor intentionality of the subject that is observed. This empathetic capacity grows proportionally with the experience of the embodied-self of the observer. Returning to the relationship between patient-therapist in sandplay therapy and more specifically analyzing the elements that are introduced in the therapy through sandplay, my discussion compares new neuro-scientific theories with the latest clinical intuitions that concern the transformations that happen in the psychotherapeutic process. From this study it might be possible that new theoretical and empirical studies for sandplay therapy will emerge (Sandplay Therapy: From Alchemy to Neuroscience is a transcription of the presentation given at the 21st International Society for Sandplay Therapy Congress: Origins, Evolution, Essentials, 2011 in Ittingen, Switzerland).