The Sand Therapy Training Institute

Into the Depths with Symbols in Sand

Center for Culture and Sandplay 

Purpose

The purpose of the Center for Culture and Sandplay (CCS) is to support research into the practice and concerns for using symbols in sand across cultures. The research lens is a cross-cultural, qualitative, interdisciplinary study, through process research, existential phenomenology, hermeneutic psychology, psychodynamic, and social construction/ feminist theory.

Goals for CCS

  1. To maintain the organization and content of a library of symbols and images with research into each symbol’s meaning across cultures, from mythology, cultural icons, material construction, culture-specific stories, origin in natural science, use as culture-specific metaphors/ language, historical and postmodern references to media, movies, religion, science, fairy tales, poetry, and literature. Of special interest is indigenous mythology, cultural rituals, the evolution of images and meanings from paleolithic to postmodern.
  2. To gather stories from therapists to understand their experience of the projective process and symbol activation when creating their own sand scenes.
  3. To study the social construction of symbols and emerging meanings through the lens of social-cultural-political-intersubjectivity.
  4. To develop a narrative psychology approach for the use of symbol activation within sand stories and with single symbols.