The Sand Therapy Training Institute

Reflecting on the Logo

By: Dr. Dee

One of my passions is to pause and immerse in the richness of the imagination. To flow with poetics. The image of the logo is anchored below in two aspects of wonderment — the methods that provided fertile ground for the space of imagination, the framework for Narrative Sand Therapy, and a brief touch of personal amplification, the wonderment of meaning.  

Our logo was originally designed for the Center for Culture and Sandplay. This has been the home of sand therapy professional training since 2000. Process with symbols in sand was grounded in my cross-cultural research, a critique of presumptions embedded in Western analytic psychology, creating space for indigenous voices. The initial critical questions were, how is culture represented in sand scenes and how do we respond to layers of cultural identity? This is now described as intersubjectivity. Emergent questions concerned how we understand and respond to identities that are visible and named, as well as identities, experiences, that we cannot access, that are invisible to both client and clinician. How do we validate experience that can not be spoken, that does not have a voice or conscious structure in story?

My research method to explore those questions was an integration of psychology’s hermeneutic circle, phenomenological field work, indigenous myths, and cultural psychology. This design laid the framework for a model to understand and respond to sand scenes, symbol engagement, the experience of the person creating the scene, and the experience of the clinician. The framework set the stage for clinical training in the use of symbols as a projective process. That was the science and art of discovery.

A process of interpretation moves through iterations of meaning from a starting grasp of representation, a naming, through iterations of meaning, arriving back to the original understanding with new insight and clarity. 

Our experience with an image connects to thousands of associations, memories, metaphors, and experiences . . . known and not known. When we name, we temporarily make conscious a single thread of meaning. It is one temporary thread among thousands. We can re-immerse to locate threads not taken. The hermeneutic circle evolves. The never-ending stories continue.

Art expresses experience, the existential and ineffable, and is meaningful from the point of view of the one who creates and receives. I offer my reflection below in gratitude to Sr. Ellen La Capria and appreciation for the logo.