Sandplay in Three Voices: Images, Relationships, the Numinous M. Baron

Abstract

Reviews the book, Sandplay in Three Voices: Images, Relationships, the Numinous by Kay Bradway, Lucia Chambers, and Maria Ellen Chiaia (2005). This book is about three practitioners looking at their individual sandplay practices and trying to draw conclusions from their shared experiences. The volume is structured as sets of 'trialogues', conversations in free-fall between three experienced practitioners whose insights, questions, truths and doubts jostle with fragments of theory in attempts to speak what they practise. Together they discuss issues current in their practices of sandplay therapy, and as each woman brings to the conversation her own style and concerns, we find naivete and knowledge weaving together toward an outcome which sometimes finds them in accord and sometimes not. The trialogues cover issues that directly affect aspects of sandplay therapy, such as silence, the child, the mother, chaos and the numinous. Underlying every trialogue and every theme is a consideration of relationship in the therapeutic practice. Depth is a term that one is exposed to again and again in the book. So much so that it caused the reviewer to reflect on the muteness it creates in this volume--what else might have been expressed if words other than deep, deeply or depth had been used to describe observations, intensities, or physiological and psychological theoretical aspects? For the interested sandplay therapist, Three Voices occupies a particular position in sandplay literature. It is not an introductory book, nor does it intend to be comprehensive in its instruction. Due to its style, it is rather like eavesdropping on a reverie about the service given to a therapeutic calling, in which three women find themselves questioning and affirming the work they do. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)