KJC Korea
Journal Central

This case study is of the sandplay process of a young girl whose ego development was delayed predominantly, it seems, because of negative mother archetypal energy expressed by the personal mother. The client is an elementary school-aged girl caught in the negative mother archetype, particularly in its devouring quality which was a manifestation of the mother’s over-protectiveness; thus development of ego consciousness was impeded, as was a balanced relationship between ego and Self. The mother suffered from severe chronic depression and anxiety, and the father from panic disorder. As sandplay therapy progressed, client gradually began to engage in her everyday outer life and function normally, and the mother increasingly became less overprotective and more containing and accepting. As is evidenced in this case, sandplay therapy provided an environment which enabled the reconstitution of client's problematic primal relationship, constellation of the Self so that she developed a sense of self-worth and competency, and the reconstruction of her damaged ego-Self axis.

The study investigated how the sand play therapy reduces the internalized shame, which the children of alcoholics would have inside, but improves the children's self-expression. The children of alcoholics are understood to feel several emotions as anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, shame and anger. They generally try not to expose their problems caused by alcohol and other dysfunctions of their families as they either go silent with those problems or pretend that they do not have the problems at all from the beginning. Because of that, however, the children of alcoholics come to have a hard time with building up close relationships with others. In that regard, the study looked into how the sand play therapy could reduce the internalized shame of those children of alcoholics but improve their self-expression which would eventually help the children to be healthy both psychologically and socially. What the study has learned during the therapy is summarized as follows. First, the sand play therapy turned out to be efficient in reducing the internalized shame of the children of alcoholics. Second, the sand play therapy improved the self-expression of the children of alcoholics.

Jung said that the stubbornness of life and the attitude towards life in the second half should be different. In the first half of life, the attitude towards life is the period of widening oneself, aggressively challenging life, concentrating excessively in order to achieve social success, and in the latter half of life, unlike the direction of life in the first half. It takes time to listen to the sound of the unconscious, but the process is scary and painful enough to be expressed by death. The process of changing the attitude towards life in the second half is expressed as psychological abandonment and wandering, which requires efforts to develop the ability to dismantle and reorganize the old mental structure. It is only through the process of death that it is transformed into a new process of individualization. This article is about the reasons for starting the process of death, looking at the cultural, religious, mythological, psychological, and creative meanings of death, and about the changes in the attitude towards life after death and suffering.

The purpose of this study was to find the themes and symbols expressed in sandplay therapy by Korean-Chinese adolescents from broken families in China. This study was conducted with Korean-Chinese residents of Yanbian Prefecture in northeastern China. The subjects of this study were adolescents in broken families who did not live with their mother, father, or both parents for various reasons. Sandplay therapy consisted of eight sessions over one month. The subjects underwent 45 minutes of therapy in each session. With the agreement of the subjects and their guardians, the sandplay therapy process was photographed. Meaningful contents were noted in the sand scenes and abstract research themes were narrowed down. As a result, the observed contents were materialized and the common themes found in adolescents were categorized. To ensure the validity of this study, triangulation and peer debriefing were applied. A case-by-case analysis procedure was adopted. It was found that there were four common themes expressed, namely a ‘sense of distance’, ‘wounded’, ‘hope’, and ‘newness’. This study afforded insights into the psychological difficulties and characteristics of adolescents from broken families as well as providing them with an opportunity for understanding and healing themselves.