ABSTRACT
On a wide beach or in a box in a playroom, sand is greeted enthusiastically by children everywhere. They scratch designs into its surface, dig down into it, build up forms and castles, bury things underneath; it can be soft, warm and powdery, damp and firm, sometimes hard, cold and heavy. Amorphous, soft and pliable, it offers in both its visual and tactile qualities a perfect medium
Figure 5.1 Into the body: Messing about with sand and water is an activity beloved by most children. This chapter discusses how, in an art therapy situation, the physical sensations and imaginative images offered by these substances can transform this ‘ordinary’ play into an
opportunity for a child to explore complex body issues connected to their sexual abuse in an unthreatening and undifferentiated way
for the projection of images, dreams, fantasies and feelings. Very often water, the first play substance of an infant, is added from the sea, a puddle or a tap. With it rivers, lakes, seas, oceans can be made, the sand can be made mouldable into forms which are then dissolved-swamps and delightful soggy areas can be created. Children are drawn to play with these two universal materials naturally, wherever they find them, almost it seems with a sense of coming home. They are after all, along with fire and air, the elemental ‘primary substances’ of the earth, ‘archaic mother symbols’, with whom powerful and primitive links are made and retained throughout life (Balint 1968:68).
