Introduction

I was initially attracted to both Jungian psychology and sandplay therapy because of what I sensed as an accepting and valuing of individual differences rather than an emphasis on the judging of people. I had been taught in traditional American psychology to emphasize testing, which evaluates a person as better or worse than other people in various dimensions. So I was comforted by Jung’s only test, the word association test, which simply identifies what complexes a person has without judging whether they are good or bad complexes. Moreover, his theory of typology is based on the principle that people naturally differ from one another in personality type and does not place a premium on one type over another.