While working with trauma or emotional difficulties in children, it is essential to work at an appropriate level that corresponds to the child’s developing mind. Identifying the clients’ cognitive and emotional abilities will mitigate their therapeutic journeys and support the development of coping strategies. As younger children have a limited verbal capacity, especially articulating emotional trauma, therapists such as Anna Freud and Dora Kalff developed ways to help children ‘play out’ their problems. Play therapy addresses the personal unconscious via metaphor and symbols appearing in various expressive and creative activities (Carey, 2006). Psychoanalytic play therapy aims to not just alleviate particular behaviours or symptoms that may be present, but to change deeper and broader aspects of the child’s inner workings (Bromfield, 2003). Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and workings with the unconscious mind or psyche, suggests that a child enters the world with basic drives for survival and reproduction. These constitute an aspect of the psyche known as the id. In addition, the ego is the part of the psyche that is in touch with reality, and it mediates between the id and the super ego, which is composed of our internalised ideals and morals inherited from society and family (Freud, 2018). Congruent with earlier theories of evolutionary psychology, Freud believed that our current mental state could be understood by history and past experience, and he emphasised the importance of early experiences and developmental stages. Drawing upon Freud’s psychotherapeutic systems, this essay will focus on psychoanalysts Carl Jung and John Bowlby, and their theories on early childhood experience and development. In turn, they will be critiqued on their contributions to play therapy, in particular the use of symbols and the relationship with the therapist.
Jung (1990), although not commonly associated with theory on child development, uses childhood as an archetype or feature of adult development and personality. He claimed that all psychoneuroses could be classified in two main groups: collective people with underdeveloped individuality, and those individuals with weakened collective adaptation. He suggested that we inherit primordial archetype images that form a collective-unconscious and appear throughout different cultures in religion, stories and dreams. Jung was interested in using these preconscious images and archetypical symbols to explore the unconscious mind and uses the example of a client who had twenty-six recurrent dreams featuring the water motif, visualised as images of the sea, a river and rainfall (Jung, 1990). Archetypes become actualised when they are displayed in behavior or become conscious images in dreams or through creative expression (Boeree, 2006).
Jung’s early work focusing on adult patients’ dream recall, suggested many of the underlying psychological themes came from parents’ illness or psychopathy. He later extended the use of the archetypes that appeared in adulthood to childhood and developed the idea of introjection and identification whereby children internalise, and strongly identify with, the beliefs of others, particularly their parents. Jungian theorists propose that children create images to organise experiences in order to understand and connect their inner and outer world (Microtraining Associates, 2003).
Jung also believed that the power of dichotomy gives power to the psyche, as all archetypal concepts have an opposite. For example life and death, and the dichotomies identified in Jung’s personality types; sensing/intuition, introversion/extraversion, judging/perceiving and thinking/feeling (Jung, 1990). In suppressing one end of the dichotomy, feelings are denied and may manifest around the consistent archetype. However, in acknowledging both opposing sides in the conscious mind, the energy will contribute to the growth of the psyche and ultimately result in self-improvement. Personal development occurs when an innate striving from psychic fragmentation towards wholeness and healing is led by the archetypal images. Through therapy, the symbols help to lead the therapist to the shadows or areas of the unconscious that are neglected and suppressed (Green, 2005).
Individuation – developing the psychological self fully, occurs in adulthood when the ego, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious are integrated. In childhood, the ego is separated from the self, and is realigned and integrated once again in late adulthood. After birth, child identity is developed in relation to the mother. The infant’s specific needs limit the environment to which he or she experiences and interacts with; other elements do not exist yet. The infant grows away from a primary identity and develops imagery by continually evaluating his or her experience. He or she graduates into a separate being through independence granted by bodily control over the first two years (Ryce, 1982).
Bowlby (1951) is another psychoanalyst that focused on the role of external factors and affectionate bonds between infant and carer in child development. However, he distanced himself from theories relating childhood relationships to internal conflicts and oral gratification. Drawing upon some Freudian ideas, he suggests that the mother figure acts as the child’s ego and superego until they are capable of taking over the functions themselves, and that healthy mental development is a result of a consistent and warm relation with this figure (Bowlby, 1951). This can be compared to Jung’s theory of childhood individuation mentioned previously.
‘She orients him in space and time, provides his environment, permits the satisfaction of some impulses, restricts others. She is his ego and his super-ego. Gradually he learns these arts himself, and as he does, the skilled parent transfers the roles to him. This is a slow, subtle and continuous process, beginning when he first learns to walk and feed himself, and not ending completely until maturity is reached.’ (Bowlby, 1951, pg 403).
As infancy is a period of high dependency and vulnerability, an evolutionary advantage is that a caregiver is accessible and responsive to the infant’s needs. As a result of a reciprocal infant-carer relationship, the infant will develop and regulation strategies will mature according to the responsiveness from the primary caregiver (Bowlby, 1951). Different attachment styles emerge depending on caregiver sensitivity, which in turn become internalised by the infant.
Mary Ainsworth (2015) reiterated the importance of mother sensitivity to child signals, and introduced the idea that a secure attachment figure acts as a base from which the child can feel confident to go and explore the world. She categorised the relationship as: secure, insecure-avoidant, insecure-resistant and disorganized. Secure children develop a trust that their caregivers are consistently available to respond to their needs, whereas avoidant children have learned to ignore their caregivers as a mechanism developed as a result of the unwillingness or inability of the caregiver to soothe. Insecure-resistant children become clingy as the unpredictable responses of the caregiver result in uncertainty, and disorganised children’s view their caregivers as both sources of comfort and fear as a result of unpredictable negative and positive interaction (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters & Wall 2015). Bowlby’s focus on the attachment figure as a working model in which guide the infant’s expectations, can be compared to Jung’s theory of identification and introjection. The infant relies on external factors to create internal representations of self and other, which will predetermine his or her resilience or vulnerability (Bowlby, 1988).
In a therapeutic setting, the therapist and client work together to understand the cause of the client’s model of self and others. The relationship with the therapist is extremely important in this environment if the child is to use the therapist as a secure base from where he or she can begin to rework and explore his or her working models. Transference can occur when the client has an inadequate model of attachment and may impose these models on interactions with the therapist. When the therapist does not comply with the child’s maladapted internal working model, the child is challenged to amend it and will begin to develop more healthy expectations (Bretherton, 1992).
The therapist can successfully become a secure-base for the child with the use of interactive synchrony. The therapist adopts a responsive stance by tuning activity to the child’s cues and allowing the child to engage and disengage depending on his or her readiness (Benedict, 2006). The importance of the eight Axline (1974) principles come in to play here, which state that the therapist establishes a warm, friendly relationship with the client and accepts the child as is. The therapist should establish a feeling of permissiveness and should not direct the child’s actions or conversation, or hurry the process along. However, limitations are necessary only to anchor the process to reality and highlight the child’s responsibility in the process. The therapist should also respect the child’s ability to self-heal and be alert to the feelings the child is expressing (Axline, 1974). This is also in line with the concept of the wounded architype proposed by Jung, and the psyche’s ability to heal metaphorically (Barnes, 2013).
Another hugely significant contribution to play therapy is Jung’s use of symbols and imagery to direct the client to the shadows of their personal unconscious. Creative arts therapists often work within symbolisation as it is indirect and has great power to evoke healing imagery. There is no direct interpretation that would be too threatening for the child, and feelings are not accessed directly or by verbal means (Crenshaw, 2015) Similarly in the play room, the toys have a greater depth than their outward appearance. They each have a conceptual form and lead to great symbolic significance. The symbolic meaning they carry is for the benefit of the child, and it is important that the therapist does not try to interpret the inner world of another person; different meanings can be discovered for different children and across different cultures (Barnes, 2013). Psychoanalytic play allows the child to face their relationships and conflicts using symbols and metaphor to create a psychologically safe distance, resulting in fuller and more open experience (Bromfield, 2006).
Sand play is often utilised in play therapy, and is symbolic in its essence. The sand reconnects the client with the earth in a way that cannot be done with other media, and the client can construct scenes using miniature symbolic figures to contact the unconscious process (Carey, 2006). Kalff (1980) describes the miniature scenes as conflicts that can be made visable by being transferred to the outer world. The unconscious in the child is influenced and new energy are freed that contribute to the development of a healthy ego (Kalf, 1980).
As illustrated, the work by Jung and Bowlby on child development is very present in the play therapy session. Both theorists highlight the significance of early experience and relationships on personal development and through the concepts of ego, superego, unconscious and collective unconscious we can better understand the child’s ability to interpret their experience and memories. Bowlby introduced the importance of building a secure-base relationship with the child, which has heavily influenced the theme of therapist-client relationship. Relationship-specific types of therapy such as object-relations therapy and filial therapy have also been developed to specifically address attachment issues. Jung’s work is centred around the use of symbols and archetypes, which are evident in all the therapeutic activities such as sand play, painting, puppetry, story-telling and role-playing.