THE

NON-VERBAL ‘THINKING’

OF CHILDREN

by Dr Margaret Lowenfeld

(Founder and Director of the Institute of Child Psychology)

AND

Phyllis M Traill, MA, Dip.ICP and Frances H Rowles, MA, Dip.ICP (Child Psychotherapists practising at the Institute of Child Psychology)

First Published by the

INSTITUTE OF CHILD PSYCHOLOGY LTD

6 Pembridge Villas, London, W11, 1964

Edited and republished in 2016 by the Dr Margaret Lowenfeld Trust[1]

www.lowenfeld.org

CONTENTS

1. THE NON-VERBAL THINKING OF CHILDREN by MARGARET LOWENFELD

2. NON-VERBAL THINKINGIN CHILD PSYCHOTHERAPY by PHYLLIS M TRAILL and FRANCES H ROWLES

2.1 BASIC THEORY

2.2 PLAY MATERIAL

2.3 TECHNIQUES

2.4 STANDARD SEQUENCES

2.5 NON-VERBAL THINKING

2.6 CONCLUSION

2.7 NOTES

THE NON-VERBAL THINKING OF CHILDREN

by MARGARET LOWENFELD

[2]Paper read at a conference at Institute of Child Psychology, 1948

FOR the past 20 years, we have been studying children using methods to enable them to talk, as it were, without the use of language. A careful and detailed analysis of the productions children have made, using materials specially designed for their use, has brought to light an activity of the human psyche that so far has not been described. This is non-verbal mental activity, which seems to start at the beginning of life and to remain at the core of the psyche. This mental activity will be referred to as ‘thought’ in this paper.

To describe this activity in words is a task set about with great difficulties. The difficulties will be stated first, to show why it is that many gaps must appear in this account. To give a complete account, one should first describe it, then show how it operates in normal healthy childhood, say what happens to it in adult life, and against that background describe it as we see it in our patients. But this would be a matter of intolerable length and quite outside the limits of this paper. Moreover, there has been no opportunity to study this activity of the psyche in normal children in anything resembling the same detail as has been possible in disturbed children. Also, the amount of available evidence on the nature of non-verbal thought in adulthood is too scanty to give more than indications of probability. Thus all that can be done here is to put forward some of the evidence which has been collected as to the existence of this activity, and then to describe it as it has appeared in child patients.

It must first be noted that psychiatry and psychotherapy have hitherto, in the main, been occupied with adult life and experience and with childhood as it has been recovered or recreated by adults through the techniques of psychoanalysis. In the analytic study of children, it is material obtained primarily from adults, which forms the basis of the interpretation of children’s play. In work with adults, it has been taken for granted that language, supplemented by drawings, gestures, tones of voice and movements, all combined together in a specialised relation to the physician, formed tools through which the whole of the psyche could be investigated. But in this assumption certain important considerations have been omitted. First, educationalists tell us that children cannot use words as tools to think with until the age of about seven or eight; before that time, their use of language is similar to that of adults speaking a foreign language that is only slightly known to them. Before that age, children are unable to manipulate language to write, for example, a letter or an essay that has a beginning, a middle and an end. On the other hand, we have Freud’s discovery and the knowledge poets have always had, that early childhood is a time of the most vivid impressions and of emotional experience, which is crucial for the whole of later life. Furthermore, in adult life, language is the tool used to realise, within the self, by interior speech, the individual’s own experience and to communicate with his fellows – unless the individual is an artist, a point which will be dealt with later in this book.

Now, R. G. Collingwood, the English philosopher whose work underlies so much of this study, used to teach that all thought began with putting a question. The question put by the writer some 20 years ago can be formulated as follows. Since the parts of the brain with which one thinks are formed and active long before the age of seven, when language is not available for thought, in what way do younger children think, register and group their experience?

Study of the interior life and experience of man, by the processes either of psychoanalysis or analytical psychology, has hitherto concentrated its attention upon the aspects of desire and of emotional life. To the pictures that arise in the mind as the goals of these interior urges, the term ‘fantasy’, whether conscious or unconscious, has been given. But little attention has been paid, so far that is, to the intellectual or conceptual aspect of the pictures, which appear. It is to the nature of the dynamic behind the picture, to the wish or urge, which has appeared to call the pictured goal into being, that attention has been directed. Yet it is both, the picture plus the urge that brings it into being, that make the complete phenomenon. It is with the first element, the conceptual factor, that this paper is concerned and which it sets out to examine.

Take the simplest of all human urges, the drive of appetite – the desire to eat, which arises from the reality of the body’s need for sustenance. This desire, because of the physiological substratum from which it arises, would, in its simplest form, seem to give rise to the most obvious and direct kind of activity. One is hungry and one eats. But even here, experience with people in famine situations has shown that the dominant factor in the situation is not, as would be imagined, the physiological need to eat, but instead the intellectual concept that accompanies it. Hunger alone, and the organic need behind it, is not sufficient by itself to bring about eating. There must also be, in the minds of the hungry, a concept of ‘food’, which corresponds to the foodstuffs available. It is no rare thing for large numbers of adults – men and women – to die, for instance in India, or among the Indians of Canada, because the food offered them, maize, for example, in the place of rice, was not seen by the hungry as food. This refusal to accept the unknown, even when the preservation of life depended on it, has been persisted in, until death supervened.

The conceptual element is, therefore, at least as important as the element of desire, and worthy of the same attention. But if it proves difficult to understand this element in adults, and in adults who share a common language, how is such contact to be made with the inner life of children, and particularly of young children or of infants?

To answer this question, means must be found for making contact with children, which are independent of speech. Tools must be created with which children can describe to themselves and to adults, the nature of their own experience; methods must be devised to make it possible, as it were, to watch a child think.

Once it became clear that something real was emerging through use of the, at that time very primitive tools designed by the author, the next step was to secure research partners and adequate material to make genuine study possible. This was necessary to cope with a difficulty that had begun to appear very clearly. Freud had made a certain basic assumption in his work, which he had not realised as an assumption, because it was accepted by all the men of his time. This was that there exists a common plan of development in the emotional sphere of human beings which parallels physiological and anatomical law. Working on this assumption, he felt justified in drawing deductions of universal application from the study even of single individuals. This assumption persists among present-day psychoanalysts, namely that what occurs in a small group of individuals, or even in a single individual, if carefully studied and correctly understood, can be taken as generally applicable to all individuals. However, although this belief is very strongly held, no evidence has been adduced in support of it.

The next question to be tackled was that of the checking of observations and the recording of facts. To do this a system was devised by which every fact was cross-referenced and checked, and later, charts were drawn up of the data obtained. A paper on the first findings was read to the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society and published in their journal, entitled: ‘A new approach to the problem of psycho-neurosis in childhood’ (B.J. Med. Psychol., 1931, 11).

At that time it was possible only to see dimly what can now be understood far more clearly – that there is an activity of the mind, which has so far been inadequately observed and understood because it is inexpressible in language. However, it is in language ultimately that all discoveries have to be communicated, and this accounts for the delay that has occurred in the presentation of these findings. Moreover, it seemed best to wait until a certain number of the children treated in youth had gone out into the world as adults in order to see whether the benefits, which appeared to accrue from this type of treatment in childhood produced the anticipated results in reality in later life. Some 2,000 cases have now been treated and studied in this way, and a fair number of the earlier ones of these are now grown up and out in the world as independent individuals. Wherever it has been possible, contact with them has been maintained. It is, therefore, now possible to present a study, which has a certain completeness about it. To return to the matter in hand, which is to describe something of the nature of this activity, let us start with a parable, the form of which is drawn from worlds[3] created by children themselves. As children, many of us delighted in reading that mixture of fairy story and children’s tale in which there was a garden surrounded by a wall, which all the grown-ups took as being really the end of the garden, but which, at a specially exciting moment in the story, the children found to conceal among the bushes which grew close up to the wall, a secret door. This door, opened only at midnight, led to a garden of delights unsuspected by the grown-ups, and peopled with fairies and wise or prankish gnomes. This story has many forms – sometimes it takes place under the sea, sometimes on an island out at sea, sometimes in a lost valley in the hills. The essence of the story is the same; the finding of a fantasy land near home but with rules of life within it that are magical and altogether different from normal life. There are also terrible things in this garden, ogres and man-eating giants, and wizards and spells, but in the end it is only the wicked or careless who are consumed, and for those who know the rules of life in that land it is exciting and virile, and from it the traveller brings back treasures of gold and jewels.

It is clear that there are many ways in which these stories can be regarded, and Jung and Freud have thrown a great deal of light on them, but here they will be taken quite simply as they stand and studied in almost a literal fashion so that they may assist the understanding of non-verbal ‘thought’. For instance, there are always certain constant characteristics of these stories. There is always a key to the garden, and the key is difficult to find and even invisible to many people. Great efforts are called for from those who are bold enough to take the key and open the door, before they can enjoy the freedom of the secret kingdom and the strange things within it. Within that garden or that kingdom there are dangers also and tests and struggles, and not all come back again. Some die, some lose their way back; perhaps these become some of those people we call insane, who never find their way back again. There are people who, having been once inside, are frightened and spend the rest of their lives denying there is any such kingdom at all. There are others, like the painter Marc Chagall, the author James Joyce and the poet William Blake, who live equally on both sides of the wall, coming and going at will, and although people find them strange, they do not call them mad. Finally there are those who take theodolites and measuring tapes and go in and out measuring and calculating and trying to learn the geography of that vast garden and how its outlines are drawn.

This is easier for the author to do personally because her childhood was spent partly in a square in London, near the park, and partly in a quiet part of Poland. Her father was a collector and the house in London that formed the background to experience was full of objects that came from far away places and had no relation to each other. They were rich in colour and, to a child, unexpected in character and did not fit into the life of every-day. In Poland, the people wore brightly coloured clothes and were simple and direct in speech and thought. The author was used to hearing several languages spoken around her, and so things did not have just one name by which everybody knew them, but several names used by different people, so there was always a certain amount of uncertainty as to what the names really were. The word one thought of might be the one the grown-up one was talking to wanted, and then again it might not – it was difficult to be sure.

The author was also a very delicate child and spent a large part of her life in bed in illness, with long periods of solitude. The years immediately following World War I brought her the opportunity in Eastern Europe of seeing and experiencing famine and war and terror and isolation, but also the exhilarating experience of taking part in the rebirth of a country. With a basic training in paediatrics, return from Poland brought the opportunity to train in paediatric and biochemical research work under the late Professor Leonard Findlay, and as part of a research team at the Royal Free Hospital in London. Perhaps these broad experiences have made it easier to forge a key to that garden and not to be too startled at its contents.

Two characteristics of that fable must now be considered which differentiate it in important ways from the concept (either psychoanalytic or of analytical psychology) of the unconscious. First of all, the fantasy land within the garden is a well-defined region, clearly separated from the home garden by a wall. The rules of conduct and the type of event that occur on one side of the wall are different from those on the other side. What is to be expected in one garden does not happen in the other, and in the magic garden almost anything may come about. This is not strange because the idea of the story comes directly from study of the actual productions many children have made with the tools supplied to them. The second important fact about the garden is that, although to some extent it looks like the outside world, there is in it neither time nor space. It is in this timelessness, and this quality of being able to be at the same time in two places which may actually be far apart, that has given rise to the legends and fairy tales of Rip Van Winkle, the Magic Carpets, Seven League Boots, the little figures that suddenly grow tall as in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and much of the paraphernalia of fairyland.

Despite these differences, we are dealing here with something, therefore, that resembles closely what is termed the ‘unconscious’. Indeed, most of the phenomena of the Freudian and Jungian unconscious are found within it, though with a different explanation. We need to ask ourselves, therefore, how is this garden constructed and what do these strange features mean? It is difficult to understand this directly, being so far removed from reality, because it is too peculiar, and most poets and artists have also left it far behind and grown into a different world to be able to regain contact with it easily. Some artists keep a dim consciousness of it and the work of the painter Marc Chagall may be taken to help us in building a bridge.

It is characteristic of Chagall to paint pictures in which figures and objects appear without apparent relation to one another and without the normal relation to gravity. His method of grouping these figures and his skill of colouring are so aesthetically pleasing, that his pictures receive a warm welcome in most countries of the world. Nevertheless, judged from a ‘rational’ standpoint, it is difficult to understand the rules upon which he works, why he selects just those objects that appear in his pictures, or why the ones which are included in any given picture should appear together? Moreover, the size of figures and objects and the place within the picture they occupy seem, judged from the common-sense point of view, to be completely irrational. Figures are painted within other figures and in some large heads contain whole scenes within them. From the ordinary standpoint, this is very odd. This is not surrealism, which is an attempt to represent and to evoke in the beholder by that representation certain emotional states, but something different that stands by itself. It is, in the main, the painting of the beautiful side of the strange inner experience of man, so difficult to reach in adult life, but which dominates the life of small children.

As a first step, let us consider the way he treated common metaphor in a concrete fashion. For example, one might speak of a ‘horse-faced’ woman, but in his picture ‘Claire de Lune’ (1944), Chagall paints a nude female figure in solid texture and superimposes over the head of the figure a shadow painting of a horse, so that in literal fact the central figure in his picture is both woman and horse. In Figure l (see below) is shown for comparison a reproduction of a drawing made by a young woman patient who wished to express early confusion of thoughts about certain aspects of bodies. It is a commonplace of psychoanalytic experience that the teapot with its projecting spout and the breast-like formation of its lid can stand in symbolic fashion for a combination of male and female sexual characteristics. It is also one of the characteristics of early confusions and identities that the parts of the body which contain orifices into which and from within which substances come and go stand for and are compounded with one another, the head becoming in this way confused with the excretory end of the trunk. This particular patient wished to express a concept into which these ideas had coalesced, and to combine the resultant mass with the idea of struggle for possession of the total qualities conceived of as existing both in the head and in the male and female genitalia.

Figure 1

It is difficult to express so complex a concept in words, just as the complex combination of ideas and feelings behind the impulse to superimpose a horse upon a woman’s head cannot be fully expressed in words. Both, however, can be presented in a plastic medium, if the usual concepts of ‘sense’ and ‘possibility’ are rejected. Chagall, being an artist, can blend his concepts into an artistically pleasing whole, which has value in itself. This patient, having no artistic ability or desire to do anything but communicate something, has produced a drawing in which teapots formed parts of heads of pairs of people engaged in a struggle with each other. The teapots were of different colours, and the patient stated that each figure was dissatisfied with its particular coloured teapot and wished to change it for another. The top hat, the cork seen from the side, and the third crude drawing indicating a cork stopping up a hole, fill out the genital significance of the drawing in a manner that will be familiar to all psychoanalysts.

Further, those who are familiar with the paintings of Chagall will remember that, in the well-known painting ‘Dans Mon Village’, Chagall makes use of the device of painting scenes within scenes, small solid individuals within parts of larger figures. In particular, in the painting entitled ‘La Somnabule’ (1945), there appears within and painted upon the crinoline skirts of a female figure, a winter village scene, the floating horizontal figure of a man with a cock’s head, and a quadruped minus the front legs and with human legs instead of its back legs. In the same picture, a candelabra appears in the top right-hand corner, although there is a moon below it, and a man’s arm in a coat sleeve is in the region of the ear of the bridal female figure. Once again, because Chagall is an artist, the total result of these compositions is enchanting, and has brought Chagall fame in all countries in which his pictures have been exhibited. But this means only that Chagall, being an artist, has chosen to use as the material for his pictures concepts and plastic forms which are a common possession of all human beings, but of which most of us remain unaware.

To make this clear, let us consider two drawings of a young woman patient. In the first, out of the mouth of a dragon’s head come what she termed ‘“many tubes’ or “many ‘tongues’ with parts of the human body attached to the end of them. The body of the dragon curving away then becomes part of a scene of a river with a small sailing boat on it and a camel on the bank. The end of the dragon’s tail is looped around a kettle. At the bottom left-hand corner of the drawing there is a quite different small scene of a prehistoric monster standing by a sheet of water. At the top of the paper is a crucifix with a charwoman prostrate before it; a lamp floats in the middle, as does Chagall’s candelabra, and a crown sails away to the right on wings. In the second drawing a whole under-sea world with seaweed and sea creatures appears inside a woman’s abdomen, and in the place of breasts are bombs. We should here note that in the patient’s drawings parts of the human body become mechanical objects, while Chagall’s, animal and human body parts are interchanged.

These drawings suggest the ‘introjected objects’ of psychoanalysis. Indeed this same patient described at another session that at one time she had a vivid feeling of her father’s body, diminished to something much smaller than life, present within her own body, with his face at right-angles to her neck. She maintained that the ‘tickling in the throat’ from which she suffered was caused by his moustache touching the sides of her throat. At the same time this patient is, as far as daily life is concerned, remarkable for her quick and correct observation of people and her sound common sense.

Another feature of Chagall’s paintings is the confusion of time and space or, to put it the other way round, the absence of the dimensions of time and space. The materials he uses appear, therefore, to be suitable for the expression of experience in which there is neither time nor space but only immediacy of experience, each experience obliterating the one before it and replacing it with itself. The beauty and the harmony of Chagall’s pictures, and the gulf that in that aspect separates them from the productions of patients, gives much material for thought, material which arises equally out of contemplation of the work of other artists and authors including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Joyce, Henry Moore, and Hieronymous Bosch. The great artist works with the same tools as our own experience could make accessible to all of us, but he produces results, which are mysterious and act powerfully upon us. Where the work of our patients very often reflects fear, horror and suffering, the work of these artists, even where we cannot understand it with our intelligence, affects some other part of our being in a way peculiar to itself, often calling out responses of which we did not previously know ourselves capable. Here lies the key to the difference between non-verbal thinking in health and in illness, and this difference will be described in detail later on.

Having established that this process of non-verbal thinking exists, it is now necessary to consider how it comes about, what it tells us, and the part this process plays in the total personality. The first idea that will occur to any worker familiar with the technique of free association is that this process represents the chain of free association occurring not in sequence as it usually does, but congested or condensed, as it were, into a solid mass as indeed often occurs in psychoanalytic studies.

It will be useful, therefore, to start there and to analyse out some of these combinations. To do so we might take a hypothetical case in which a man walking down a street, undergoing emotional experiences of high significance for him, but of a type liable later to be repressed. At the same time he idly notices that a woman on the opposite side of the street, wearing a red hat, is passing a pillar box of exactly the same colour. Further, as she comes towards him, she moves in front of a small front garden to the houses on the street, in which there are some Paul Crampel geraniums. The colour of these, he casually notices, is the same as that of her hat and the pillar box. As they come together, these three items make, as it were, a column of red, topped with a hat and finished with fluffy flowers. It is possible that he would remember that experience image exactly as he had experienced it or that the sight of a component of the experience on another occasion would reproduce for him the other part; or even that when some chord in the accompanying emotional experience was touched, it would lead him to associate that with the visual experience, or the other way about. But whichever way it happened, he would at all times see the hat as a hat, and the pillar box and flowers as a pillar box and flowers.

It is necessary to examine this fact a little closer to see why this should be. To do so, let us consider the experience of a foreigner coming to a country with the life of which he is unfamiliar, as for instance, the arrival in the 17th century of Europeans in China. Or let us take our own experience when exploring an exhibition of pictures by an unfamiliar artist, or going around a number of furnished houses looking for accommodation. When we attempt later on to remember accurately the arrangement of the items we have seen, if we make a note of what we remember and then compare this with the actual facts, we shall find that we have confused the characters of the objects seen and in memory at times attached the qualities of one to another, and so on. It is this well-known phenomenon, which renders legal witnesses, and even scientific records, on occasion unreliable.

It may then be agreed that the reason the man in the street would be unlikely to do this with the pillar box, hat and flowers lies in his familiarity with these objects and their functions. Moreover, he saw the objects before him, as he was accustomed to seeing them. He has seen many hats, knows their purpose and cannot mix the hat, for instance, with the face of the wearer. He has posted many letters and only the swiftest glance is needed to tell him all he needs to know about the pillar box; the same is true of the flowers. He is, therefore, able swiftly to abstract one quality from each of these and associate it with the same quality abstracted from the other objects, while at the same time holding each distinct in his mind. His ability to keep the objects distinct while at the same time associating them through a single aspect depends upon his previous experience. Had he not had that experience, this would not have been possible for him, or possible only in exceptional circumstances.

But it is just this element of former experience that is missing in children, especially young children. It must be emphasised that the one essential characteristic of much of children’s experience is that it is new to them, and comes, in the larger number of cases, uncombined with understanding of the significance to other people of the sensorial experiences personally experienced. Now it is one of the characteristics of intelligence that the owner attempts, as if driven by an inner need for internal economy, to group  experiences together. We all do this automatically in cataloguing. As soon as we meet some new fact, we say to ourselves in order to locate it: ‘That is rather like an X, but with the added character of Y.’ This impulse starts at as early an age as we have been able to gain contact with children. It may even begin prenatally.

But in order to make a catalogue, some principle must be adopted by which events (meaning all elements of experience) may be grouped. The author had the opportunity of discussing this point with the late Professor Spearman at the General Meeting of the British Psychological Society in Manchester in 1937; he agreed with her that the usual method of grouping in the ordinary speech and usage of the adult includes a large measure of consideration of function and of common use. Thus, when thinking of a knife, we tend to speak of its sharpness or bluntness, of its size and use – pen knife, dinner knife, etc. – and we do not usually use adjectives such as ‘cold’, ‘bluish’, ‘sour to taste’ etc. which are equally appropriate to it. We do this not because we deny the existence of these qualities or could not perceive them if we desired, but because they are uninteresting to us and so go unnoticed. Once again, the perception of the qualities we do notice involves our experience of that item, and therefore is ex hypothesi inaccessible to young children.

By what method, therefore, do children classify their experience? This was one of the first questions that it was essential to answer, and one we are now able to answer thanks to the material collected over many years: namely that children classify experience by the quality of the personal experience that child has of the thing or event in question. Thus ‘things which made me feel horrid’ go together, as do ‘things which made me feel warm’, and so on up to the greatest refinement of difference, in sensitive children, of all varieties of experience. Moreover, items when grouped together in this way do not become associated; they coalesce, the shared quality not combining them in a way that can be separated later by the owner into the component parts, but becoming entirely compounded so that the original items now form part of a single whole. Here is a little story, which makes this clearer. A little boy of three and a half with a pretty, social mother had a green, smooth, shiny toy duck to which he was much attached. He used to put it under his cheek when sleeping. This duck quacked. His mother used to go out a great deal in the evening, and so would come up to his nursery, usually wearing a green silk evening dress, to read him a good-night story. She then sat in a low chair, and being rather tall, her knees came just to the height of his cheek. It was their custom that when he had had his bath he would come in from the bathroom to his nursery with his duck under one arm, pause at the door, look at his mother, then run forward, stroke his cheek on her knee, say, ‘Pretty Mummy,’ climb on her knee and cuddle down, and she read him his story. Every night this little ritual was carried out. But one night his mother came up wearing a red dress. The little boy paused at the door and looked at her very hard before he came forward rather slowly, did not stroke her knees with his cheek, and climbed up rather soberly on to her lap. This happened two nights, and on the third night he stood at the door and burst into tears and said, ‘Oh, Mummy why do you not put on your quacking dress?’ That is to say, the whole combination of affection, greenness, smoothness, cheek-stroking, etc., and the boy’s duck, had come together into a whole; it was a matter of chance which of this composite group of qualities he might hit upon to characterise this whole.

This story demonstrates the process by which the inner experience of children is grouped, and to the results of this process has been given the name ‘clustering’. The strange composite objects in Chagall’s pictures are almost certainly clusters, though this could not be confirmed without investigating them with the artist himself. There are innumerable clusters in each child’s mind. The number and variety depend upon two factors; the sensitivity and intellectual quality of the child, and the variety of their experience. Clusters are of all sizes and complexity and composed of very various materials.

The formation of clusters, it would appear, is an essential process in the development of the individual personality. When the child is sensitive and intelligent, the connections formed in early life between experiences of intimacy and intensity in ways that are personal to that child, and which are afterwards forgotten (in a manner to be described later), gives the child resources to be drawn upon that are of inestimable value. From this region[4] come ‘five miles meandering with a mazy motion’, the ‘Tiger, Tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night’ and so on, works of poetic genius that delight us as adults. Since much of our essential experience is similar to that of the poet, musician or sculptor, in whom suddenly a cluster can burst into poetic speech or dynamic sound or form, the creation of an artist will express for us similar clusters in our own experience, which are inaccessible to ordinary man. In so doing, they bring about in us a discharge of energy and release of tension and the experience of profound inner satisfaction.

Two main characteristics are observable in any large collection of studies of this kind. The first is the occurrence of similar formations in Worlds made by patients, regardless of their age, sex, complaint and intellectual capacity. Take, for instance, a relatively simple formation, that of the mound surrounded with water, which is, at times, a volcano; this can occur with a number of variations in different patients, but always with the same essential features. This formation represents, plastically, the kind of experience which in an artist can result in the ‘explosion’ of a work of art, because of his temperament and ability, but which in a patient expresses only anxiety and neurotic tension. There are a very large number of these constant factors, but we are only beginning to recognise them and understand their significance, both in themselves and for the patient who makes them.

The second characteristic of this type of material is the individuality of each patient’s productions, when these are considered as a whole. This parallels to some extent what we know of human life: we are all born, feed from a mother or a bottle that we suck, grow in stature with the constant change of relation to the outer world that this involves, come into full possession of our bodily powers, including those of reproduction, and finally die. Our faces are made of the same features but no two individuals – and no two individuals’ lives – are really alike. In the same way there is a certain likeness in the material produced by patients. Were this not so, it would be impossible ever to understand it, but there is an infinite difference in the manner in which the material is grouped and in the individual features which are added by each individual patient.

It is quite impossible within the scope of this paper even to begin to show the range and variety, the infinite subtlety and complexity of these clusters, and the light they throw upon processes of individual and of group thoughts. We must, therefore, pass on to another aspect, that of how they are arranged. Intensive study of material from around 2,000 cases has brought much material on this subject to light. To arrive at an understanding of the full meaning of any non-verbal production, either of Mosaics or of Worlds, a series of material of the same kind from the same individual should be studied together, because the first productions often contain, as sometimes does the first interview of a long term analysis, the germ of all that comes later. A very striking similarity between the development of non-verbal material and of musical themes appears. The later themes emerge from the elaboration of elements of the original design. It is as if the whole were charged with power, which only slowly becomes perceptible as it finds expression for itself, thus once more paralleling the process of artistic creation.

So far, the clusters have only been considered from their sensorial side, but they also provide powerful representations of dynamic experiences. To illustrate this, consider a very simple picture made by a young woman. At the top are, in parallel lines beneath each other, a black smear, a green hedge, and a train of trucks loaded with coal. This train is going very fast; the blackness above ‘is frightening, as things pop up in it and one does not really know what they are’; below these, a child runs. ‘She is really’, the painter said, ‘running out of the picture towards the beholder’. She is running with all her might, but she does not know where she is running to – it is the running of panic, combined with the aimless running for the sake of the movement, of young children. Below on the left, is a heap first of faeces and then of smoking manure with streaks of blood in it, and on the right the sound that trucks make when heard shunting in the night.

This picture aroused powerful but vague emotion in the painter. She described this as follows (the thoughts are given in the order they occurred):

‘It is important that the manure steamed – like the train – like smoke. I loved (that is as a child) giving plants heaps of manure (pause). The train is in pieces – like sausages. Coal burns, it leaves ash – I have often heard of lavatory (her word for faeces) referred to as ash. Yes, I remember tramps’ hats popping up from behind a hedge (she later painted this incident without realising what she was painting); it’s like when a man finishes peeing it comes in spurts. Something here is really like a face (she worked this out in great detail later), the nose area, and a little like sick. There’s something somewhere about what drives a train being partly water and steam, sick comes up in jabs too and is also hot – horrible trains at night, I used to hear shunting and puffing, frightening. Peeing is like lav, coming out with a rush (here followed a reference to early childhood defecation experiences when she had to get out of bed suddenly, from beside a heavily sleeping sister, because of a sudden onset of diarrhoea and run down a terrifying dark passage to a frightening lavatory). I think of something cook told us about a man, and while he had been ill and away from home, they had built a railway and a bridge, but he had not known of it, and he said he had seen a row of houses rushing down a drain (ie a train going under the bridge). If one is being upset inside, one feels one’s whole inside is going to rush out, like it does down the lavatory plug – I get a feeling that if I start machining I shall get faster and faster – I shall lose control – very like running down a slope, you start all right and then you can’t stop yourself later and tobogganing.’

Here then is a cluster and in it are entangled a number of the patient’s phobias, sights, sounds, sensations, memories, conceptions and motor experiences, the whole highly charged with energy. All these factors and feelings are therefore interrelated, and the material of this picture recurred in other forms and was combined with other material in dreams and in Worlds. If space permitted, many examples of this sort could be given where the strongest feelings form part of the clusters.

To return for a moment to the upside-down faces of Chagall, one of the most striking features of the interrelation of clusters among themselves is the interchange of positions. Clusters are not arranged flat or vertically, but apparently in a massive clumped manner. Children (and also such adults, as have been studied so far) often attempt to arrange objects suspended in space above the World trays, and the relation between different Worlds of the same patient makes it clear that they are conceived plastically. Not only is this true, but confusion between the relation of glove and hand and that of ‘inside out’ with the ‘right way out’ also frequently occurs.

This leads to a consideration of the relation between the clusters: how is the whole system tied together and what is the dynamic quality? As far as it is possible to conclude from what has been observed, it would appear that energy invests the whole of the clusters of non-verbal thought but does so in an uneven fashion. Some clusters are very highly charged, some less so; and the question of what happens to this energy, and what part is played in the conscious life of the individual by the presence of these clusters depends on the relationship between them and another aspect of mental functioning. It seems that non-verbal mental activity begins with the infant’s first sensorial experience, while, at the same time, the child is also beginning to struggle to connect with and to understand the world that he shares with the rest of his surroundings. In other words, what we are describing is the common ground and study of all aspects of child development, about which a great deal is already known and there is nothing new to add here. As the child grows, they go through all the stages known to child psychology and shown especially by the beautiful and careful work of Gesell and his school. Through these processes the child gains mastery over his own body and gradually understands, in a practical way, how to master his environment. Later comes the supreme achievement of mankind, the ability to communicate with others, and with his own interior self, in language.

Thus, in every child, there are two types of mental functioning. The first is personal, idiosyncratic, massive and multidimensional, by its nature incommunicable in words to others. Parallel with the development of this goes the development of the second, which is reasonable, practical, governed by causality, shared with other people and to a large extent can be described through language. The first is non-rational, peculiarly constructed, entirely individual, and made up of groups of clusters which cannot later be separated by free association, all charged with undifferentiated energy. The second is shared, logical, reasonable, and uses language as its tool.

Now, the important point is that the products of this first non-verbal kind of thinking cannot, by their nature, appear in conscious thinking. Most people are, therefore, unaware of its existence and its contents are, in this sense, truly unconscious – for the simple reason that material such as this, in its crude state, is inexpressible in words. To discover the content of non-verbal thought material has to be made accessible to the patient in which constructions of this peculiar nature can be expressed. It is the absence of such material, which has prevented its discovery hitherto. Similarly, for the expression of music, instruments capable of producing certain types of sound must be available; and suitable stone must be available for the production of sculpture. It is interesting to meditate, for example, what would have been the fate of Prokofiev or Beethoven had they been born in Ancient Greece, or to Henry Moore if born in a desert of sand?

In collections of Mosaics made by workers as far apart as Sweden, Switzerland and central France, all the characteristics described above appear, and also in Worlds made in Sweden as in those made in this country.

For development to be normal, two things are essential. First of all, there is much in the content of non-verbal thought that is common to many different individuals and groups, and fairy tales, folklore, myth and fable embody many of these elements. As the Jungian school of analysis has shown, through enjoyment of these the energy that charges the clusters, which non-verbal thinking has brought into being, can find its way through to expression in the outside world.

The second necessity is adequate opportunity for the child to play and toleration of their play and their difficulties in adaptation by the adults around them. Gradually, the child corrects their interior concepts, through contact with external reality, and the energy with which the clusters are charged finds its way to expression in the outside world. If, however, this does not occur for any of the many reasons that can happen to a child, then four conditions may result and these correspond to the four main disabilities of the children we treat. First, the energy may remain locked up in the clusters. In this case, the child becomes listless and without interest, unable to put energy into any aspect of living; this child tends to be conventional, uninteresting as a character and under the domination of outside circumstances. Secondly, if the amount of energy is greater and more concentrated, with no outlet, then the energy, finding no way out, creates tensions and stresses within the body. Different conditions appear to be associated with different types of cluster; thus arise those asthmas, eczemas, catarrhs, convulsions, disturbances of digestion and sleep habits, and so on, in which no organic basis has been found. Thirdly, if, on the other hand, the child takes his clusters for reality and tries to see them in the outside world, they form the kernel of phobias, rituals and obsessions. And fourthly, if the child who cannot achieve a proper development of logical thought and a clear distinction between what is outside and what within, the outside world becomes for him mixed up with his inner life and his relationship with reality confused. According to the content of his clusters, he may become the dreamy detached child, the child who appears to be suffering from an early psychosis, or the neurotic delinquent. A single child may even, at different times, develop each of the four types of trouble, or different aspects may appear at one time or another in the treatment of a single individual.

In later life another fate may occur. Should the person experience a temporary breakdown in their adjustment to reality, the energy investing these products of non-verbal activity, of which the individual is unaware, may flood his personality bringing with it pieces of these clusters, which the person will now take for reality, the whole presenting some of the appearances we are familiar with in psychosis.

The study of non-verbal thought is only in its beginnings, and what has been set forth here are only some of the highlights of our observations and experience so far. It takes a full three years to train workers in the understanding of the nature of actual clusters in children and in the acquiring of adequate skill in the use of this knowledge in therapy. However, these scrappy notes, most inadequate to the vastness of the subject with which they attempt to cope, may have provided something to stimulate interest in this pregnant subject, and perhaps to form a basis for consideration of the part in psychotherapy that study of the early non-verbal activity of children can play.

NON-VERBAL THINKINGIN CHILD PSYCHOTHERAPY

by PHYLLIS M TRAILL and FRANCES H ROWLES

(June 1964)

This article puts forward the theories of Dr Margaret Lowenfeld on non-verbal thinking and its place in the psychotherapy of children. These theories arose out of detailed studies into the play of disturbed children.

A description is given of the playrooms at the Institute of Child Psychology, London, and of the play materials in them. There follows an account of certain techniques and of the apparatus devised by Lowenfeld for use in psychotherapy with children of all ages. Examples are given of the responses of children to these techniques.

It is shown how in the non-verbal ‘thought’ of small children, misconceptions can arise which may lead to social, emotional, intellectual or physical disturbances. This cause of disturbance is suggested as a further contribution, in addition to those already recognised in understanding the difficulties of children. The records at the Institute of Child Psychology are rich in examples of non-verbal thought, some of which are given in detail.

The externalising of these misconceptions by the child through his use of play material, and the unravelling of them forms an important part of psychotherapy at the Institute.

INTRODUCTION

It has been accepted for many years that emotional conflict occupies a central position in psychological disturbance. The terms ‘repression’, ‘Oedipus complex’ and ‘sibling rivalry’ have become part of the vocabulary of the psychotherapist. At the Institute, however, it is believed that although emotional conflict is an important cause of disturbance in children, whether this is physical, social, intellectual or emotional, it is not the only source. Equally important are the ideas and concepts that come into being in the mind of the infant and the young child from their personal experiences, and their mental processing of them as they try to reach an understanding. This paper focuses on the question of pre-verbal concepts and ideas. Emotional conflict as such, about which so much has already been written, will not be discussed except where it is inextricably bound up with pre-verbal misconceptions.

DEFINITIONS

In order to avoid misunderstanding, the following terms will be used in the sense defined in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1959):

Cognition: the action or faculty of knowing; knowledge; consciousness

Conceive: to take in and hold (primary notion); to take or admit into the mind; to form in the mind

Concept: the product of the faculty of conception

Feeling: the condition of being emotionally affected;

Capacity or readiness to feel: pleasurable or painful consciousness

Idea: any product or mental apprehension or activity existing in the mind as an object of knowledge or thought; a Thought: a conception; a notion

Phantasy or fantasy: an illusory appearance; delusive imagination

Think: to conceive in the mind; to form in the mind; to exercise the mind; to form connected ideas in the mind.

BASIC THEORY

The Institute of Child Psychology was founded by Dr Margaret Lowenfeld in 1928 for the purpose of treating disturbed children whose parents were unable to afford specialist fees, through the study of their spontaneous activities in a play situation. As this was an entirely new field, she made a thorough study of the play materials available at that time in several countries in Europe and from these a selection was assembled for experimental use in the playrooms of the Institute. Detailed studies were made of what the children did with the play opportunities and the material offered. Connections were observed and the attention of the children was drawn to them, but comparatively few interpretations were offered.[5] Gradually the hypothesis was formulated that certain play sequences were a form of non-verbal thinking and that the child was using the material to think, in an attempt to come to an understanding of his sensory and emotional experiences.

The hypothesis upon which a great deal of the work of the Institute is based is a simple one: namely, that the early concepts formed by the infant and young child about himself, the workings of his body and the world around him, can be incorrect and disturbing. The results of his mental work upon these concepts can be incorrect and can lead to painful feelings. For example, a boy born into a musical family developed the misconception that everyone enjoys listening. He himself did not; he enjoyed visual pleasures. The mental work he did upon this gave rise to the idea that he was ‘no good’ and led to much unhappiness.

These early misconceptions may be compared with erroneous beliefs held in the past about the Earth and the sun. For example, it was believed that the Earth was flat and that the sun travelled round it. These beliefs were based on inferences made from immediate observations, arising partly due to the lack of the scientific instruments necessary for testing the truth of hypotheses and partly due to insufficient evidence.

PLAY MATERIAL

Since Lowenfeld’s theories on the non-verbal thought of children developed out of the specific techniques that she designed, the latter must be described. It is widely agreed that spoken language is not the natural medium of expression of the young child. Older children may be verbally fluent but the difficulties for which they are referred to the Institute very often date back to the pre-verbal stage and cannot be expressed at all easily in words. The first task, therefore, was to find substances and material objects by means of which the child could externalise their thoughts and feelings. Gradually a variety of items were collected according to the expressed needs of the children, until the Institute had a large ‘vocabulary’ of play material with which the children are able to ‘talk’. These items are distributed among six separate rooms, each opening into a corridor. Each room is equipped to serve a particular purpose. The two main playrooms communicate with each other and lead out into the garden. The physical activity room is soundproofed and fitted with clothes for dressing up, rudimentary gymnastic equipment and a large box with a lid, which moves on wheels and is large enough for a child to curl up in. At the end of the corridor are two tiled rooms with slightly sloping floors, bulkhead lamps and equipment for large-scale water play and wall painting.

The play material falls into the following categories:

- Materials for the expression of ideas and feelings: The Lowenfeld World apparatus[6] consists of zinc-lined trays containing sand and cabinets of miniature objects within reach. These trays may be placed on tables of any height and in each tray the sand may be dry or damp. Water may be added to the latter according to the wish of the child. The miniature figures and objects in the cabinets are generally used in the sand tray to make a three-dimensional picture. These small toys include people of all kinds, civilian and military, ‘cowboys and Indians’, historical, fictional and entertaining characters. There are houses, all kinds of vehicles, boats, machines and road signs. There are animals, wild and domestic; trees, hedges, garden objects, farm equipment; furniture, and amorphous materials such as sticks, planks, pipes and funnels, plasticine and small dishes. Anything that is in the playroom may be used in the sand trays, if desired by any child. The term “World” came spontaneously into use in 1930 to describe the children’s use of this material.

- Drawing and painting materials: These are also used to express ideas and feelings, but in such materials only two-dimensional pictures can be produced, a certain amount of skill is needed, and it is difficult to convey the idea of movement. On the other hand, fantastic images and mythological and nightmare figures may be more effectively portrayed through drawings and paintings.

- Clothes for dressing up and acting are provided and glove puppets for those who prefer to express themselves in this way. Doll’s houses and miniature dolls come under this heading and the large chest.

- Water play: The play materials and opportunities for activity in the Water Room further extend the range of expressive possibilities.

- Sensory experience: Opportunities are provided for obtaining and developing sensory experience with sand and water, plasticine, clay, paint powder or other substances. There is a full-sized baby bottle and cot, and a child may lie in the chest described above and experience the sensation of being enclosed and moved around.

- Experimental play: This may be carried out with almost anything, but the materials most frequently used are water, pipes and containers, paints in the Paint Room where experiments with colour may be carried out in saucers or on tiled walls; and the sand tray with dry or mouldable sand or water.

- Family and domestic activities: For these there are doll’s houses and dolls, cots, a doll’s pram, cuddly animal toys, cooking equipment, china and cutlery and a small strong house, which the child may play in, climb over or hide in, and which is large enough to include the therapist, if desired.

- School games: These can be played with chalk and blackboards, paper, books and pencils.

- Construction: There are a variety of constructive materials covering a wide range of skill and perseverance, including materials for woodwork and bricks of different shapes and sizes.

- Outlets for aggression: A supply of undamaged but used tins is kept on hand with a wooden mallet for flattening them. There are skittles, conkers, toy guns and carpentry tools that may be used destructively on old pieces of wood kept for the purpose. The hose in the Water Room is often used as a weapon, directed on to wall paintings or toys. Materials that can be made into grotesque animals and people provide a means of expressing aggression through laughter [grotesque humour], which can lead to overt aggression. Although aggression is expressed through many different materials, children are not allowed to hurt anyone or themselves, or to damage the playroom furniture and fittings. All this material is included because of its cathartic value.

- Outlets for energy: There is a large, comparatively empty room with a small amount of gymnastic equipment and also a garden with a tree that may be climbed by the more daring children. The Water Room equipped with hoses, squirts and other water toys also comes under this category.

- Opportunities for sound: One of the rooms contains drums and simple musical instruments.

TECHNIQUES

At the entire basement of the Institute, which opens into the garden, is devoted to children and therapists; the only other adults admitted being occasional visitors. The children, each accompanied by a therapist, may move freely between the seven playrooms to use the material they need. In this way, psychotherapy is carried out in the open, with other children and therapists in sight, rather than privately in separate small rooms. It has been found in practice that this procedure has certain advantages for the children; for example, inhibited children are encouraged to express themselves by the sight of others and older children are encouraged to relax and indulge in activities that they might otherwise have considered too childish. This method is also of great value in the training of psychotherapy students, who are able in this way to see therapists at work and to observe how they handle different children in various situations. Conversely, members of staff are able to see the students at work and are, therefore, better able to help them when discussing the written reports. Students are also able to start working with children earlier in their training than they would be if they were to work unobserved in single rooms.

The first two sessions of treatment consist of the following approach, which is adapted to the age of the child. The child is presented with the Lowenfeld Mosaic Test[7] and asked to make something with it. Over the years this has proved a valuable indicator of the type of disturbance present in the child, and its depth and severity. The therapist then explains the function of the Institute, which leads to a discussion about the difficulties for which the child has been referred. The role of the Institute as a bridge between the child and the adults around him is explained to them through a diagram. It is pointed out that there is always a difference between the child’s point of view and that of adults, and that the Institute bridges that gap. The child is told that the basement is for children and the therapists who work with them, and that nothing they say or do will be reported to anyone else without their permission, but that the therapist will sometimes discuss with the child what their parents and others say about them.

The therapist explains to the child how playing with the materials at the Institute is going to help them with their difficulties. It is explained to him that the children in the play rooms are really making pictures in various ways. The value of making signs for the expression of ideas when people do not speak the same language is discussed. After this by getting the child to work out the meaning of some comic strips that have no words and by getting him to find obvious and hidden meanings in some advertisement pictures, the therapist tells the child that everything they do in the playrooms is of significance and has a meaning which he and the therapist, together, will try to discover. It is pointed out that non-verbal thought exists in all of us and can be expressed more easily in pictures than in words, that we all have pictures in our heads about ourselves and other people with feelings we have about them. They then discuss how the symptoms for which the child has been referred are a sort of picture of half-understood ideas and emotions, and that when these have been expressed and looked at and resolved, the symptoms should improve. In this way a reality situation is created for the child which forms a platform from which they can launch out to try new ways of expressing their problems, conflicts, impulses, misconceptions and so on.

Since children under the age of six or seven naturally express themselves through play, they need scarcely any introduction to the idea that play is a language. Children over this age, however, have already begun to move away from the use of play towards that of words. As they go through school, increasing emphasis is placed on the use of words for communication of ideas and emotions. The older child has to be brought back to the idea that play has a meaning and is not just a pleasant pastime. The explanation is made in words to the child’s present day self in order to gain cooperation and understanding and to let him know that the therapist realises that much of their experience cannot adequately be expressed verbally.

After this explanation the child is asked to make a ‘World’ in the sand tray. This first World can be of the greatest importance because frequently it is a presentation of several aspects of the child’s problem simultaneously. Should this happen, these aspects are generally taken up one by one as they arise later in the treatment. Certain children, having made a ‘World’, will go on to present their problems through other materials also. The following three examples of play were carried out immediately after a talk on picture-thinking; they are cited here to show the sort of responses children make to this explanation.

RALPH, aged nine, IQ[8] of 84, was referred for severe phobias. He started with the following ‘World’ (see Figure 1). He made a square wall of sand inside of which were soldiers with cannons and a very tall thick post which he said was a flagpole. Fierce animals surrounded the wall trying to break in. One soldier was about to be jumped on from behind by a huge ape. Ralph seemed to be on the side of the soldiers building up defences. Later he made the animals break in and with much drama they gobbled up all the soldiers and overturned the guns and the flagpole. Ralph was smiling a little and appeared to be on the side of the animals now.

Figure 1

After this he moved on to play with puppets. There was a king and queen whose daughter had run away from home; on the order of her father she was pursued, captured and thrown into prison. She was released and captured again. The crocodile was said to bite her head off. There was a young man who had a cat. A witch came and changed the cat into a Siamese cat. She changed the young man into another person – Punch from the Punch and Judy puppets. Neither the young man nor the cat had wished to be changed into someone else but they could not help themselves. They went to the palace to tell the king all about it and the king killed the witch.

Ralph has a 12-year-old brother who was born with anomalous sex organs and has been in hospital for several operations ‘to turn him into a boy’. There has been much talk and anxiety in the family about this. The operations have been successful, but the brother has been left with a penis that is smaller than normal.

These two pieces of play show that Ralph, in spite of his appearance, has a great deal of violent aggression within him and that he enjoys finding a safe outlet for it, but also that he is very much afraid of its destructive force. The emphasis on the flagpole may indicate that he has a fear that his masculinity may be destroyed, and here, his brother’s small penis and numerous operations must be remembered. Then he goes on to show that he is concerned with the question of femininity and masculinity, and a young man being changed from one person into another. He has given his therapist a good indication of the matters, which will have to be dealt with later in treatment.

OLGA, aged 12, with an IQ of 111, was referred for a fear that her food might be poisoned, that she might develop a disease, and that the world might come to an end at any moment. She was enuretic and indulged in antisocial behaviour. Her first ‘World’ (see Figure 2) was divided into five sections by fences, without gates. The sections contained the following scenes:

1. A woman setting off on holiday about to board a train

2. Boys watching men ski down a mountain wishing that they also could do this

3. A sailor who had been left by the captain of a cabin cruiser to swab down the deck; swimming along the river was a mother duck followed by her ducklings

4. Two cows about to be milked by a woman, while another woman forked hay that would be used for winter food for the cows. Nearby are milk churns and food troughs. The boss, who is a woman, is watching to see that they do their work properly

5. Outside a butcher’s shop a girl who had been told to push the baby in a pram was playing instead; next door to the shop was a restaurant.

Figure 2

Here, several themes have been simultaneously presented in what is technically described as a fragmented ‘World’. Later in treatment they were elaborated separately. These are:

- Setting out for a new place

- The wish to be able to control her energy

- The great importance of food

- Feeling that she is ordered to carry out tasks by an all-powerful boss-woman;

- Her desire to avoid looking after her baby sister

- The dependence of children on their mother.

JEREMY, aged 14, IQ of 132, was referred for an inability to express himself in words; his words tended to become all jumbled up, although he had no stammer. He made a car park in the sand tray (see Figure 3), which included a place where cars were lined up for sale. Cars and lorries were each kept in their own lines. In the centre of the area were a man and woman being shown a car by a salesman, who was about to open its bonnet for them to look inside at the engine. This is a static picture but there is potential movement and force in it.

Figure 3

Having made this world, Jeremy went to the paint room where he painted on the wall a most dramatic picture of an airfield with runways and a store of guided missiles. There was a terrific fire on the airfield with an enormous amount of smoke caused by a bomb dropped from an aeroplane overhead. This plane had been hit by a guided missile and was producing a trail of smoke and flames. Other enemy planes were approaching and guided missiles were travelling through the air towards them (see Figure 4).

Figure 4

Jeremy was described as a boy unable to stick up for himself who was being bullied a great deal. This first treatment session produced what appeared to be good pictures of his internal situation. He has plenty of energy but he is not able to allow it to flow out through the usual boyish activities, because he fears that if he relaxes his grip it will emerge in a dreadful explosion, which he feels will be enormously destructive. This would seem to be linked with his inability to allow words to flow smoothly. An out-flowing of words and an out-flowing of energy are both impossible for him.

After these preliminary interviews, the child is shown all the playrooms with their varied materials and throughout treatment they are generally allowed to choose their occupations. Sometimes, however, it is found necessary to guide them for a time. Because the child makes his productions without full cognitive awareness of what he is doing, the therapist always makes him aware of what he is actually doing without comment on its possible significance at this stage. This procedure is accepted by the children and does not restrict the spontaneity of their activities. This ‘making aware’ applies as much to the expression of feelings as it does to the expression of concepts. After the end of a session, any ‘Worlds’ made by the child are drawn by the therapist and a record is thus obtained. At times it is useful to study with the child a series of “Worlds” made by him over a period. The child is enabled in this way to see how he has expressed and developed the thoughts and feelings, which occupy him.

Together the child and the therapist work on the meaning of the objects used. Interpretations are offered only when the child seems ready for them and when he can understand how they are related to the actual play that has preceded them. Frequently during the early stages of treatment, the child’s productions are confused and obscure. At this stage the therapist merely points out what the child is doing, and draws the child’s attention to any repetitions and similarities from previous sessions. Movement, its force and direction are commented on, and also the shapes and placement of objects can be pointed out and perhaps their relationship to each other. In this way the therapist is helping the child to look at and to sort out his confused ideas and feelings. The following two examples illustrate this.

HILDA, aged six, IQ of 111, was referred for feeling sick and for fears at night. She went to a tray of sand and said she wanted to use the crane, but picked up the large bridge and put it across the tray. She made a line down the middle saying it was a river, and asked for water. She scooped out two oblong spaces, the one on the left being the larger. This was a swimming pool for adults and the smaller one was for children. She made a little place in each ‘for you to wash your feet’. She poured water into them and then made a mound with a pointed top where the children’s pool had been. She then made all the sand into one big mound. She flattened the sand, played about with it, enjoying the feel of it and then made a pattern of hollows on each side of a central ridge.

While material such as this is being presented, all that is said to the child is something like the following: ‘Oh, I see, you have used the bridge instead of the crane. Yes, there is a separate pool for grown-ups and another for children. You made a pool going down that way and now there is a mound going up this way (indicating with gestures). Now it is all one big mound and now it is flat.’

GEORGE, aged nine, has an IQ of 130, but was quite unable to learn at school. His attainments were not yet at a six year old level. He made a mound of sand in the middle of the tray, which he said was an island (see Figure 5).

Figure 5

He made another island to one side and there were more in the corners. These were linked by bridges to the central island. He put an aircraft carrier in dry dock on the island to one side. There was a battleship on an island in a corner and there were boats and lorries distributed around the tray on islands or in the river. At one point he must have noticed that the cars were in the river because he said that ‘they’ would have to take the water away in tankers to a place where there wasn’t any water and the river had all dried up. Next the bulldozer scooped away the sand in the bottom left hand corner. This, he decided, was not an island but a bit of wasteland, and he added the scooped-up sand to the central island, making it smooth so that people would not trip. He now got the harvester and pushed it around and around, churning up the sand; the bulldozer took the sand away. Another corner island was removed and the centre island was joined to the one at the side; a bridge connected the summits of each. George remarked that his bridge was private on top and public underneath. He moved various cars and ships over the bridge and down on to the flat part of the tray. The lawnmower was introduced to move the sand. He said this was the old way they used to do it but it wasn’t so good. The harvester was the new way and it was better, cheaper to buy and quicker. He took a bridge and pushed it through the central island and was very thrilled when a beautiful tunnel resulted. In the end, all the cars, ships and machines were lying about the tray in disorder.

It must be emphasised again that at this stage the therapist gives no explanation or interpretation. At this early stage of treatment it is only possible to make the child aware of what they are doing. Gradually, the child works through to a point where their play is less obscure and confused and its meaning becomes clearer to the therapist while the child himself seems almost to have reached an understanding of it. Hilda and George had reached this stage in later examples of their play – see section on ‘Non-verbal thinking’. Not until this later stage are interpretations tentatively offered. For this the child must also have arrived at a state of emotional readiness for interpretation. At this point the therapist must rely on their experience and intuition in deciding whether or not this is so. If their interpretation is correct, the child’s ensuing play will be modified and other aspects will appear; younger children will generally respond through play rather than in words. Some children will ask questions in connection with what the therapist has been saying after which new themes will appear in their play.

With older children a short discussion of symbolism is sometimes useful before interpretation of their material. The child is asked if they know what a symbol is and the therapist will explain how one thing can stand for another because of qualities shared by both, and that children sometimes use symbols to think with. This discussion helps the child to see how interpretations given to them relate directly to their productions.

Interpretations are not made in any routine order. The therapist follows the activities of each individual child. If infantile experiences are being worked out early in treatment, and the child seems ready, interpretations are offered. Another child may start with more recent material and work back to early experiences. Resistance to interpretation does at times occur, but it has not been found at the Institute, in the majority of cases, to be a serious and lasting problem. (This is too wide a subject to be dealt with here.)

If the interpretation is incorrect the child will either calmly say so or will continue the same play that has led the therapist to make the interpretation, or may break off this form of play and attempt to express the same theme through different material.

STANDARD SEQUENCES

As previously stated, the activities of children were closely studied and analysed before the techniques described above were developed. Observers were struck by the fact that in children of widely different ages, and with different symptoms, certain sequences of play tended to recur. For convenience in reference, these have been termed ‘standard sequences’. It must be understood that this term does not apply to types of play involving things such as ‘cowboys and Indians’, farm scenes and so on, which are common features of all children’s play, but to certain play sequences that would appear to have no meaning or content to the casual observer or would be dismissed perhaps as toddler play. Instead, what has been found is that almost exactly the same sequences of movement and use of objects can appear in the play of children of all ages, such as the creation and manipulation of mounds and tunnels, perhaps with the addition of water, or of water and pipes, or of moving ‘World’ objects. Three of the ‘standard sequences’ can be seen as follows:

1. A child plays with water and hoses: The child notices how the water flows, what starts it and what stops it, and spend time experimenting with this. They make water systems with pipes, siphons and containers, keeping the water flowing, and very likely they end up by making a closed circuit where the water that comes out at the end of the system is put back in at the beginning, so that the same water goes round continually. Here, the child is studying the fact of movement, up and down, along and around, and also controlling it. Sometimes dry sand is used instead of water for the same purpose.

2. Transporting and dumping: A child plays with a train consisting of a string of trucks or a tug pulling a string of barges. They experiment with putting a malleable substance such as damp sand into the trucks and then moving the train along. They then turn out the substance into an amorphous mass upon the floor, and go back and repeat the sequence.

3. Tunnelling in sand: A child makes a mound with mouldable sand. They tunnel through the base of the mound from one side to the other, then straight down through the mound from top to bottom. The solidity of the mound is penetrated by openings that become hollow passages inside it. There follows movement through the tunnels: the child blows through or runs traffic or water through and out. The solidity of the mound is sometimes emphasised by putting a road or a moat around it.

These standard sequences include a great deal of experimental play and seem also to embody some aspect of early psycho-physical experiences. They are not carried out by all children, but children of any age or degree of intelligence or type of difficulty may develop them. Careful records have been kept not only of all these forms of play but also of the development that takes place out of them in each individual child. The following case studies provide examples of standard sequences.

RALPH, aged nine, who has already been referred to above, connected a small funnel to a pipe and on the other end of the pipe he put a large funnel. Holding the small funnel high, he poured dry sand into it and let it run down the pipe into the large funnel. This large funnel was placed over a pile of cylinders that were open at both ends. He listened to the noise made by the sand pouring down the pipe and was delighted to find that the pipe was split and that he could hold it apart and actually see the sand pouring down inside. He noticed that the cylinders at the bottom, inside the large funnel, did not fill properly so he took the funnel off and found that the sand was escaping through the spaces between the cylinders. He placed the large sieve on the sand tray and poured dry sand through it into the space underneath. He lifted up the sieve to see how much sand had gone and found a little mound. He opened several boxes on the shelves and looked inside. He went to another room and climbed to the top of the wall bars with a football under his arm. He then let the ball run down the slide from the top of the wall bars to the floor, then he himself slid down.

CONRAD, aged 11, IQ of 170, was referred to us for crying easily and for stealing money. Putting sand in at the top of the funnels and allowing it to run down through the spouts into the sand tray, he tried to discover through which funnel the sand ran faster. He could not understand why it ran faster through the smaller one because the openings were apparently the same size. He asked the therapist to time how long it took for the large funnel to empty. He guessed how many fillings of the small one would be needed to fill the large one. He placed the large one upside down on the tray and let the sand pour down into it through its upturned spout from the small funnel held above. He knocked the large funnel and noticed that the level of sand inside it became lower and he wondered where the sand had gone. He filled the space inside the large funnel full.

Now we will look at two sequences, carried out by children of very different ages, concern transporting and dumping.

ADRIAN, aged five, IQ of 114 (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Form A), who would not speak except at home, filled a large van with damp sand, shut its doors and pushed it along into another room where he opened it and placed bits of flat wood on the surface of the sand in the van, pressing them down slightly and closing the doors. He pushed the van along and finally dumped its contents in a heap of sand and bits of wood all mixed up together.

ERNEST, aged 13, IQ of 144, referred for headaches, vomiting and enuresis. He put a full sand tray onto a trolley and pushed it along the passage into another room. There he loaded some of the sand into a large tip-up lorry and transported it back to the first room, where he tipped it out into a heap in an empty sand tray. This was repeated until all the sand had been taken back. Each time the lorry was unloaded the therapist had to sign delivery notes to prove that he had received delivery. His sequence had elaborations, which that of the little boy lacked.

DENNIS, aged 7½, IQ of 117, carried out the following sequence in connection with a mound of almost dry sand. He built it high, flattened the top and set a spinning top going on it, which made a little dent at the top. He scooped out a hole where the dent was, using a teaspoon and then enlarged it with a desert spoon. Having made a perfect hole he got a jug of water and poured spoonfuls of it into the hole. He said that it would make it easier to get the rest of the sand out from the inside of the mound. He dug the sand out from the bottom. He then proceeded to wet the outside of the mound with spoonfuls of water and the therapist had to pat it to make it harder. He now had a hole down through the mound, which came out at the bottom to one side. He pushed a pipe in at the bottom, which came out at the top. On this top end of the tube he fixed a funnel into which he poured water, which gurgled inside the mound and came out at the bottom end through the pipe.

Standard sequences tend to appear in the play of older children once treatment is well established. In younger children such sequences can be encountered straightaway because experimenting with substances and movement, and so on, are part of the normal play of small children.

NON-VERBAL THINKING

What strikes the observer in relation to these standard sequences is the intense concentration shown by the children carrying them out, even by those who have been specifically referred from school for an inability to concentrate. Prolonged observation of these sequences has led to the formulation of the hypothesis that they represent a kind of thinking that differs in form and content from adult thought. That is to say, the child is reproducing through these activities phenomena that were, in most cases, first experienced at a very young age. Having reproduced the phenomena, and having experienced them again, the child is now experimenting with them and thinking about them in a multidimensional non-verbal way in order to arrive at understanding of them. There is a universal need to understand the world around us, and our relationship to it. This process continues throughout life. The therapist is able to help by pointing out exactly what is happening and what the child is doing, linking this at the appropriate moment with the child’s own personal experiences, which are to a large extent bodily ones. The child, using his now increased knowledge of the world, is enabled to arrive at generally accurate concepts.

It is practically impossible to express non-verbal problems adequately in words, but it is possible to express them through the manipulation of suitable materials. These materials are provided in the playrooms and the use children make of them will be described in detail later. Provided the therapist is familiar with the characteristics peculiar to non-verbal thought, they are able to help the child to sort out their early misconceptions and point out how the emotions and conflicts in connection with them have arisen. Misconceptions can produce strong emotions; when these misconceptions are sorted out, the emotions that have been caught up in them are freed to find other more productive channels.

One of the ways in which non-verbal thought differs from cognitive thought is that it is non-linear. All aspects of a problem are interwoven in a child’s mind forming a closely-knit network. There is no coherent sequence. In a child, bodily sensations and emotions are inextricably mixed with their mental activity. While thinking of an experience a child will feel again the emotions originally aroused in connection with that experience, and this is accompanied by actual bodily sensation. For an adult, on the other hand, it is possible to sit back and think things out in a logical, detached way in the light of wider experience and knowledge of the self, keeping in mind and comparing memories of similar experiences either in the individual’s own life or in that of others known to him.

In the experience of very young children, space and time are not clearly defined. Things that happened at different times may become telescoped together if they have produced similar sensations or emotions. Objects may also become linked in a child’s mind because of certain common qualities. The child may then see the objects as identical and may attribute to one of them qualities that really belong to the other. Things that are opposites to the adult mind can seem to be the same thing to a child. They may be aware of a movement through a container, but whether this is inwards or outwards is immaterial. Drinking and urinating can appear to him to be the same thing. An example of this was a boy playing with water and pipes who was given a funnel. Delighted he asked, ‘Is that a sucker?’ In fact, of course, the funnel was the thing to be sucked and the boy himself was the sucker. In this case opposites have become the same.

Non-verbal thought is multi-dimensional. For example, a child thinking of liquids flowing, in and out, can feel in his body the appropriate sensations[9]; they may also experience emotions and conflicts about the subject simultaneously. It is, therefore, necessary to provide multidimensional material for the expression of this type of thinking. Play material should have height and depth, an interior and an exterior, and be capable of expressing movement and of reflecting the child’s sensations and emotions. Much of the Institute’s play material has been chosen because it satisfies all these requirements; for example, water room equipment, World materials, the small house and mobile containers. The standard sequences with mounds and other objects, as described earlier, could not be carried out by a child with paper and pencil. An articulate adult might be able to convey some of the meaning in words, but he would have to resort to picture analogy to describe it all.

It must be remembered that the major portion of this non-verbal thinking is concerned with experiences that have actually happened in the individual’s past life. Therefore, to understand the productions of a child fully, it is necessary to have obtained a detailed history of his life from infancy up to the present. Certain play activities would be unintelligible to the therapist without this knowledge, as will be seen in some of the examples below.

Clusters of ideas and sensations can be bound together by emotion, all representing a dynamic personal experience. A subsequent new experience that possesses some characteristic of the original one can bring out the whole cluster with its associated emotions and sensations. If these are painful or suggest danger, they may hamper a child’s development. The unravelling of this type of cluster through therapy enables the child to detach his emotions from inappropriate objects and to understand how the emotions arose and to find other outlets for them.

The mental work done by the child on his early experiences can lead to misconceptions, which the child accepts as fact because he cannot know what is real and what is not. They cannot compare new experiences with past ones because they have not yet lived long enough to gain sufficient experiences to do so. They have no words with which to communicate with others and so they cannot check the truth of their conceptions with other people, such as their parents. Erroneous beliefs, therefore, can remain as a core of the child’s unconscious assumptions and through these assumptions mould his implicit outlook and reactions. Making these assumptions and the emotions connected with them explicit, unravelling and readjusting them forms a major part of therapy at the Institute of Child Psychology.

Sigmund Freud postulated what he calls a ‘primitive thought activity’ in the infant, which is set in motion by a wish, that is, ‘a current’ in the psychical apparatus, starting at displeasure and aiming towards pleasure.[10] ‘The first wishing seems to have been an hallucinatory cathecting of the memory of satisfaction.’ There is a ‘primitive state’ in which wishing ends in hallucinating, providing temporary satisfaction. The aim was the free discharge of quantities of excitation. Freud calls this primitive thought activity the ‘primary process’ and goes on to state that it is the ‘germ of what, in a fully developed (mental) apparatus’ is the unconscious.

The non-verbal mental activity described in this paper includes the Primary Process, but the gaining of satisfaction of somatic needs and the free discharge of accumulated excitation form only a part. Mental activity at the non-verbal level seems also to be the result of a need for knowledge – a need to find out about things. One could say that the child has an urge to move from the displeasure of a state of confusion and ignorance to the pleasure of acquiring knowledge and, through it, mastery. Non-verbal thought is not always unconscious in the sense in which this word is used by psychoanalysts, but whether conscious or not it is largely inexpressible in words. It is not regarded as the ‘germ of the unconscious’, but rather as the source of creative ideas.

Otto Fenichel, who sets out more recent views on the primary process, considers it to be a form of thinking: ‘This thinking according to the primary process seems to be directed only by the striving for discharge and is remote from any logic.’[11] ‘It is carried out more through pictorial concrete images whereas the secondary process is based more on words.’ It tolerates and condenses contradiction. ‘Similarities are not distinguished from identities.’ ‘The ego and the non-ego are not yet separated.’ ‘Symbolism operates automatically. It is part of the primal pre-logical thinking.’ The Institute agrees with Fenichel’s views on symbolism. It follows from the fact that the ego and non-ego are not yet separated that symbolism cannot be the result of repression. In non-verbal thinking symbolism is a part of the process: symbols are tools used by the child to think with.

As previously stated, contradictions are found in non-verbal thinking but these are not looked upon as being ‘tolerated’ by the child. They do not see them as contradictions in the way an adult would. Movements up and down are the same thing to a child because it is the movement itself that first gains the child’s attention, rather than the direction in which the movement is going. From a baby’s horizontal position the latter is of small importance.

Fenichel states that the primary process is less suited to objective judgement because it is unorganised, ruled by the emotions, and hence full of ‘wishful, fearful misconceptions’. Non-verbal thinking, as described in this paper, is full of misconceptions, but there is a difference of opinion about their cause. At the Institute these misconceptions are attributed to the lack of experience of young children. Non-verbal thinking is regarded as organised and as having a logic of its own. New things are related to something already experienced that possesses similar qualities and the behaviour of the known thing is expected in the new one. For example, a child noticed that a more modern steam engine, which goes faster, has a smaller funnel, so he thought that the smaller the funnel, the faster the engine would go.

The hypothesis, therefore, is put forward that this ‘primitive thought-activity’ is carried out more through concrete images than in words, but is nevertheless a form of thinking. Freud put forward the view that the driving force behind non-verbal thinking is the striving for discharge of accumulated excitation. We do not suggest that such striving does not occur, but that concentrated work with concrete images, as described above, derives its force mainly from the urgent desire of human beings to win understanding of their material environment and through it to obtain mastery, which is a positive aim. This hypothesis is in agreement with that of Stott in his study of the behaviour of his son from birth to 18 months.[12] The behaviour studied was that which ‘seemed to serve no immediate organic or social end’. He writes, ‘The child continuously appraised his environment for the possibilities it offered for establishing new and progressive relationships of effectiveness.’

The records kept at the Institute are rich in illustrations of this form of non-verbal mental activity, as the following examples show.

HILDA, aged six, is one of the two children whose confused play sessions early in treatment have already been described. Prior to the three sessions she had made a series of Worlds concerned with houses, mounds and tunnels, after which she had shown an unwillingness to come to the Institute. However, she was brought by her mother and the following play session took place. Using a wooden spoon she scattered sand on the floor, hid some in the doll’s house, put some on chairs and threw some at the walls; she then asked if it were time to go home. She made impressions in the sand with the spoon saying these were eggs. The therapist talked about how eggs are inside hens rather like babies inside their mothers. Hilda asked if cocks ever had eggs and how they could get seeds inside the hens without a penis. She wondered about the faeces of cocks and hens. She said that sometimes she thought we had two tongues. The therapist agreed that what we have down (genitals) there is rather like a tongue. Hilda said that she liked feeling hers. She asked what the hole in your middle is called and this led to a discussion about babies and their feeding in the womb and breastfeeding. Hilda said that she had never had breastfeeding or a bottle and that is why she has a bottle now.

Hilda buried a conker in the sand, which led to a discussion about hard and soft faeces. She said that she had had medicine from a doctor and had had to tell her mother each time whether her faeces were hard or soft. Each time she buried a conker she made two breast-like mounds and the therapist had to guess inside which mound the conker was. The therapist talked about the conker being rather like a bit of faeces and the rounded mound like a breast, and suggested that Hilda put the conker inside the mound because she thought of faeces being inside the breast. The therapist then explained that faeces and breasts are in reality quite separate from each other in the body. Next Hilda told the therapist to go into another room; on her return she told the therapist to sit on a chair on which had been placed a thick layer of damp sand. The child was delighted, then suddenly ran to the lavatory and defecated.

At the next session, Hilda went straight to the sand, asking for the wooden spoon and conkers. She hid four for the therapist to find and made an egg mark over each one so that they could easily be found. She made a pattern consisting of five round lumps of sand, inside which the therapist was to think the conkers were, but they were not. Then the therapist reminded Hilda about the idea of faeces perhaps being inside the breasts, as discussed in the previous session, and commented that Hilda now seemed to be suggesting that faeces were eggs or might be in the egg. Some children think of faeces as eggs inside people, which they lay. Hilda made a large mound with four egg marks on it. In front of it there were four small mounds, each with an egg mark. Between the small mounds she put a conker and she made a wedding cake with four layers on the large mound, and then knocked it down. She filled moulds and put a piece of sand in the centre of each.

These were cakes for the therapist, which were poisonous, but the therapist was not to know this. After the therapist had ‘eaten’ each cake, Hilda said she had disappeared. There were apples in two of the cakes; one lot were poison for the therapist, the other lot were OK for children. One cake had a tablet in it that was good for the therapist but tasted horrid. Hilda now became a doctor who gave the therapist things that were good for her but tasted nasty. She said they were medicine because ‘the brown stuff won’t come out’. She turned out moulds but each time some sand was left inside. In response to a magic carried out by Hilda it all came out. The therapist said that this was like what the medicine caused to happen to Hilda, and she agreed. Hilda said she didn’t want to go home and that she liked coming to the Institute now. At the third session, Hilda was much more lively. She poured a little water into the sand and gave the therapist a dish containing mushy sand. Then she moved the sand about with her hands, using free, spontaneous movements without any of her previous deliberateness. She told the therapist to eat up all the sand in the dish. It was poison and the therapist was to know this; Hilda said to the therapist, ‘I am your mother.’ The therapist was to get an awful pain but it would get better.

In this example, the child’s anxiety and fear is clear when she is expressing her cluster of confused ideas, emotions and sensations, as is her relief and pleasure once she has done so. Ideas concerning faeces, eggs, breasts, milk, babies, gender, tongues, clitoris and poison are all bound together in a network in Hilda’s mind. Added to this is a feeling of deprivation about a lack of breastfeeding and also a fear of being made to eat something that would cause her physical pain, empty her body of faeces, and perhaps make her disappear altogether. The relationship between child and mother also features, with the mother as all-powerful and menacing and the child is at her mercy. While Hilda is working out her confusions, her body is bound up with her mental activity: when demonstrating her interest in faeces, she suddenly has the urge to defecate.

This account shows how Hilda was ready to accept an interpretation from the therapist in these three sessions. She responded by asking questions and expressing further ideas. Hilda’s case study provides a good example of the non-linear aspect of non-verbal thinking. The topic of faeces, eggs, food and so on are not dealt with each in turn. The topics revolve round and round, appearing and reappearing in various ways. Also, Hilda has linked in her mind two elements of bodily function – faeces and eggs – because they share certain qualities such as sensitivity to touch and the fact that they are little moving things inside bodily cavities. The whole cluster is strongly charged with emotions including curiosity, fear, feelings of deprivation, desire to compensate for the deprivation, and general anxiety.

ROBERT, aged nine, referred for a fear of ghosts, played with the sand tray in the following way. He rigged up an apparatus with two funnels whose spouts were joined by a pipe. He placed a tin that was open at each end in the wheelbarrow on the floor. Over the tin he placed a small funnel upside down. The large funnel he held high in the air. He put sand into the large funnel and listened to it running down the pipe into the small funnel and the tin. When the small funnel and the tin were full, he reversed the apparatus. He thought that the pouring sand was like water and said, ‘Our pipes at school are busted.’ He told the therapist that this was due to the weather and that they would be mended. He went to a tray of damp sand and made a sort of mound that looked to him like an animal, so he made a tail and then a head with sand for it. He said that it was a jungle animal that became fierce only when people shoot at it. He turned the animal shape into a hill and dug in with his fingers from each side until they met in the middle, making a tunnel. He pushed a car through the tunnel and up on to the summit of the hill. He said that the driver of the car was the first man ever to get to the top. He did the same with a second car, which crashed into the first one on purpose and both went rolling down the hill. Next he drove a large lorry up the hill, but it was so heavy that the hill collapsed taking the lorry with it.

He made another hill with a long tunnel through it and pushed five racing cars through and up to the top of the hill, one after the other. One of them was Blue Bird, the world’s fastest car.[13] ‘Blue Bird’ came down the hill and went charging about at ground level; Robert said that it was going mad. The car became an aeroplane and flew around in the sky, before doing power dives and finally diving under the ground. He explained that it was now in its secret hiding place. The other four cars came down the hill and pushed in under the ground at various points. One car came out and charged about almost hitting one of the buried ones. ‘Blue Bird’ emerged saying, ‘I'm not afraid of anyone.’ Robert pushed the car into the tunnel to the centre of the hill, breaking up the hill; the car then emerged saying, ‘They are all after me.’ Finally, Robert pushed all the cars into the ground in one place, where they remained.

This is an example of an individual variation arising from a standard sequence, demonstrating the multidimensional aspect of non-verbal thinking. There is movement through, up, down, underneath, up above, in and out. The boy is demonstrating strong physical urges, and the fear and anxiety that he feels about them. There is an urge to push in, to climb up, to be first, to destroy a rival and so on. Vague but forceful sexual feelings are there, together with a feeling of being pursued. He is being aggressive, but at the same time he feels that he is under attack. These feelings seem to be both inside and outside of him. He is not sure where they are.

There seems to be no evidence of the mechanism of projection in cases such as this, but rather, it seems that the child is experiencing genuine confusion. There is a vague feeling of attack somewhere and the child is not sure whether it is in him or is there a ‘ghost’ outside him. In true projection the child would be clear about where the potential attack lies; he would be able to state confidently that a certain individual or group of individuals were being hostile to him.

An example from two boys who attended the Institute for treatment during the same hours brings out the differences between projection and confusion. Alan, aged 11, was referred for multiple phobias, some of which took the form of horned nightmare figures that he felt to be somewhere near him. Peter, aged 14, developed an obsessional fear of Alan, a boy half his size, who he regarded as a potential attacker. In Alan’s case, the fear of nightmare figures started to disappear as his own aggression began to be expressed and recognised. Peter, externally a kind boy, refused to acknowledge any aggressive feelings in himself and so he continued to project these onto Alan.

Another example shows even more clearly a child’s confusion between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ in relation to aggression: a highly intelligent boy of l2 had a fear that burglars might come during the night and attack him. This boy was fond of playing practical jokes on his family. When it became clear that the burglars stood for his own aggressive feelings, the therapist explained how an infant is unable to distinguish the prick of a pin from an internal pain, and it can be the same with feelings. This brought sudden illumination to the boy, who described how he had woken up the night before with a funny feeling but he did not know whether it was inside him or outside somewhere in the room.

The example below shows how objects can seem identical in a child’s mind because they possess common characteristics. Features belonging to the first object can end up being wrongly attributed to the second, and vice versa.

ANNE, aged five, referred for severe constipation and aggressive outbursts, had been attending the Institute for three months. During one of her sessions, on entering the playroom, she immediately noticed a miniature baby potty, left by another child, full of tiny pieces of brown plasticine. She asked sharply, ‘What’s that?’ During a discussion with the therapist, the child said that it was rude to speak about what comes out into the potty, that it was nasty and it hurted except when it was soft. ‘I don’t think about it,’ she said. She wanted to play with the chalks, but was worried about them being ‘dirty’ and about getting dirt on her hands and sleeves. She remarked that some of the chalks were long, some short and some medium. She proceeded to draw along the bottom edge of the blackboard in green, which she identified as ‘lovely mud’. At once she corrected herself, saying it was ‘lovely grass’. She said that mud was brown and rubbed off what she had done. Next she drew a train going over a bridge; the train was brown at first but she changed it to red, saying that she had never seen a brown train.

Anne laid out all the chalks on the table in a line, end to end, and drew the therapist’s attention to them. The therapist commented that they were bits of things all in a line, like the train, which was bits of engine and carriages all in a line going along. Anne was soon referring to the chalks as those ‘plonking things’. The therapist discussed how they were like the bits of brown stuff that go along inside Anne one after another in a line and then come out in the potty. Anne had identified faeces and chalk in her mind because they are both dirty and of similar shape. She had attributed the ‘plonking’ quality of faeces to the chalk.

An example of the confused mental state of George in treatment has already been given above. Now we consider his behaviour later in treatment when his play is much clearer and he seems ready for interpretation. For several months prior to the sessions described below, George, aged nine, had been presenting faecal material. He had been helping his mother to nurse his grandmother who had had an operation to remove part of her intestine, which had left her with a colostomy bag that George had had to change for her. He knew that she had cancer although he did not understand what this meant. He had often heard his mother talking to people about his grandmother’s condition.

George sat on the floor and made a few trains by joining up carriages and engines. In his game each engine was sent periodically to be examined for possible faults so that repairs could be made if necessary, but George said that nothing was ever found wrong with them. The therapist reassured him about his own health. He said that one of the trains was an underground train that went along a twisty tunnel, and he mentioned having to cut away part of the green belt to enable the train to continue. The therapist compared the train to faeces passing through a twisty passage inside people and noted that people also wear belts. At this point the therapist became aware of a faecal smell coming from George. He now had four trains lined up as if in platforms waiting to depart. He put up an indicator that said which train would leave first and its destination. He said that something had gone wrong: the number one train was on platform two and vice versa. A train came out of the wrong platform. The therapist said that faeces went along its passage and there was only one hole where it could come out.

George made an aeroplane come on to the scene with a man who would find out why something had gone wrong. The man discovered that it was the ‘automatic block system’ of signals that had gone wrong, and that it must be replaced by a signal box with a man to work it. A large van brought the new signal box and had to unload it from the back. It made a mistake and came in forwards and had to turn around. The signal box was installed. There were some violent crashes between trains, but this was not the fault of the new signalman: something had gone wrong with the electricity supply to the lines.

The therapist now interpreted this play and George listened and responded in a way that he had never done in previous sessions, as if he felt that the therapist was finally saying something worth hearing. She explained that the trains in his play were really a picture of things working in the body. Some bodily functions work automatically and others are responses to orders from the brain. (This had been explained to him in previous sessions.) George nodded. The therapist said that here it was the automatic things that were getting out of control and going wrong; one automatic function in his body was the passing of faeces down the twisty passage. At this George looked up and said that his teacher had been talking about that that morning: she had told the class about diarrhoea, which George said he had experienced. This was discussed and the therapist said how frightening it was to lose control and how it made one feel anxious.

Reflecting over the session later, the therapist decided that this interpretation might also apply to George’s recent experiences with his grandmother. At the following session, she discussed this with him along the following lines:

- The train going along the twisty tunnel was like faeces going along inside the body

- A bit having to be cut out of the green belt was rather like a bit being cut out of grandmother roughly where a belt is worn

- The ‘block system’ was rather like her blocked system; the cancer was blocking her twisty pipe and the faeces could not get past

- Trains coming out of the wrong platform and automatic things getting out of control were like grandmother’s faeces coming out of the wrong hole, out of control, into the colostomy bag

The therapist reassured George that everyone had diarrhoea sometimes and that this did not mean that he would be dying like grandmother. Children did not get cancer like hers. George said, in a loud voice, that he knew he could not get it, but he asked the therapist to draw just what was happening inside grandmother. Instead of drawing, the therapist demonstrated with a piece of pipe and a block of wood to show how a lump can press on a pipe and block it. George said that he understood; again he was interested in the discussion and wanted to listen. After this session his preoccupation with grandmother and illness disappeared.

This is an example of non-verbal thinking in a nine-year-old boy concerning his own bodily functions and the illness of his grandmother, which he did not understand. Having to nurse her had been a traumatic experience. Through George’s game with trains he was expressing his frightening ideas about her condition and also his fear that he himself might develop the illness because of his own diarrhoea. It was not until he had been able to express all this and had made it understood to the therapist, and she had explained the meaning of his play to him, that he was able to ask her to draw what was going on inside his grandmother. It is noteworthy that he asked for a drawing and not for a verbal description, highlighting how pictures are more easily understood by children than words. However, the therapist decided that as she was trying to explain a 3-dimensional happening, it would be a clearer explanation if three-dimensional materials were used rather than paper and pencil.

This example demonstrates part of the therapeutic process in action. First, the child presents his confused ideas through manipulation of play material. The child is trying to understand his ideas while playing, but needs the therapist’s help to clarify and disentangle his misperceptions and the feelings that have become associated with them. The therapist’s interpretation and explanation are only a part of the overall process.

CONCLUSION

These early confusions are only one aspect of a child’s problem, but they are a vital aspect that should be dealt with. It has been found in practice that addressing these confusions in this way has the effect of releasing energy, allowing the child to develop emotionally and physically at a surprising rate, and in many cases increasing the child’s ability to learn.

Psychotherapy is still in its early days. There is a great deal in the productions of children that is at present only partially understood. By continuing to study in detail how each individual child plays with the material, and by persevering in the attempt to understand what they are trying to communicate, that progress in psychotherapy will be made. It is important to guard against the understandable tendency of all psychotherapists to view the material presented by their patients in the light of one particular theory. This can be a stumbling block to progress towards a deeper and wider understanding of the human psyche and can prevent psychotherapists from becoming aware of new phenomena that may lead to further discoveries.

Notes

Notes

[←1]

This version of the text has been edited to ensure it is accessible for today’s audience. The original version without changes is available from the Dr Margaret Lowenfeld Trust, info@lowenfeld.org

[←2]

Published in “On the Psychotherapy of Children”, edited Eric Strauss. Revised 1964

[←3]

‘World’ refers to material created by the child in a sand tray with toys, models and water.

The Lowenfeld World Technique is also a therapeutic technique, which involves the use of a sand tray, toys and models through which the children display their non-verbal thinking. See www.lowenfeld.org/books-resources.html

[←4]

By ‘Region’, the author means the images provided by the non-verbal thinking. The quotations are from Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and Blake’s ‘Tiger’.

[←5]

Lowenfeld, M. (1931) ‘A New Approach to the Problem of Psycho-neurosis in Childhood’, British Journal of Medical Psychology 8, part 3.

[←6]

Lowenfeld, M.

(1935) Play in Childhood, Victor Gollanz Ltd, London;

(1939) ‘The World Pictures of Children – a method of recording and studying them’, British Journal of Medical Psychology, 18, 65-111;

(1953-4) ‘Einige Grundzuge einer Kinder Psychotherapie’, Psyche, 7. 208-216;

(1960) ‘The World Technique’, Topic. Probl. Psychother. 3. 248-263.

[←7]

Lowenfeld, M. (1949) ‘The Mosaic Test’, American Journal of Orthopsych. 19, 537-550; (1954) The Lowenfeld Mosaic Test, Newman Neame, London.

[←8]

All IQs included in this article are derived from the Revised Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale (1937) Form M, unless otherwise stated.

[←9]

See Hilda

[←10]

Freud, S. (1913) The Interpretation of Dreams, 3rd ed, trans. by A.A. Brill, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London, pp 565-567 and 598-609.

[←11]

Fenichel, O. (1946) The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, London, pp 15, 16, 47, 48, 422 and 477.

[←12]

Stott, D. H. ‘An Empirical Approach to Motivation based on the Behaviour of a young Child’, Journal of Child Psychol. Psychiatry, 1961, Vol 2, pp 97-113.

[←13]

Sir Malcolm Campbell’s Sunbeam 350hp, better known as ‘Blue Bird’, set the world land speed record in 1964, when this book was originally published.

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Notes