🐚 Module 2 — Who Is Dora Kalff? | Sandplay Therapy Course
- Jul 28
- 8 min read
Free Course by Everything IFS Academy | Therapeutic Modalities Series
Module 2 — Who Is Dora Kalff?
Sandplay therapy exists because a Swiss mother with no medical degree, no doctorate, and no clinical title of any kind noticed something everyone else was missing: children kept telling her things without words, and the therapy world of her era had no way to listen. Dora Kalff built that way of listening. But the honest story of sandplay is a two-woman story, because the sand tray itself came first from a fierce British physician named Margaret Lowenfeld, and Kalff, to her lasting credit, never pretended otherwise. This is the story of both of them, and of the problem sandplay was born to solve.
A Swiss Beginning and the Road to the Jungs
Dora Kalff was born in 1904 in Richterswil, a small town on the shore of Lake Zurich in Switzerland. Her early adult life gave no hint of a founder in the making. She married, moved to the Netherlands, raised two sons, and then, with her marriage ending and the Second World War closing in, returned to Switzerland to start over as a single mother.
She settled near Zurich, and it was there that her life bent toward its real work, through what looked at first like simple neighborly luck. The Kalff family circle came to overlap with that of Carl Jung, the great Swiss depth psychologist, and his wife Emma Jung, a gifted analyst in her own right. The Jungs noticed something about Dora Kalff that would define everything that followed: children trusted her. They gravitated to her, opened up around her, played freely in her presence. She had a natural gift for the inner world of the child, the exact territory adult psychology had the most trouble reaching.
It was Emma Jung who pushed the gift toward a profession, encouraging Kalff to train formally at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich. Kalff spent years there absorbing the Jungian understanding of the psyche, its symbols, and its capacity for growth. But when the training ended, she faced a problem the training could not solve.
Jungian analysis, as it existed then, ran on words. It worked through spoken dreams, associations, and long adult conversations across a consulting room. It was built by adults, for adults, out of adult language. And Kalff's calling was children, many of them too young, too hurt, or too guarded to hand their inner world over in sentences. She needed a road into the deep psyche that did not require its traveler to speak. That road, it turned out, already existed. It was in London.
Margaret Lowenfeld and the World Technique
Margaret Lowenfeld was a British pediatrician and child psychiatrist, a pioneer with sharp scientific instincts and very little patience for adults who assumed they knew what children were thinking. In the late 1920s, at her clinic in London, she set out to build something almost nobody had attempted: a way for children to show the contents of their own minds directly, without an adult's questions, theories, or interpretations steering the result.
Her materials were almost comically humble, and one of her inspirations was more surprising still: the writer H. G. Wells had published a little book called Floor Games about the elaborate miniature worlds he built on the floor with his sons, and Lowenfeld saw in that ordinary play something clinical medicine had overlooked. In her clinic she offered children two things:
A shallow tray of sand, a bounded, inviting field a child could shape with bare hands.
A cabinet of miniatures, hundreds of small figures of every kind, which the children themselves soon nicknamed "the wonder box."
Given these, children did something remarkable and nearly universal: they built worlds. Battles, floods, islands, families, journeys, catastrophes, rescues. Lowenfeld called her method the World Technique, and she treated the built worlds with the seriousness other doctors gave to lab results, because that is what they were to her: direct expressions of a child's inner state, produced without a single question asked. Her core conviction was that the child's world should speak for itself, protected from the contamination of adult interpretation.
The World Technique made its way into the professional world through papers and conference presentations, and at a psychology congress in Zurich in the mid-1950s, it found the audience that would change its future. Dora Kalff encountered Lowenfeld's work there, and Carl Jung himself, recognizing what the sand tray might become in Jungian hands, encouraged Kalff to go and study it at the source. So she did: Kalff traveled to London and trained directly with Lowenfeld, learning the technique from the woman who made it.
What Kalff Added: A Jungian Frame
What Kalff brought home from London was a technique. What she built from it was a therapy, and the difference between those two words is the difference between sandtray work and sandplay.
For Lowenfeld, the tray was primarily a window: a brilliant means of seeing a child's inner world accurately. Kalff, looking at the very same trays through her Jungian training, became convinced she was watching something more than expression. She was watching the psyche heal itself. The worlds in the sand were not just reports of inner trouble; they were the trouble actively working itself through, image by image, tray by tray, following a deep order of their own. In her view, the sand tray did not merely show the psyche. It gave the psyche a place to do its own repair work, the way a protected wound knits itself closed.
That conviction changed everything about how the method was practiced:
The purpose shifted from assessment to healing. The tray was no longer chiefly a diagnostic window; it was the treatment itself.
The therapist's job shifted with it. If the psyche heals itself given the right conditions, then the adult's task is to provide those conditions and otherwise stay out of the way. Kalff's name for those conditions, the free and protected space, became her signature concept, and it has its own full lesson later in this course.
The timescale shifted from a session's snapshot to a journey across many trays, unfolding over months.
Kalff also gave her method its own name, and she did it partly out of respect. Lowenfeld guarded the identity of the World Technique, and Kalff's approach had genuinely become something different. Kalff called her method sandplay, marking it as its own discipline: Lowenfeld's tray, Jung's map of the psyche, and Kalff's own conviction about self-healing, joined into one practice. Her home in Zollikon, near Zurich, became its birthplace, with children building worlds in trays a few steps from her kitchen.
One more influence deserves its honest place in the story. Kalff was deeply drawn to Eastern contemplative traditions. She studied Zen thought, kept a years-long friendship with the Tibetan Buddhist community, and hosted Tibetan monks in her own home. That contemplative sensibility, the trust in stillness, the patience with slow inner unfolding, soaked into sandplay's character and is part of why the method feels the way it does: quiet, unhurried, and profoundly non-forcing.
Building a Worldwide Method
For years, sandplay spread the slowest possible way: one visitor at a time, in Kalff's own house. Therapists heard about the Swiss woman with the sand trays, came to Zollikon to see for themselves, and left changed. Out of those visits grew a worldwide discipline.
The book arrived in 1966, when Kalff published her account of the method in German; it later reached the English-speaking world under the title Sandplay: A Psychotherapeutic Approach to the Psyche, still the founding text of the field.
America took to it early. Kalff taught and lectured in the United States repeatedly, and American students such as Kay Bradway and Estelle Weinrib became founding figures of the method there, each later making contributions of their own that this course will meet again.
Japan embraced it profoundly. The psychologist Hayao Kawai studied with Kalff, carried the method home, and renamed it hakoniwa therapy, after Japan's centuries-old tradition of miniature box gardens. Sandplay found in Japan a culture already fluent in the idea that a small contained landscape can hold a whole inner world, and it flourished there on a scale that surprised even Kalff.
In 1985 the method got its institution. Kalff and a small international circle of senior students founded the International Society for Sandplay Therapy, the body that still sets the training standards for the method today, ensuring that sandplay would outlive its founder as a defined discipline rather than dissolve into a general technique.
Dora Kalff died in 1990 at her home in Zollikon. The training program she started in her living room now spans continents, and her son Martin Kalff, himself a sandplay teacher, was among those who carried the work forward.
Why Her Work Matters Now
Every therapy is an answer to a problem, and the problem Kalff answered has not gone anywhere: human beings still carry experiences that words cannot reach, and still sit in rooms with helpers who only know how to work in words.
Kalff's life answer was a method where speech is optional and the psyche is trusted to know its own way, given safety, materials, and a witness who does not interfere. What began as a way to reach children turned out to reach something in everyone, which is why sandplay today is practiced across the whole lifespan, from preschoolers to elders, in dozens of countries.
The rest of this course opens her method piece by piece: the theory beneath it, the famous space she built around it, the tray and figures themselves, the session, the silent therapist, the language of the trays, and the long arc a sandplay journey travels. All of it traces back to a woman whom children trusted, and who took that trust seriously enough to build it a science.
Below this lesson, you'll find a Sandplay Therapy practice built around one of the skills you just learned, along with a few ways to begin noticing and practicing it in everyday life this week.
Sandplay Therapy Practice: Watching the Way Lowenfeld Watched
Lowenfeld's founding move, the one Kalff inherited and built a therapy on, was watching without steering: letting something express itself completely before any adult opinion touched it. This practice lets you try that stance yourself for a few minutes.
Pick something expressive to watch that is not a person talking to you. Good options: children playing (your own or at a park, watching casually and respectfully), a pet going about its business, or even people moving through a public space from a café window.
Set a gentle timer for five minutes.
Watch with full attention, and each time your mind produces a conclusion ("he's bored," "she's showing off," "the dog wants attention"), notice the conclusion, set it aside, and return to simply seeing what is actually happening: movements, choices, sequences.
Notice how strong the urge to interpret is. This is the urge Lowenfeld built her whole technique to hold back, and it is far stronger than most people expect. Finding it in yourself is the practice working, not failing.
When the timer ends, ask one question: did anything show itself in those five minutes that a quick interpretation would have covered over? Often something small does.
If you have no chance to observe anyone this week, the practice works nearly as well on yourself: spend five minutes doodling or arranging small objects on a table with no plan, and watch what your hands do without deciding in advance what it means.
This Week
Once this week, in a conversation, try waiting three extra seconds before responding to something emotional, just to see what arrives in the space.
Notice one moment where a child, a pet, or even your own body communicated something clearly without a single word.
If you find yourself explaining someone's behavior confidently, pause and ask what you would see if you only described it instead.
Disclaimer:
Everything IFS Academy is an independent educational platform and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the IFS Institute. While we strive for accuracy, errors can occur, and users are encouraged to cross-reference critical information. These courses, lessons, skills, and practices are offered for educational and self-reflection purposes only. They do not constitute therapy, mental health treatment, clinical training, or crisis support, and they should not be used as a substitute for professional mental health care.
Crisis Support: 🚨
If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, feel unsafe, feel at risk of harming yourself or someone else, or feel too overwhelmed to safely use self-directed practices, please pause this material and reach out for immediate support. Contact a licensed mental health professional, call or text 988 in the U.S. or Canada, or use your local emergency or crisis resources.
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