Paolo Aite initiating into sandplay by Dora Kalff in 1968. The sand scenes: relationship to the psychic phenomenon, sharing with the other, dreamlike emotional atmosphere, meditating, circular mental attitude. Personal experience of sandplay and analysis. The analyst/patient relationship: emotions, feelings, metaphors, “unsayable”.

1. Past History. 2. Play Scenes in the Consulting Room. 3. Using Space for Expressing and Understanding the Psyche. 4. Using Sand and Its Expressive Resources. 5. Using Objects for Relating to Feelings. 6. Notes on Miniature Objects. 7. From Inanimate Objects to Personification. Sandplay method: the analyst’s consulting room as a laboratory, the sand and the bookshelf of miniatures and figures, levels of relationship. Possible options, analyst perceiving, patient relationship to the emerging feeling. The use of space in sand scenes as dreams, used material and objects, empathy or abstraction, the different from self. The miniature object and Winnicott’s transitional objects, relationship between the ego complex and emotions.

1. First Scene: “The Monster That Soaks Up Energy”. 2. Second Scene “The Monster and the Woman Who Isn’t”. 3. Third Scene: “The African Witch-doctor”. 4. Fourth Scene: “The Monster Is Attacked”. 5. Fifth Scene “Split Objects Appear in the Field”. 6. Sixth Scene: “Waiting for the Birth”. 7. Seventh Scene: “The Birth: An Earthquake”. 8. Eighth Scene: “The Dragon: Only the Little Girl Sees and Talks to It”. 9. Ninth Scene: “Balance Restored”. A case report: the significance of temporal sequence of sand scenes, a subject's personal narrative structure, process of integration.

1. Imagination as a Complex Phenomenon: Uncertain Definition of Terms. 2. Initial Research: Freud Points the Way. 3. The Jungian Approach. 4. Confronting Fantasies. 5. A Proposal for Further Research. 6. Ways and Levels of Imagining. Freud and Jung: act of imaging, different approaches. Sandplay and Jung’s theoretical issues: integration of emotions, visual form, relationship with emotions, sandplay materials, emotions expression, transformation of emotions into feelings.

1. Play and Analytic Research: A First General Survey. 2. Significant Moments in Analytic Research. 3. Play According to Jung. 4. Adults and Sandplay: A Positive Regression. The evolution of analytic thought: the play role, from children to adults, controlled and organized regression, ancient experiences, old ways of projecting, externalizing, and introjecting, representative shape of the underlying feeling.

1. Listening Field and Symbolic Activation. 2. Listening As a Scene Under Construction. 3. Listening to Mario. 4. The Confrontation of Words and Images. The analyst’s watching as listening: the exterior, the patient’s play-action, the inner theater of the analyst, verbal and the imaginal levels, the psychic phenomenon. Images and words: integration of the relationship between the ego complex and the emerging feelings, distinct levels of a single symbolic process. Analyst’s mental attitude: own personality, qualities and faults, conflicts, relationship among hearing, feeling, imagining, and theories. Effective listening: patient’s body language, gesture, facial expression, tone, rhythm of the words, analyst dreaming-like attitude, distinguishing and organizing imaginal and verbal.

1. Towards a Borderline Experience. 2. From Approaching the Play Scene to Using It. 3. The Moment of Use. 4. Signs of Difficulty: The Resistances. 5. Signs of Willingness. 6. Sandplay: A Story Beyond Words. 7. The Underlying Narrative Structure of Story-telling: Indicative Signs. Sandplay and the capacity for storytelling: loss of confidence, fear, sense of freedom, building of the sand scene, individual desires and needs, communication, resistances or willingness reading. Scene building as storytelling: human need, going through and emotions expression, distancing. Clinical signs evidences: effectiveness of the play’s storytelling, pre-existing emotional situation modification.

1. Meeting Bruno. 2. Meeting Carla. 3. Meeting Dario. Preliminary meetings cases report: the narrative structure story, conflicts, defences, emotions and feelings appearance, building a play scene. Paolo Aite preliminary setting. The verbal and the play levels, its connection and the psychic phenomenon.

1. Jung’s View of the Unconscious. 2. Notes on the Symbolic Function. 3. The Spatiotemporal Unfolding of a Scene. Sandplay method: visual representation of indistinct but operative emotions, their symbolic expression, the spatiotemporal organization of experience, relating the conscious-unconscious, the known- unknown, the rational-irrational dimensions. Sandplay like a “facilitator”: a clinical sketch.

1. Signs of the Activity of Images in the Analytical Field. Playing: sudden memory, patient emotion organizing, mnemonic and perceptive heritage. Coming up image: intrapsychic and interpersonal levels as a single unit. Image as a dynamic presence in the relationship: level of “visibility”, “operative” dynamic, field of relationship, a new operative potential.

1. Emotions and Feelings as Successive Integrations. 2. Complexes in the Play Scene. 3. Mental Representation and Metabolism of Feelings. 4. Representations of “Things,” “Persons,” and “Words” as the Expression of the Relation¬ship Between the Ego and the Secondary Complexes. 5. Levels of Conscious Participation in the Event. 6. A Complex Activated in the Analytical Field. Differences between emotion and feeling: initial emotional reactions, ability of selecting more adequate emotional responses, sentiment as a cognitive function, acting reflectively. The experience of the player self-identity changing. The construction of a scene and the relation between the Ego complex and the affective charges. The use of different kind of materials and objects.

1. The Mise-en-scéne Reviewed. 2. Final Notes. Patient sand scene building: sequence of gestures, verbal level, analyst’s counter-transference, the analyst opportunity to really “see” a veritable “tale” telling the patient’s inner experience.

1. The Objects and Their Relationships. To re-examine scenes built during therapy as a path carrying new discoveries: the overdetermination of the symbolic process, the forms chosen at the construction time, objects and characters meaningful analogies of the affective dynamics between the analytic couple. Objects, feelings, and words in a complex tale that represents the patient life.

1. Notes on the Hermeneutical Aspect of Reviewing. 2. From Images to Words: The Mobilizing of Energy Reviewing sandplay scenes: the relationship between play scenes and verbalization, and transforming effect. The resonance of feeling between the analyst and the patient, the objects as metaphors fitting for the feelings shared during therapy, results in a psychic activation revealed by clinical signs (i.e. dreams, verbal associations, etc.), the sequence of scenes highlights. Reviewing as a new attitude: a new field of experience and reflection.

1. Analytical Field and Self-healing. 2. The Transpersonal Aspect of the “Self-healing” Event. 3. Words That Further Self-healing and Prepare for Interpretation. 4. Words As a Vital Necessity The two involved factors within the analytic therapy: the activation of an interpersonal field and the interpretation. Sandplay as the path for the analyst to better distinguish the emotional factors: transformation of feelings, symptomatological picture, the symbolic integration, loosing pre- existing certainties, encountering limits.

1. Language and Myth. 2. The Whens and Hows of Words That Interpret. 3. Interpretation Through Images: The Use of Metaphors Extracted From the Sand Scene. 4. Interpretation That Constructs. 5. The Long Journey of Words That Interpret. The construction of a sand scene: patient’s sensation, perceptions, emotions and feelings, playing and shared speech, “dialogue”, “interpretation”, play and interpretation similarity, a new mental act. The analyst interpreting: the extraction of a single detail, its placing into a significant whole, transition from a “pre-personal” to a “personal” level of relating to emotions. Metaphor role: initial recovery, patient discourse, his sand scene (unsaturated), a well-constructed mental act (saturated).

1. Towards the Center. 2. Experiencing the Center in the Analytical Field. 3. Laura Towards Her Center. Sandplay contribution to the study of the process to build the Self: the quadrangular shape of the sand tray role, the spatiotemporal sequence of building gestures, the tendency toward unity, separation and integration, defences overcoming, the ego and the complex nuclei contact, the change of pace in the player’s movements.

1. An Instrument for Research. 2. Suggestions for Clinical Research. 3. Children Continue to Show the Way Sandplay way: a different angle to observe the patient’s inner word and the emerging emotions and feelings. Primary emotions and life and death impulses, the body as vehicle of communication, intrapsychic and interpersonal level. Sandplay as a complex organization: previsual aspects of the emotional experience, visual integration, flexibility of sandplay, encouraging elaboration in patients, images and correspondence to verbal language. Constitutional limit.