Lois Carey lives in New York, where she has been a practicing therapist since 1978. She is Adjunct Professor of Play Therapy at Hofstra University and President of the New York branch of APT. Her work will be familiar to PTI/PTUK Members through her book ‘Sandplay Therapy with Children and Families’
The purpose of this collection of contributions is to demonstrate how play, art, music therapies, sandplay, storytelling and psychodrama (a contentious subject for play therapists – see ‘Play for Life’ Summer 2006) can be used to aid the recovery of trauma victims. The publication is well timed because of recent natural disasters and terrorist atrocities but also deals with the trauma of children resulting from abuse.
The success of this type of book, in my view, depends upon the quality and relevance of the individual contributions for Play Therapists and also how they fit together.
The book gets high marks for the range of modalities and methods described as well as for the illustration of many different theoretical approaches thus fitting PTI/PTUK’s integrative holistic model.
The scene is set in a foreword by Judith Rubin which makes a general case for the use of arts and creative therapies for helping trauma survivors by reference to case studies. There is a link to the first chapter making the point that through neuroscience we can better understand why the arts are so therapeutic and provides an overall strategy: firstly access the nonverbal right hemisphere (through images, sounds and movements), then enable it to communicate with the left hemisphere to gain cognitive and affective (emotional) mastery.