A Study of the Sandplay Therapy Case of a 9-Year-Old Girl Seen from Mahler’s Ego Developmental Viewpoint

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Psychologically, a child is not born as a complete human being by birth but is born as a true human being over time, partially through the development of their ego as they establish relations with the outside world. That is, after birth, a child achieves psychological development and forms relations with “objects” thanks to their mother’s loving care. Here, ‘objective relations’ are defined as interactions between the Self and internal or external objects. According to Margaret S. Mahler’s (1897-1985) theory, children go through a mental autistic phase and a symbiotic phase immediately after birth in order to develop the ability to distinguish between the Self and objects. As they become physically and mentally independent of their mother using their newly acquired motor skills, they begin to undergo a separation individuation process in which self-representation and object representation are gradually separated from each other (Hamilton, 1988). When seen from a developmental viewpoint, the first constituent unit of objective relations is a symbiotic self-object in which the Self and objects are not clearly distinguished from each other. In its psychological meaning, the term ‘symbiosis’ refers to conditions in which the Self and objects are experienced as inseparably entangled with each other. This symbiotic phase would be analogous to the primal unity stage which is described by Neumann (1973). In a study of children’s normal and abnormal developmental processes, Mahler (Choi, 2011) advised that a measure of children’s successful development was a process called ‘separation individuation’ through which children start in the symbiotic phase to obtain stable and individual identities in the predictable realistic world of others, a process she also referred to as ‘psychological birth.’ The separation individuation process is divided into two developmental trajectories. One involves the differentiation of children from their mother as they form boundaries, and the other is the children’s development of “endopsychic autonomy” in terms of cognition, memory, and perception. Therefore, for the most appropriate separation-individuation to occur, children should not only physically separate from their mother but also sever the psychological fusion with their mother to develop indeOriginal Article Symbols and Sandplay Therapy 2013;4(1):21-34 http://dx.doi.org/10.12964/jsst.130004 eISSN : 2288-5188 pISSN : 2234-0556