Making Meaning : Clay Therapy with Children and Adolescents

It is delightful to see another book by Lynne Souter-Anderson, contributing to the field of Clay Therapy. Her first book, Touching Clay, Touching What?: The Use of Clay in Therapy (2010), gave credence and credibility to using clay in therapy. It was a pioneering book in the field of the creative arts therapies and gave a broad perspective on working in this modality with all age groups ; This new book is written for already qualified professionals who want to add the use of Clay Therapy in their work with children and adolescents. It is a hands-on book for practitioners and easy to read. However, the application of clay therapy in this specialist field requires appropriate additional training ; Lynne’s book is a significant addition to the small but growing library of books on the market about specialist therapeutic approaches with young children and adolescents. Play Therapy UK (PTUK)’s research analysis of over 300,000 therapeutic sessions using the ‘toolkit ‘(sand, music, clay, art/drawing, puppets, movement, drama, therapeutic story, creative visualisation etc.) has shown that clay is the fifth most used medium in play therapy sessions. It is therefore an important medium to offer to children and adolescents to support their healing process ; Lynne achieves a good balance between the application of theory and the actual process, which is always valuable for the reader. This is especially well demonstrated in Chapter 1, ‘Clay Therapy: Theoretical Underpinning of Clay Therapy’, in which the author explains her own theoretical basis, ‘The Theory of Contact: Physical, Emotional, Spiritual and Metaphorical’. She uses the analogy of the ’five lenses’ to demonstrate the stages of immersion and discovery in the clay therapy process, and includes an invaluable diagram to clarify her theory about the evolving nature of the process ; For me the book comes really alive through the ten case studies, which demonstrate how clay therapy has been used with the younger clients a