Margaret Lowenfeld

Margaret Lowenfeld (born February 4, 1890 in London , † February 2, 1973 ibid) was a British pediatrician and psychotherapist .

Childhood and youth

Margaret Lowenfeld's father was of Polish descent, he owned a family estate near Kraków , and her mother was English. Her older sister was Helena Wright , one of the pioneers in the birth control movement .

Lowenfeld was a sickly child who often had to stay in bed. Various publications suggest that during this time she read the book "Floor Games" by HG Wells , which describes children's games with all kinds of lifelike little figures, a book that was only published in 1911 when Lowenfeld began studying medicine. The mentally unstable mother held spiritualistic sessions at home . When Margaret was 13 years old, the parents divorced and the daughters stayed with their mother.

Knowing only the English language, she later spent the summer months with her Polish relatives, possibly an indication that she later dealt with non-verbal communication in children.

After graduating from school in 1911, she studied medicine . During the unrest that preceded the First World War, part of the family returned to Poland. In 1918, at the beginning of the Red Army invasion , she went to Poland as a doctor. The misery of the population with typhus , cholera , tuberculosis and especially the fate of the refugee children has had a lasting impact on them.

She later recalled: “It opened the door for me to an inner world that I would otherwise not have reached. Later, after reflecting on this experience, I realized that living in a constant atmosphere of fear and no direction is an essential experience of unhappy children, and that the 'black misery' of prisoners of war is very similar to childhood depression ".

Development of world technology

Sandplay after Margaret Lowenfeld

In 1921 Lowenfeld went back to London and worked as a pediatrician in various research institutions. She was particularly preoccupied with the way young children think and express themselves before language is available to them to think about. She watched infants, published a book on breastfeeding in 1928 . In 1928 she opened a Clinic for nervous and difficult children , from which her Institute for Child Psychology (ICP) later emerged. In 1929 she began to develop world technology (Worldtechnique) .

As Lowenfeld describes, world technology was actually invented by the children themselves. The children built “worlds” for themselves from small figures that they found in the playroom. Lowenfeld provided the children with sandboxes made of sheet zinc, which were filled with sand or water, for their play. The standard size of the boxes resulted from the specified dimensions of the zinc sheets. In this way the dimensions were approximately 75 × 52 × 7 cm. In addition to the world game, other methods were used at the Institute for Child Psychology , including a mosaic test developed by Lowenfeld .

The rise and fall of the ICP

In 1935 Lowenfeld published her Play in Childhood . In 1939 she presented her theses to the British Psychoanalytical Society, among the audience were Melanie Klein , Susan Isaaks and Donald Winnicott . Their theses were downright torn up by the Freudians present .

Caused by the National Socialist regime in Germany, almost all analysts had emigrated to England or the USA. Lowenfeld was particularly affected by the hostile reception by the Kleinians , although she repeatedly emphasized in her writings what she owes to Melanie Klein's playing technique. However, Lowenfeld fundamentally rejected certain analytical ideas, for example the play instinct as a sublimated masturbation fantasy .

However, world technology as well as Lowenfeld's work in London and Great Britain remained of great importance. In 1956 Dora Kalff came to the ICP to study there. Back in Switzerland, she has Worldtechnique in sandplay renamed and Lowenfeldschen theories to some Jungian expanded ideas. In the UK, on ​​the other hand, the psychoanalytic tradition of the Association of Child Psychotherapists grew in influence and importance. In recent years, Lowenfeld had to experience bitterly that state funding, without which her institute could not exist, was suspended.

After Lowenfeld's death in 1973, her institute only survived a few years. The last graduates of their course were taken over by the Jungian analysts in order to get a degree.

World technology today

For several years now, the UK has again offered courses and introductory seminars on world technology. Thèrèse Woodcock , a student of Lowenfeld, has worked with other sandplay therapists who work according to the Lowenfeld method, the Dr. Margaret Lowenfeld Trust founded.

Publications

• Play in childhood . With a foreword by John Davis. [1935]. London, New York 1991. ISBN 0-901260-84-3 .
• The World Technique . London, Boston 1979. ISBN 0-04-150067-9 . (Published posthumously)
• The Work and Aims of the Institute of Child Psychology. London 1977.
• Understanding Children's Sandplay: Lowenfeld's World Technique . Dr Margaret Lowenfeld Trust. (1993).
• The Lowenfeld Mosaic Test . Dr Margaret Lowenfeld Trust. (1994).

literature

• Ruth Boyer: The Lowenfeld World Technique . 1970.
• Dora M. Kalff: sand play. Its therapeutic effect on the psyche. 4th edition. Reinhardt Ernst, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-497-01399-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lowenfeld 1988, p. 33.