箱庭療法の神経心理学・神経美学試論

Sandplay therapists and researchers have long sought for ways to explain why sandplay therapy heals. In this paper, the author first briefly reviews the history and status-quo of sandplay research from the perspective of neuroscience. Then sandplay therapy is redefined from the specific standpoints of neuropsychology and neuroaesthetics or neuroscientific study of art. Sandplay shares some characteristics with visual art in that it entails active processes of extracting components from the ever-changing real world and re-constructing it as more or less static. However, it is different from visual art in that it is multi-modal, starts with stimulating the tactile sense, thus triggering PLAY, which is one of the seven basic emotions by Panksepp. The key concepts in sandplay therapy,“mother-child unity”and were discussed in the light of neuroscience, infant research, and psychoanalysis. Sandplay as art is also related with curiosity, SEEKING, which is closely related with PLAY, and all these lead to creativity. Although therapists have been warned against seeking for beauty in art therapy, for fear that“false beauty”should compromise therapeutic effects, beauty itself may be an inherent and important part of sandplay therapy, for, the sense of beauty, according to some neuroscientific studies, is grounded in the neural network related with“reward”, and the often-felt sense of“reward”in the client-therapist relationship may be a contributing factor in the client’s psychological growth. Also, in such elderly clients as those with brain damage and cognitive and/or physical impairments, the therapist’s assisting them with making their sandtrays“look better”may uphold their diminished or traumatized sense of self and might help them achieve some “beauty”towards the end of their lives. Studying neural underpinnings of sandplay therapy with more advanced neuroimaging techniques than near-infrared spectroscopy（NIRS）may shed light on such topics as the relationship between the“reward”circuits and sandplay therapy processes. Hopefully, neuroscientists and sandplay therapists and researchers will, in future, go hand in hand to dig deep into both the brain and the inner world of sandplay therapy, to open up new possibilities to explain to the public and specialists in other fields what is going on in sandplay therapy and what really makes it therapeutic.