Buildings section of figures, Box 24, taken from the Lowenfeld's 'World Technique' therapy collection. Consists of 36 small and medium red-roofed houses (wooden), 24 small and medium blue-roofed houses (wooden), 2 painted houses (wooden), 7 unpainted medium sized houses (wooden), 1 black windows (wooden), 3 churches (wooden), 6 houses (plastic), 2 towers (?), wooden, 2 Tudor thatch buildings, 2 ground floors matching Tudor thatch building, 1 bridge (wooden), 4 wooden building blocks, 1 red-roofed building (wooden), 1 red-roofed building with paper image exterior (wooden), 1 rectangular hospital building (wooden), 1 red, printed, beamed house (wooden), 1 red-roofed house (wooden), 1 thatched house with right-angled extension (wooden), 1 blue-roofed beamed house (wooden), 1 church with black paper windows (wooden), 1 large house with blue roof (wooden), 2 parts of red-roofed house (wooden), 1 red roof (plastic) and black building with leaded windows (wooden).

What do toys have to do with trauma? In the years before the Second World War, Margaret Lowenfeld, a child psychiatrist in London, was looking for ways to help children express fears, anger, and family problems that they couldn’t say in words. At her clinic, she began experimenting with the use of small toys in a sand-box and gradually developed an approach she called ‘the World Technique’. This involved a large rectangular tray, sand and water for building a landscape, pieces of plasticine, and an extensive ‘library’ of miniature figures kept in dozens of drawers. Lowenfeld simply asked children to create a world, and observed what happened.

Her idea had parallels to Sigmund Freud’s theories of hysteria – where repressing traumatic memories could lead to psychological and physical symptoms. But Lowenfeld never regarded herself as a psychoanalyst. She always said her chief influences were the children she worked with and the novelist H.G. Wells. She attributed the idea behind the World Technique to a small book, published in 1911, in which Wells described how he had encouraged his two sons to construct elaborate ‘floor games’ out of miniature figures, such as toy soldiers and building blocks.

Other therapists carried on Lowenfeld’s methods in various ways. In the 1950s and 1960s, one psychoanalyst adapted the World Technique in order to encourage children and adults to develop their ‘inner selves’ in a safe, non-judgmental space. This approach became very popular among American psychotherapists under the name ‘Sandplay’. Later, in the 1960s, psychologists in Sweden standardised the World Technique into the ‘Erica Method’, which uses a set of 360 toys in various categories. The Erica Method has recently been used to study post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Iranian refugee children in Sweden.