Touching Clay? Touching What: the Use of Clay in Therapy

In this thought-provoking book, Lynne Souter-Anderson invites her readers to accompany her on a journey into an exciting and relatively unexplored area of therapy. She builds on sound research foundations to formulate a way of working with perhaps the most basic medium – that of clay – and shows, with the aid of numerous case vignettes, how such work can be effective for a range of presenting problems. She writes in an accessible and engaging manner of her own development as a therapist, and the circumstances in which she came to be an authority on this approach. The book provides a valuable overview of the development of this field and of current initiatives in therapeutic use of clay. Souter-Anderson draws on insights from her own practice to propose practical suggestions for therapists to introduce work with clay with, among others, young children, adolescents, and disabled clients; she makes a convincing case for its potential as a therapeutic tool and supports this with a new theoretical underpinning which she terms a ‘Theory of Contact’. Avoiding the limitations of a reductionistic manual, this book offers a wealth of ideas, exercises and resources for anyone wishing to make use of clay in their own practice.