Bulls, Crocodiles, and Other Scientific Instruments: Margaret Lowenfeld and the Alternative History of Child Psychotherapy

This article casts new light on the life and work of influential child psychologist Margaret Lowenfeld, who devised the World Technique-a unique form of play therapy using miniature toys, sand and water-during the 1920s. Lowenfeld's experimental, child-directed practice expanded significantly in the postwar period, rivaling the psychoanalytic treatment of children by better-known therapists such as Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. Lowenfeld was a difficult and paradoxical figure, who described her World Technique as a "scientific instrument" for accessing preverbal experience while also conceiving of the child psyche in idealist and transcendental terms. Lowenfeld's creative and esthetic remedies for psychological illness provide us with an alternative reading of childhood experience and of the postwar psychotherapeutic scene. Most significantly, her work challenges the monolithic focus on family life and the maternal relationship which characterizes recent studies of postwar child psychology. Drawing on Lowenfeld's extensive personal papers and published works, this article explores her intellectual influences-including her friendships with Carl Jung and R.G. Collingwood-and the reasons behind her marginalization in the historical literature.