Clay Field Therapy

Work at the Clay Field is a bottom-up Sensorimotor Art Therapy approach, which has been developed by Prof Heinz Deuser in Germany since the 1970s. The client at the Clay Field works in a flat wooden box filled with approximately 10 kilos of clay; the clay is evenly and smoothly spread, filling the entire box; a bowl of water and a sponge are supplied. With closed eyes, the client makes contact with the material and the hands find their way through touching, scratching, digging, kneading, patting, beating. Shapes start to emerge, scenes become created, destroyed, recreated. The haptic sense of touch is the most fundamental of human experiences. Infants rely on sensorimotor feedback to feel safe and loved; to be rocked, held and soothed is communicated through touch. Love, sexuality as well as violence are primarily communicated through touch. Our skin boundary becomes invaded through inappropriate touching, through accidents and medical procedures. The majority of traumatic memories involve touch.

“The regressive quality of clay in a therapeutic context allows a therapist to address early attachment issues, developmental setbacks and traumatic events in a primarily non-verbal way. The focus is not on the story of what-happened, but on what-do-I-need-to-do-now to find an adequate response.”

Clay has the unique ability to feedback every imprint we make. As I touch the clay, I am touched by it. In this way the encounter at the clay field allows us to gradually rewrite our biography, to respond in a new way, to find a fuller more connected flow of our life force. Emerging research shows that Clay Field Therapy is deeply therapeutic particularly for traumatised children, and adults.

A Conversation

I want to ask about your history with Work at the Clay Field. Where did it all begin?

Well it started when I was in my early twenties and I was studying at the Institute for Initiatic Therapy in the Black Forest. It was a multimodal training and we studied art, music, drama and movement therapy, body work, martial arts, yoga, meditation and Jungian Analytical Psychology.

In the nineteen-seventies, the arts therapies were still a very open and unstructured field. Many of us experimented with various approaches and so did Heinz Deuser, when he began to explore clay as a modality - and I was his guinea pig. So actually I have been part of what he developed from the very beginning.

Initially, he started out with a lump of clay. From the beginning, his focus was on working with closed eyes, exploring clay as a touch experience. He was never interested in creating objects and then talking about them.

In my very first session with him, he asked me to touch a rock with closed eyes and then to recreate that rock with clay. So I’d never seen it and I recall quite vividly that I needed to find orientation points on the rock, orientation points that I could also name. For example, in my self-talk, I mentioned that there was a ‘wounding’ that the rock had experienced. On this basis, I recreated my clay object. He experimented with this exercise and found that everyone used different reference points, and that these prompted the meaning-making process. For some, it was a weapon, or it could be used as an axe, or it held sacred significance.

And then by accident, he created this box, the Clay Field, out of a discarded window frame. He put a base on it and filled it with clay. He asked me to put my hands into the box and follow whatever my hands wanted to do.

And it was the sense of touch that led people to their meaning?

Yes. He became fascinated by the complexity of the sensory experience you could have through touching, that this sensory experience actually included images, sound, even colours and smell. That all the senses were represented in the hands.

So it developed then?

It developed over the last forty-five years, and only now we are able to name it as haptic perception, perception with the hands.

Can you talk about the significance of the box?

The field became significant in providing a sense of containment, especially when clients had their eyes closed. Initially, all the work was with adults, the work with children came later; and children always work with their eyes open. With closed eyes, the smooth clay in the field can feel vast, or feel like skin, or like ice, or be rock-hard; it can be yielding or unforgiving. We observed how the neutral clay could evoke intense touch memories. As I touch the clay, it touches me. And similar to the initial rock experiment, these touch memories were always informed by biography.

“The box as a boundary could contain the touch-experience to the extent that it supported a sensory experience or motor impulses without the need to go into imagery.”

These days that would be called a “bottom-up” process, however in the 1970s we didn’t have any of this language. As therapists, we supported the felt-sense experience by encouraging a client to “follow your hands”.

This prompted not a visual experience, but one of coming into contact with the material and exploring if it ‘was comfortable, or not’, or ‘felt safe, or not’. It took more than twenty years to realize how such touch related to attachment theory, how babies understand safety and love through skin contact. And that touching the clay was evoking these primal memories of safety and threat.