Adlerian Sandtray
Alfred Adler placed belonging, purpose, and social interest at the center of human motivation. Terry Kottman turned those concepts into a practical play therapy approach. Together, they give sandtray clinicians a framework for understanding why a child behaves the way they do — and what the tray reveals about how they've answered that question for themselves.
Adlerian theory in brief
Alfred Adler broke from Freud to argue that human behavior is best understood not through drives and the unconscious, but through social interest and the pursuit of significance. We are, Adler said, fundamentally social beings — and our core motivation is to find our place among others, to matter, to belong (Adler, 1927/1992; Dreikurs, 1967).
From this premise come the theory's most clinically useful concepts:
- Inferiority and striving for superiority. Every person begins life in a state of relative helplessness and develops a characteristic response to that helplessness — a striving toward competence, significance, or power. This striving is not pathological; it is the engine of development. It becomes problematic only when the direction of the striving is mistaken — aimed at compensation rather than genuine contribution.
- Lifestyle. The "lifestyle" in Adlerian terms is not a way of living — it is the private logic through which a person understands themselves, others, and the world. It is formed early, often by age 6, and acts as a lens through which all subsequent experience is filtered.
- Goals of misbehavior. Dreikurs, building on Adler, described four goals that drive children's difficult behavior: attention, power, revenge, and assumed inadequacy. The behavior makes sense once you identify the goal beneath it.
- Social interest (Gemeinschaftsgefühl). The felt sense of connection to and concern for others. Adler considered this the central indicator of psychological health — and its absence the root of most psychological disturbance.
Kottman's Adlerian Play Therapy
Terry Kottman (2011) formalized Adlerian Play Therapy (AdPT) as a structured, four-phase approach that integrates Adler's theory with play therapy techniques. Kottman's genius was recognizing that play — including tray work — is an ideal medium for gathering lifestyle information, building relationship, and ultimately supporting insight in a way that translates to behavior change.
Kottman's four phases are:
Reading the tray through an Adlerian lens
Lifestyle themes in the build
The tray is a projective field for the child's lifestyle. A child whose private logic is "I only matter when I'm in control" may build organized, tightly controlled scenes — or, when they can't control the outcome, may demolish what they've made. A child whose private logic is "I don't belong anywhere" may build scenes populated by isolated figures with no proximity. The content of the tray, read alongside what you know of the child's family structure and presenting concerns, becomes lifestyle information.
Kottman encourages clinicians to hold tray observations loosely — as hypotheses about lifestyle, not diagnoses of it. "I notice that the figures in your tray seem to be far apart from each other. I wonder what it's like for them." That "I wonder" is Adlerian: tentative, curious, never insisting on the interpretation.
Goals of misbehavior visible in the tray
Dreikurs's four goals can show up in how a child uses the tray, not just what they build:
- Attention: Frequent glances at the clinician to ensure they're watching; building things specifically to show off; asking repeatedly whether the clinician thinks the tray is good.
- Power: Refusal to build when invited; insisting on rules that govern how the clinician must respond; building and then demolishing before the clinician can react.
- Revenge: Builds that enact themes of punishment, destruction, or cruelty; figures that represent the clinician or family members being harmed.
- Assumed inadequacy: Paralysis at the figure selection; claiming "I don't know how" before starting; abandoned trays; builds that are completed quickly and dismissively as if anticipating criticism.
These observations inform the clinician's relational response. A child seeking attention needs encouragement for effort, not performance. A child using power needs genuine choice and limited power struggles. A child enacting revenge needs the relationship to survive the expression. A child demonstrating assumed inadequacy needs very small, very certain successes.
Birth order and family atmosphere
Adler placed significant weight on birth order and family atmosphere in shaping lifestyle. In the tray, it is useful to notice how a child populates family scenes — who is central, who is peripheral, who is missing, what the relationships between figures suggest about the child's experience of their own family position. This is not interpretive in a psychoanalytic sense; it is observational. "I notice there's no father figure in your tray. I wonder about that." Then wait.
Encouragement as the primary intervention
Adler considered discouragement — the belief that one cannot succeed, does not belong, is not good enough — the root of most presenting problems. The antidote is encouragement: specific, effort-focused, relationship-based feedback that counters the private logic of inadequacy or insignificance.
In the tray, encouragement sounds like noticing the child's care in selecting a figure, their persistence in rearranging a scene, or the creativity of what they've built — without evaluating the product. "You spent a long time finding exactly the right house for that family" is encouragement. "Your tray is so pretty today" is praise. Adlerians distinguish these carefully: encouragement builds intrinsic motivation, praise builds performance orientation.
Adlerian concepts map well onto school counseling because school is precisely the setting where children are working out their sense of belonging and significance. A child who is disruptive in class is often, in Adlerian terms, a child who has not found a legitimate way to matter. The tray gives them a space to matter — to be the architect of a world — while you track what that world reveals about how they understand their place in the real one.
Working with parents from an Adlerian frame
Kottman's model explicitly includes parent consultation. In Adlerian theory, the child's lifestyle is co-created with the family system — it cannot be understood or changed without attending to that system. Parent consultations in AdPT use the same tentative, curious stance: exploring parents' goals, the family atmosphere, and how the adults in the child's life may be inadvertently reinforcing discouraged beliefs.
For school counselors with limited session time, even a brief parent check-in framed around "what is your child working toward?" rather than "what is your child doing wrong?" can begin to shift the relational pattern from punishment-discouragement to encouragement-belonging.
Citations & Further Reading
- Adler, A. (1992). Understanding human nature (C. Brett, Trans.). Oneworld. (Original work published 1927)
- Dreikurs, R. (1967). Psychodynamics, psychotherapy, and counseling. Alfred Adler Institute.
- Dreikurs, R., & Soltz, V. (1964). Children: The challenge. Duell, Sloan & Pearce.
- Kottman, T. (2011). Play therapy: Basics and beyond (2nd ed.). American Counseling Association.
- Kottman, T., & Meany-Walen, K. (2016). Partners in play: An Adlerian approach to play therapy (3rd ed.). American Counseling Association.
- Meany-Walen, K. K., Kottman, T., Bullis, Q., & Taylor, D. D. (2015). Effects of Adlerian play therapy on children's externalizing behavior. Journal of Counseling & Development, 93(4), 418–428.
- Sweeney, D. S., & Homeyer, L. E. (1999). The handbook of group play therapy. Jossey-Bass.