Katherine Bradway

Katherine “Kay” Bradway, who died on May 7, 2013, at the age of 102, stood at the intersection of analytical psychology and sandplay therapy throughout the years when the interrelationship between these two healing disciplines was first being formed. After she became a Jungian analyst in 1954, she helped to integrate other psychologists into the analytic training group that had initially been created largely by medical doctors. This led to the formation of the Society of Jungian Analysts of Northern California, which, during her presidency, took steps to create the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. In 1985, Kay became a founding member of the International Society for Sandplay Therapy. She co-founded Sandplay Therapists of America in 1986 and mentored younger therapists in many parts of the world. She also co-authored three seminal books about sandplay therapy: Sandplay Studies: Origins, Theory, and Practice (Sigo Press, 1981 and 1988), Sandplay: Silent Workshop of the Psyche (Taylor & Francis, 1997), and Sandplay in Three Voices: Images, Relationships, the Numinous (Routledge 2005).

In her 2010 memoir, Journeys Long and Short: Some of my 100 years, Kay Bradway tells us that she was born Katherine Preston in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on November 17, 1910. Her mother was a homemaker and her father was an accounting professor. Kay skipped two grades of school, graduating high school and starting college at age fifteen. She majored in psychology at the University of Minnesota where she also got her master's degree. In 1942, she earned a doctorate in psychology from Stanford.

As a young, married woman with her formal education behind her and a patchwork of employment pulling her in different directions, Bradway began to wonder seriously about her future direction and to feel a need to explore depth psychology. After two brief unsuccessful starts at undergoing Freudian psychoanalysis, she began a Jungian analysis with Joseph Wheelwright in which she felt immediately at home. Her analytical mind and early academic work opportunities had drawn her into statistical psychological research based on assessment instruments. In Jo Wheelwright, she must have found an analyst who could appreciate not only her acute thinking but also her powerful intuitive gifts. A few years into her personal work with Jo, she decided to study to become a Jungian analyst herself. In this decision, she was supported by her friend Clare Thompson, who was also on a path to become an analyst. Elizabeth Whitney and Joseph Henderson were among her teachers. The timing of her certification as an analyst came as a surprise. Kay was informed only after the fact that a case presentation she had made with little preparation to a group of analysts had been her one and only certification exam!

In 1962, while chairing the program committee of the North-South Conference of California Jungian analysts, Kay met Dora Kalff and heard her lecture about using sandplay in therapy. After that, Kay took every opportunity she could to experience and study sandplay—first, locally, with Renee Brand and then with Kalff—both in Zürich and during Kalff's periodic visits to California. It was Kalff who near the end of her own career invited Kay to join in the founding of the International Society for Sandplay Therapy.

Although she had honed the traditional techniques of Jungian “talking therapy” and was used to occasionally responding with great pertinence, Bradway was remarkably open to the largely nonverbal approach to therapy that Kalff had advocated for the sandplay process, which was predominantly symbolic. Testing out this point of view empirically from her own personal experience, Kay came to agree with Dora Kalff that sandplay's healing value is in the numinous experience of creative symbolizing, more than in any subsequent intellectual understanding. For example, fully ten years elapsed after Bradway did sandplay with Kalff before Kalff reviewed the photographs with Kay and was willing to talk about their meaning. Looking back on the course of that therapy, Bradway realized that if the same interpretations had been made during the active time of her symbolic work with Kalff, she would not have been ready to hear what this therapist thought about what she was still in the process of making her own. In Sandplay: Silent Workshop of the Psyche, she advises the therapist to wait about five years before reviewing photographs of the sand worlds with the patient, and even then, she counsels, the review process need not be seen as an opportunity for the therapist to make interpretations.

As both analyst and sandplay therapist, Bradway trusted the symbolizing process in analysands and did not feel a need to direct it. Rather, she saw her role as containing, observing, and recording the process with empathy and analytic understanding. “The creative process is always therapeutic,” Bradway wrote. The series of symbolic tableaux that the analysand produces in the sand forms, in other words, a coherent enough record of coping and individuation.

Bradway ceased her private practice around the time of her seventy-ninth birthday, but she remained active in supervising groups of sandplay therapists into her ninetieth year. Many of her women students became devoted friends as well, and it was not hard to see why. In both her professional and personal life, Bradway was, like some of her ancestors, a pioneering woman, notable for her intelligence, her courage, a lack of pretense, and a lively curiosity and openness to new ideas. Modest without ever lacking confidence, she was ready to learn from any available source; in her 1997 book, she credits an eight-year-old patient as one of her most important teachers about how sandplay can facilitate healing.

For seventy-two years, Kay was married to the visual artist Firman “Brad” Bradway. The gentle attunement and mutual appreciation the two shared was an inspiration to this writer and, I imagine, to many others who knew them. After Brad's death in 2007, Kay was able to remain in her comfortable Sausalito home with a spectacular view of the Bay, and although she suffered a number of physical impairments in these last years, thanks to her devoted caregivers she could receive her many friends in a familiar place, surrounded by Brad's paintings, including his portrait of her. In those last years, she worked on her writing, both fiction and nonfiction, dictating when she could no longer see well enough to type. At that time, I had the pleasure of reading some of my own work to her and got a chance to experience the depth of Kay's ability to listen. Generous with her attention, imagination, and material resources to the last, she actively supported the development of a new program at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco for training in the analysis of children.