Sand Story Counseling for Korean Early Childhood and Young Students: Life History Research on Heesoon Cho's Life Works and their Meanings

This study centers on the dynamics of psychology theory. Drawing upon Heesoon Cho's life, we aim to extract and analyze sand story counseling in her personal and academic experiences. Additionally, we aim to investigate her process of adapting sand play techniques into Korean sand story counseling and explore how this adaptation of sandplay, along with its dissemination, contributed to early childhood development, counseling, and psychological exploratory behaviors in Korea. To avoid bias, we adopted a life history method, including collaborative interviews and triangulation. The results reflected Cho’s life chronologically, describing significant events in her life. Using existing Western theories, Cho transformed and acculturated the existing sandplay technique into sand story counseling in the Korean context. Cho observed significant positive outcomes through sand story counseling. Sand story counseling theory significantly contributed to professional counseling. This study strongly supports future culture-fit counseling research in Korea, as opposed to adopting Western theories.