English summary
Most welcome to this website for therapeutic use of puppetry! A site with focus on puppettherapy with adults. For all you people working with this already, or are interested in working in the area.
Me myself am a social worker and symbolstherapist working mostly with young adults in the psychiatric field in Gothenburg, Sweden. My interest in combining puppetry with therapy quite recently made me realize the idea of trying to widen the theraputic field of puppetry by making a website. My aim is mainly to give basic information and inspiration for interested people, but also to provide a type of playground for further development in Sweden. Therefore using swedish language.
Compared to international perspectives Sweden is a country where puppetry quite much still is for children only. Fortunately this is on its way to change. But in the therapeutic area this is even more obvious. I would say it doesn´t have any space at all. At least not officially. Therefore the use of a webbased playground (!). A playground in which everything is accepted. Where different therapeutic theories can meet such as psychoanalytic, jungian, cognitive and narrative as well as technicques from art therapy, play therapy, drama therapy and psychodrama. All with the same base in looking at the puppet as an extension of the self - similarily to what is sometimes referred to as psychopuppetry*.
A puppeteer and occupational therapist called Ingrid Lagerqvist is the one person in Sweden I take off from when starting my journey in this new webbased vehichle. She is a great model for combining puppetry and therapy, but also the only person in this country as far as I know to explore the puppettherapy area. She became interested in drama, musictherapy and puppetry early in life, and was also the child of polish puppeteers. Hand- and paperpuppets were her specialty working in the area from 1951 til she passed away some years ago in Austria. From 1969 she was also a co-founder of UNIMA-Sweden. Her work was mainly in schools for children with special needs, although she also practised her work in childrens hospitals and psychiatric wards. She specially emphasized the use of puppetry as a continuous method including the whole process from creation to play.
Since I can´t reprase all written on this website, I´ll shortly just tell you what it contains. Except for telling some more about Ingrid Lagerqvist, the area of puppettherapy and its advanages is briefly described (see "Dockteaterterapi" with some english quotations). Things like the protective, empowering and healing sides of puppettherapy are mentioned here. A lot of this information is also possible to get in english by reading the ten last chapters in book mentioned in the bottom of this page. "Litteratur" is possible to click on even for englishspeaking people since it is a list over articles and litterature related to the subject. "Länkar" simply means links and include international links in the second half of the page. After that comes information about upcoming events ("Aktuellt") mainly in Sweden / Europe, contactinformation ("Kontakt") and a guestbook that you are most welcome to sign ("Gästbok").
I sincerely hope you got at least parts of what you expected from this website. If not, or for other reasons, don´t hesitate to contact me at: dockteaterterapi@live.se
Questions, tip and opinions are most welcome!
Best regards Åsa Viklund, Sweden
* Matthew Bernier p.110 in: Bernier, M & O´Hare, J (red) (2005) Puppetry in Education and Therapy – Unlocking Doors to the Mind and Heart.