Thérèse Mei-Yau Woodcock Archive Relating to Lowenfeld Mosaics Projects

The following is an interim description which may change when detailed cataloguing takes place in future:

Note: This archive includes a significant volume of sensitive personal data in the form of resident/client files, files on staff/trainers and information on participants in other projects. When the collection is catalogued, some of this data will require closure for the lifetime of the data subjects in accordance with the 1998 Data Protection Act. Other parts of the archive will be assessed for sensitive content and may be closed or restricted for specified periods.

Archives of Thérèse Woodcock relating to Lowenfeld Mosaics technique projects, notably Hayfield Support Services with Deaf People, Glasgow, 1990s-c.2000, and Chinese Cross-Cultural Mosaics Project 1980s-1990s, plus associated mosaics projects and papers and presentations by Woodcock. Includes client mosaics and assessment files, administrative papers and correspondence, original artwork and colour transparencies of mosaics from various projects. The majority of this research work and material was summarised and interpreted in Woodcock's book Expressing the Shape and Colour of Personality. Using Lowenfeld Mosaics in Psychotherapy and Cross-Cultural Research (Sussex Academic Press, 2006).

1980s-c.2000

7 boxes

Donated to the library at Wellcome Collection by Thérèse Mei-Yau Woodcock, 24/08/2016

Thérèse Mei-Yau Lo was born and educated in Hong Kong, graduating in English Language and Literature, University of Hong Kong, 1956. In 1957 she arrived in England and undertook the one year Postgraduate Diploma course in Librarianship and Archives at University College London. Due to lengthy illness Thérèse did not qualify, but soon after qualified as a teacher at the Maria Gray College, University of London and worked as both a teacher and librarian.

In 1969 Thérèse Mei-Yau Woodcock began a three-year postgraduate course in child psychotherapy at the Institute of Child Psychology, London. The Institute was founded by Dr Margaret Lowenfeld in 1931 (originally set up as the Children's Clinic for the Treatment Study of Nervous and Difficult Children, 1928) and during her studies Thérèse was personally supervised and received extensive training from Dr Lowenfeld in the use of the psychotherapeutic techniques she pioneered such as Mosaics and Worlds (Sandplay). Having qualified in 1972, Thérèse also became a full member of the Association of Child Psychotherapists. She went on to work for 25 years in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in the NHS in the Greater London area, specialising in Lowenfeld play therapy techniques. During her career she has taught the use of the Lowenfeld Mosaics to a wide range of professionals who work with children – child psychotherapists and psychiatrists, paediatric social workers, paediatric occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, play therapists, guardians, specialist nurses, workers with the deaf, among others.

In the 1980s Woodcock became interested in the use of Lowenfeld Mosaics as a research tool for cross-cultural study and in 1986 embarked on a project to study the responses of Chinese children from different cultural backgrounds to the Lowenfeld Mosaic Test. (Previous work had identified a persistence among Chinese children from different cultural backgrounds of characteristic responses to the Test). The first two stages of the project involved collecting Mosaics from samples of Chinese children in Guangzhou (Canton), Guangdong Province, China, and Chinese children in England educated within the English school system but who also attended extra-curricular Chinese language classes. The third sample, completed in 1991, came from Chinese families in San Francisco, USA, who had settled into that culture and had not learned any Chinese language, their native language being English. The study results showed starkly different outcomes between the Chinese children in the USA and those in China, indicating that the former had a very insular outlook compared to the wide-ranging cultural outlook indicated by mosaics of the children sampled in China. The results for English children fell somewhere in between in that they were freer in what they depicted in their mosaics than Chinese children in the USA. A summary and analysis of the study is included in Woodcock's book Expressing the shape and culture of personality: using Lowenfeld Mosaics in psychotherapy and cross-cultural research (2006).

From the late 1980s Thérèse taught and, in many cases, pioneered courses on Lowenfeld techniques. These included in 1988 a course on the use of the Lowenfeld Mosaics for teachers and workers at a rehabilitation unit for deaf people in Glasgow (Hayfield Support Services with Deaf People) which continued until 2000; a post as visiting tutor to the Institute of Dramatherapy in 1992; a newly created post at the University of Cambridge Department of Developmental Psychiatry, set up in September 1992 with the support of the Dr Margaret Lowenfeld Trust, to teach and develop Lowenfeld's theories specifically Protosystem thinking and E and her play therapy techniques. From 1992-1996 Thérèse helped to establish and became Director of a MSc Programme in Lowenfeld Projective Play Therapy which commenced in 1999 and was retrospectively validated by Middlesex University in 2000 (see PP/LOW/T/24, covering 1994-2004). The course ceased in 2004 due to government financial cuts and the difficulties students had in taking the required time off from work.

In addition to the Association of Child Psychotherapists, Thérèse Mei-Yau Woodcock is a member of The Association of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, The Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture and The United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy. She was a trustee of The Open Way Charitable Trust (extant 1957-1998) which operated to promote the study and teaching of psychology and psychotherapy so as to advance the physical, mental and moral health of mankind. She is currently a trustee of the Dr Margaret Lowenfeld Trust.

Born in British Hong Kong in 1935, Thérèse was six years old when in 1941 Japan extended its invasion of China to the British colony. Her family moved to Canton on mainland China and lived there between 1944 and 1947, afterwards returning to Hong Kong. The extremes of occupation and hardship during the war have, in her view, influenced Thérèse's path towards and work in the caring professions especially with children, as well as her ardent pacifism.

In 1969 Thérèse married Jasper Woodcock (1926-2015). Jasper was director of the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence from 1975 until his retirement in 1993. The organisation later merged with the Standing Conference on Drug Abuse to become DrugScope in 2000 (which closed down in 2015 due to lack of funds). They have two children.

For further information on and the papers of Dr Margaret Lowenfeld (1890-1973) see PP/LOW and the website of the Dr Margaret Lowenfeld Trust, http://lowenfeld.org/.

The archive of Margaret Lowenfeld. Which also includes papers in Section T generated by Woodcock (PP/LOW/T).

This collection is currently uncatalogued and cannot be ordered online. Requests to view uncatalogued material are considered on a case by case basis. Please contact collections@wellcomecollection.org for more details.