M.A. / This qualitative study will research five children's experience of long-term play therapy, from the perspective of the child. In exploring and describing the children's experience, the study will be a tentative delving into the 'inner workings' of one approach to play therapy, developed by this researcher in her private clinical practice. The research will aim to begin to make explicit the 'sub-text' of play therapy; that is, to give a voice to the child patient's usually unarticulated experience of the helping process. By directly researching the child's experience of play therapy from the perspective of the child, the study will represent a departure from the emphasis clinicians and researchers have historically placed on their theories and professional roles in therapeutic practice and discourse: Gardner, (1993) for example, in his account of the development of play therapy techniques in the twentieth century, reviews a broad range of classical and contemporary texts, all of which promote the central role of practitioners and their theories. Further, as noted by Spinelli (1994:77), "somewhat amazingly, given the large amount of studies dealing with therapy and therapists, there exist very few exhaustive studies that focus exclusively on the client's experience of therapy.'