Introduction
to the Collage Method:
Chaos, Creation, & Collage
The
Collage Method consists of a progressive sequence of physical activities and
a closely correlated series of therapeutic interviews.
Taken one by one the physical activities of collage-making appear disarmingly
simple, so simple in fact that their significance easily escapes notice. However,
when they are taken together, as an integrated series of transformations, a
quite surprising symbolism appears. The activities entailed in making and physically
transforming collages can then be seen to embody the logic of psychological
development. These activities comprise an extended metaphor: they symbolize
the growth of the human mind.
This correspondence between a series of ‘simple’ activities on the
one hand, and a subtle developmental logic on the other, is the key to the Collage
Method. Thanks to this correspondence, the Collage Method enables the collage
maker to re-trace, in a forward direction, the path by which the psyche develops
in infancy, childhood, and adolescence.
The logic of psychological development is not something one leaves behind as
one ‘grows up.’ Childhood is important precisely because it provides
access to a universal generative function, which is the logic of creativity
in general. The psychotherapeutic power of the Collage Method derives from the
fact that it provides a way to re-access this universal logic of creation.
On the Collage Path every step is symbolic. Every step on this path symbolizes
some essential increment of symbolizing capability. That is why it is possible
to say that the Collage Path symbolizes symbolization. Expressed differently,
the collage process provides a ‘user interface’ to the mind’s
inner black box, a way to engage the psychoformative action by which, in creating
and re-creating many types of symbols, the psyche keeps itself alive.
Why is the Collage Method a psychotherapeutic technique? The Collage Method
functions in two ways simultaneously: the Collage Path provides both an open
format for personal expression, and an ordered sequence for structural transformation.
This double-functioning enables people to tell their personal stories in such
a way that the stories open up, the elements become fluid and available to enter
into new combinations, and the teller/collage-maker becomes accessible to creative
change.
The specific images used by collage makers are important, of course, but the
content of these images, and the interpretation of this content, are approached
indirectly here: from the ‘bottom up.’ In this approach, the process
of discerning and interpreting meaning is enfolded within a re-creation of those
mental operations that establish meaning, and, more specifically, establish
the capactity to make meanings, in the first place.
In the same way that the progressive logic of psychological development transforms
the child’s experience, so also the operations performed upon the collage
transform the multi-image field. These structuring operations—highly abstract
and elusive in actual life, but in this method foregrounded and made concrete—are
the object of the Collage Path.
Re-creating these paradigmatic operations leads to interpretations of the particular,
very personal images, configurations, and transformations that appear during
the course of a collage process. But, more fundamentally, these operations produce
a psychological subject who is capable of forming and using such interpretations:
a “collage maker” who is a locus of subjectivity and is, himself or
herself, continually under construction.…
Specific images are chosen by collage makers because they are bearers of feeling,
or because they serve as emotional catalysts, marking essential positions in
what becomes, thanks to their presence, a highly charged emotional space. When
these feeling-laiden and feeling-marking images are combined in multi-image
configurations, the feelings at play are multiplied by the interactions that
occur among all the images. The amount of feeling in the total field can then
become nearly overwhelming.
Feelings intensify when strongly motivated images are brought close to each
other. A need then arises to re-structure the whole image-field in which these
images occur, so that mounting levels of excitation can be made bearable by
being channelized in new ways. Successive re-structurations raise the field
to progressively higher levels of organization, each new level governed by more
complex cognitive principles.
Over the course of a collage process the collage-maker’s core images and
key personal symbols, including ones that have been repressed or disavowed,
come to light. Given the depth of the developmental sequence that the Collage
Path re-creates, and the vividness of the materials it employs, they can scarcely
fail to do so. But these symbols emerge here in a formative context, in which
the primary object is not symbols but symbolization. This implies that the psychic
conditions that will enable these problematic, feeling-laiden symbols to be
clearly faced and progressively re-integrated, re-symbolized within a more differentiated
self — these symbolizing conditions are, on the Collage Path, re-created
along with the symbols they support.
The mind is, inherently, a pluralistic society; a collage is, above all, a contained
multiplicity. Hence it is not the action of isolated images, no matter how potent,
that motivates the movement we will follow here; it is, rather, energies and
tensions generated within multi-image fields that propel it. Accordingly, the
cultural background presumed by the Collage Path is the contemporary experience
of over-stimulation and fragmentation: the experience of multiple elements proliferating,
generating a surplus of feeling, becoming unmanageable. Fragmentation is both
a paradigmatic psychological symptom and an inescapable prelude to innovation;
a source of anxiety and pain, and an opening to the birth of new form.