The power of personal collage in deepening self-awareness
Clare McCarthy, ATR-BC, LCPC
“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”
― DW Winnicott, Playing and Reality
How can collage making reveal and deepen our understanding of ourselves?
As we move through life, we absorb narratives and concepts about ourselves them from others, including our family of origin and our larger culture. Often these narratives are collective created, and may actually obscure and harm the development of an accurate self-understanding. Challenging a verbal narrative about ourselves that we have constructed from feedback from the world around us can feel uncomfortably confrontational. It can also be difficult to find the language to articulate and examine the imbedded self-concepts without becoming emotionally overwhelmed or shut down. Using art therapy collage, we are able to start from a non-judgmental place of collecting self-reflective images that we are intuitively drawn to, and curating the images into a cohesive framework that reflects and clarifies our authentic self-understanding. This creative process helps to expand our ability to tap into our unique visual awareness and intuitive thought processes in order to shape an integrated, personally accurate sense of self.
Images give us a starting place in accessing our murky internal self-concept
Having difficulty appreciating our unique personal qualities can contribute to both depression and anxiety. Art psychotherapy can assist us by providing us a place to start in looking within ourselves. Creating a personal art therapy collage can provide a tangible way of examining the following questions:
1.) What images are we intuitively drawn to?
2.) What might these images be reflective of in our memory networks?
4.) What are the narratives and cultural components that might fit with this imagery?
5.) How do we react to these concepts when we see them as reflecting of ourselves?
Collages use different components of our memory to help us unpack and reorganize imbedded memory networks contributing to mental health problems
Autobiographical memory, or memory about ourselves, is a type of explicit memory that includes elements of episodic memory (memory of specific events) and semantic memory (knowledge of facts about the self and the events we have experienced). For individuals who have experienced traumatic events, autobiographical memory is frequently disrupted or poorly integrated. This can make it difficult to put into words aspects of our prior experiences, and may leave us feeling frequently disorganized or scattered within our own minds. College making allows us to access our broader and more durable recognition memory to visually identify with aspects of potentially fragmented or sensorially encoded memory networks, and expand the associated context through a flexible and rewarding artistic process. While college making is supportive for a variety of personal growth goals, it can be particularly valuable in the treatment of ptsd—both in combination with traditional approaches, as well as an alternative to medicine.
Collage mirrors the multi-layered process of understanding and reimagining our sense of self as complex and dynamic
Collage is flexible, and gives us a chance to use the iterative design process (making many sequential layered choices and reassessing decisions without becoming quickly attached to a final static version) in a way that helps us understand that the self is not a static concept and goes through frequent shifts and perspective changes as we encounter new experiences. Self-reflective collage making can also help us to recognize our own growth over time as we compare and contrast expressive arts therapy collages made at various times in our therapeutic work.
The artistic freedom and playful act of creating of collage encourages imaginative play, and gives us a physical space to individually conceptualize our own unique view of ourselves
The creation of a personal collage can be a quiet act of self-declaration. Using our own rational and intuitive processes we are able to use a non-verbal process to make statements and declarations about who we are. In fixing the images together in our completed product we are communicating many interconnected concepts, visually stating “this is what I have made sense of, the pieces I have sorted out and put together, the memories I have integrated, and the person I see myself as being. While my identity may shift and change, I am accepting this version now as whole, unique, and creatively alive.”
