The Collage Path:
Fragmentation
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.
Psychotherapy generally assumes that the patient’s ego must be exposed gradually and cautiously to the experience of divergent impulses and ideas, and, accordingly, the psychotherapeutic process begins with the notion of a presumed (even if defensive) unity.
The
Collage Method works differently. The individual-developmental background presumed
by the Collage Method is the infant’s experience of incohesion—the
lack of a unified image of its own body or the surrounding world prior to the
integration of the perceptual field: the body-in-pieces; the world a flicker
of unstabilized appearances and vanishings. In this sense the Collage Path begins
at the beginning. Fragmentation is the hallmark of the modern age, but it is
also the point at which the human impulse toward form arises.