The Collage Path:
Scan & grasp
The path continues with scanning, reaching-out, and grasping—perceptually based actions that correspond to the orality of infancy and to the expression of desire in adulthood. These actions open deep reservoirs of psychic hunger, initiating the complex passage from physiological need, to articulated demand, to unconscious desire.
Scan the specially constructed book of public photographs. Let your hand follow the lead of your eyes. Reach out for, and pull out of the book, whatever pictures attract you. Pull out pictures you find appealing as well as ones that irritate you, or that draw your attention in some unknown way. Take whatever non-picture materials you wish from the community chest.
People
know far more about themselves than they know how to say. They bear this knowledge
non-discursively, in capacities for recognizing, reacting to, and handling (and
being handled by) significant images, and in the implicit rules that govern
the self’s orienting maneuvers among its objects.
It is the aim of the collage process first to elicit this non-discursive, feeling-laden
knowledge, which is vividly expressed in acts of scanning and grasping visual
images, and in bodily orientations and movements within an image-configuration,
and then to coax this knowledge into less immediate forms of representation.
Access to such more distanced forms enables the self to become disentangled
from fusions with loved and hated objects, thus providing the foundation for
lively desire as well as for liberated conscious choice and will.
The formative trajectory in which the collage images are utilized moves, in
its non-discursive as well as its discursive strand, toward expression in articulate
speech. The transformations accomplished in the non-discursive strand support
the progression toward verbalization. Verbalization actually occurs, of course,
only in the therapeutic interviews, in the medium of sound, in Speaking of Collages,
not in Making them.
The image strand supports the movement toward speech not only through the logic
of its progression, but also through the very resistance that its medium offers
to discursive formulation. The difficulty of distinguishing, in an image medium,
between signifier and signified, symbolizes the resistance that repressed emotional
material offers to thought.
Making psychological-semiotic resistance tangible in the image strand of the
collage path enables the defensive functions served by non-articulation to be
partially transferred to the inertial weight of the medium itself. When resistance
is approached from the side of the image, and when images are utilized in a
formative process through which they are progressively symbolized, as occurs
in Making Collages, then the resistance offered by the image medium changes
sign from negative to positive, and begins to provide a supportive ground for
the risky leaps entailed in expression.
An image process that follows the structure of a series of linguistic transformations,
even though it never becomes full speech, nevertheless makes a powerful contribution
to the coding operations that, finally, enable unconscious meanings to be spoken.
This use of images bridges the gap between the imagistic form in which repressed
meanings circulate as signifiers in the unconscious, and the verbal form in
which they can become conscious and accessible to re-coding.
Coordination among eye, hand and mouth has been called the earliest organizer
of the psyche. In the “Scan and Grasp” step, the eye and hand are
enlisted in acts of rapid recognition and reaching-out. It is difficult to overestimate
the evocative and cognitive depths to which this activity reaches in various
psychic zones.