THE PARTECIPATED CONSTRUCTION OF AN IMAGE
THE PARTECIPATED CONSTRUCTION OF AN IMAGE
EXPERIMENTAL METHOD OF THERAPEUTIC PHOTOGRAPHY
The aim of this project is to create a photo book of portraits starting from a series of sessions during which I, together with the patient, create images based on their experience of suffering. To do so, we focus on the emotions that arise when the patient remembers the painful times in their life.
It’s about giving a visual structure to the emotions, creating a photographical space in which the patients can find their place. This place becomes the narration of the frame of mind the patient is in when they remember their moment of suffering.
After this phase of participated image design, I prepare small photosets using different materials, where the performance can take place and where I can set new pictures.
The last step consists in putting together all the elements that make up the various scenes. It’s a long and demanding work of postproduction, that is done using specific photo editing software. In this phase the patient participates directly, in order to make sure that the resulting images are exactly what they had in mind. This is fundamental, because the patient must be able to recognize themselves in the pictures.
This activity had very interesting outcomes not only as far as psychotherapy is concerned, but also as a method of personal formation.
PROJECTS
PROJECTS
“I believe that it is not hyperbole to say that the psychological work that occurs at the frontier between the preconscious and unconscious minds is at the very core of what it means to be alive as a human being. The frontier is the “place” where dreaming and reverie experience occur; where play and creativity of every sort are born; where wit and charm germinate before they find their way (as if out of nowhere) into a conversation, a poem, a gesture, or a facial expression; where symptomatic compromise formations are generated and timelessly go on hunting us and sapping vitality from us as they provide order and the illusion of safety at the cost of freedom.”
Thomas H. Ogden, Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming, 2001
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It is always difficult for both therapists and patients to approach sad, painful and mournful experiences, and to go through them together. The treatment sometimes stops when facing resistance; this resistance hinders the re-narration of trauma, which would allow the patients to accept their pain as true and the beginning of their healing.
In such cases, this method is absolutely valuable: what cannot be expressed with words is conveyed through the use of images; this allows the patients to get close to their emotions and to their life experience taking a different path, at the frontier of dreaming.
As for my direct clinical experience, the use of such images during therapy sessions reconnects the patients with their psychological journey, in continuity with the photographic journey. And all of this happens in a very brief time span.
Images function as facilitator in accessing what cannot be seen, in discovering what remains unconscious and hidden. Fixing the elusive aspects of the unconscious, they allow the patient to experience it while building a relationship with the therapist, which results in improving the treatment outcome while also enhancing the cooperation.
It’s all about cooperation, then. It’s a polyphony, created with different voices (the therapist’s, the photographer’s and the patient’s) which are different but harmonious. This teaches us that in order to defeat a monster, you must be able to imagine and tell a story.
Luca Bonini (psychologist and psychotherapist)
I started to get interested in photography more than forty years ago, even before deciding I would become a family therapist. It hit me almost instantly that photographing was essentially a relational act, and photography was a “symbolical-relational” creation.
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In the ‘80s I went to Rome to study, and had Rodolfo de Bernart as a mentor. It was him who made me realise the importance and the power of images in mental and relational processes. We started using videoclips, family pictures, and other tools (e.g. picture collages) which could help us bring to light inner images and produce new ones. We think through images, we remember through images. Photography fixes an image in a certain time, it freezes the moment, and at the same time it makes it eternal; it also conveys and exchanges emotions, stimulating thoughts and feelings. I got to know the works of people who are influent in the field of phototherapy, such as Judy Weiser and Cristina Nuñez with their self-portraits, and about one year ago, the work by Silvia Ettacani.
I think her work stands out for at least two reasons:
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In a photoset specifically devoted to the project, patient and photographer collaborate in an experience of co-creation, which aims to produce images. I think it is significative also because it is an experience of personal exchange, which is potentially corrective of the dynamics the patient has gone through in the family environment.
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This last aspect shows that it is coherent and desirable to combine this kind of work to sessions of “classical” psychotherapy. The patients can use their relevant life experience both for photographic production and clinical treatment.