Collage and the Reimagining of Community

By Ricky Varghese

As a psychoanalyst, I know a little bit about what it looks like to feel disorganized at the psychic level. When you lie on the couch and free-associate to your therapist, as in when you speak on matters that come to the top of your mind, freely and openly, without judgment, reservation, or censoring yourself, you can feel all over the place, disorganized as it were. 

One might argue that this is part of the therapeutic process, at least in the context of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic forms of therapy, wherein the hope is that such free-associative speech will bring to the surface otherwise deeply embedded or repressed memories, histories, affects, feelings, and emotions that need to be resolved in the therapeutic setting. It feels like collaging, precisely because, at first glance, it feels disorganized. 

To feel disorganized is to feel human in this context. You, as a patient or client, start bringing up references that cut across different timespans and from different moments in your life, across a myriad of non-linear temporalities, and it becomes the role of the psychoanalyst, as an objective outsider to your life, to facilitate in the co-construction of meaning from all that you narrate about yourself. It feels like collaging because the collage, as an aesthetic and artistic category, puts the past in a dialectical and dialogical relationship with the present by mashing up visual and textual references that feel unrelated to, or incongruous with, one another. The philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote, “[the] interior is the asylum where art takes refuge.” The psychoanalyst helps the patient make meaning out of this place of interiority, out of a complex set of relationships between their past and their life in the present, between words, thoughts, and memories that, ostensibly, feel or appear to be unrelated, disconnected, perhaps even somewhat disorganized and chaotic. In this sense, because the interest of the analyst is in the life of one’s most intimate sense of interiority, the place of unconscious refuge and safety, psychoanalytic practice is an art form precisely in the style of collaging.

How does the idea of community then fit into this context? One might argue that the very notion of community is a fantasy structure that all of us, each one of us, has some sort of complicated relationship to. Some of us feel safe in them, some others feel like they exist on the margins of them or on the outside. Community, much like the collage, is open to being made, unmade, remade, interpreted and continuously reinterpreted. It is rooted in notions of identification with and across markers of similarity or difference that we may hold with others. 

When I observe that the idea of community might be a fantasy structure, I am not suggesting that feelings of belonging, non-belonging, identification, feeling sameness or difference and otherness, are not real or don’t have material consequences. Of course, these are real and profoundly grounded in each of our very specific and particular material and historical realities. Rather, what I mean is that like all fantasies, any sense of a community that is founded on ethical grounds, that puts social justice at the forefront of its concerns, needs to be one that is open – open to be critiqued, challenged, made, unmade, and remade time and again. Ultimately, like the therapeutic setting that is founded on the possibility of a safe and comfortable relationship emerging between the therapist and the patient, one that allows the patient to feel slowly but surely included and welcome, a community needs to remain receptive – receptive to always already be ready to stage a necessary dialogue between its past and its ongoing evolution in the present.

This is why perhaps the collage feels like an apt metaphor or analogy for a sense of community that might be possible – one that feels like its members are always working toward being inclusive, safe, equitable, ethical, and just.