SoulCollage in Individual Therapy: A Creative Approach to Self-Discovery and Inner Dialogue

SoulCollage is a creative, card-making process developed by Seena B. Fagan in the 1980s that uses collage, imagery, and structured inner dialogue to access and give voice to the different aspects of the self. It is not a conventional psychotherapy modality — it does not have a clinical protocol, a diagnostic application, or a pharmacological mechanism. What it offers, when integrated into individual therapy, is a visual, intuitive, and deeply personal framework for exploring the inner world in ways that language-based approaches often cannot reach.

For clients who struggle to access their inner experience through words alone — whether because of trauma, alexithymia, intellectual defenses, or simply a different relationship to verbal processing — SoulCollage provides an alternative entry point. The images speak before the words arrive, and what emerges in the process often surprises both client and therapist with its accuracy and depth.

What SoulCollage Is

SoulCollage is built around the creation of a personal deck of cards — each card made from magazine images, photographs, and other visual material collaged onto a 5×8 inch backing. Each card represents an aspect of the self: an inner part, an emotion, a recurring pattern, a relationship dynamic, a guiding figure, or a quality the creator is cultivating or struggling with.

The card-making process is intuitive rather than analytical. Participants are guided to select images that speak to them without necessarily knowing why — trusting the pull of an image as meaningful before its meaning is fully understood. This intuitive selection process is itself therapeutically significant: it bypasses the cognitive filtering that verbal processing depends on and allows material from the unconscious to surface through the language of image.

Once cards are made, the SoulCollage reading process — a structured dialogue in which the creator speaks in the first person as the card — gives voice to what each card represents. Beginning with the phrase “I am the one who…”, the creator allows the image to speak through them, often discovering material they did not consciously know they were carrying.

The Theoretical Foundations

SoulCollage draws on several streams of psychological and transpersonal thought that connect directly to frameworks already present in individual therapy:

Jungian Psychology and Archetypal Imagery

Carl Jung’s understanding of the unconscious — and particularly his concepts of archetypes, the collective unconscious, and individuation — is foundational to SoulCollage’s theoretical framework. The SoulCollage deck is organized into four suits, two of which map directly onto Jungian concepts: the Committee suit (inner sub-personalities and parts) and the Community suit (significant people and animals from the creator’s life).

The Council suit represents archetypal figures — energies that transcend individual biography and connect to universal human experience. The Transpersonal suit represents the deepest layers of the self, connecting to spiritual experience and the mystery at the center of existence. This four-suit structure reflects a transpersonal psychological framework that honors both the personal and the beyond-personal dimensions of human experience.

Parts-Based Psychology and IFS

The Committee suit of SoulCollage — representing the inner parts, voices, and sub-personalities that make up the internal cast of characters — maps directly onto the parts-based framework of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy developed by Richard Schwartz. IFS identifies managers, exiles, and firefighters as distinct inner parts, each with their own perspective, history, and protective function. SoulCollage cards in the Committee suit give these parts a visual form and a voice — making the abstract framework of parts work tangible and personally specific in a way that verbal description alone rarely achieves.

Clients familiar with IFS often find that creating SoulCollage cards for their parts deepens the parts work significantly. A manager part that has been described verbally in therapy becomes more fully known — and more available for the compassionate attention that IFS requires — when it has been given an image and a voice through the SoulCollage process.

Expressive Arts Therapy

SoulCollage exists within the broader landscape of expressive arts therapy — therapeutic approaches that use creative media including visual art, music, movement, drama, and poetry as pathways to psychological material. Natalie Rogers’s person-centered expressive arts, Pat Allen’s open studio approach, and the more formally structured art therapy modality developed through the work of Edith Kramer and Margaret Naumburg all share SoulCollage’s foundational premise: that creative expression accesses material that verbal processing does not, and that the act of making something visible gives form to what was previously formless.

The distinction between SoulCollage and formal art therapy is that SoulCollage does not require artistic skill, art therapy training, or the specific clinical framework of art therapy. The collage process is accessible to anyone, and the images are provided by the culture — magazines, photographs, found imagery — rather than generated from scratch by the creator. This accessibility is one of SoulCollage’s most significant clinical assets.

Narrative Therapy

The SoulCollage reading process — speaking in the first person as the card — connects to the principles of narrative therapy developed by Michael White and David Epston. Narrative therapy understands the self as constituted through stories and works to externalize, examine, and re-author the dominant narratives that constrain a person’s sense of who they can be. The SoulCollage reading, in which a card speaks its own story, externalizes inner experience in a structurally similar way — creating enough distance for the creator to witness their own inner landscape with curiosity rather than being immediately captured by it.

How SoulCollage Is Used in Individual Therapy

Creating Cards as Therapeutic Process

The card-making process itself is therapeutic, independent of the reading that follows. Selecting images — moving through magazines with attention to what catches the eye, what produces a felt sense of recognition, what creates an unexpected emotional response — is an exercise in attending to implicit, body-felt knowing rather than explicit, conceptually mediated knowing.

For clients with trauma histories who struggle to access emotion through direct verbal inquiry, the indirect approach of image selection often opens what the direct approach cannot. The image carries the feeling without requiring the client to name or explain it first.

The SoulCollage Reading in Session

When a client brings a completed card into a therapy session and engages in the reading process — speaking in the first person as the card, following the prompt “I am the one who…” — what often emerges is material that neither the client nor the therapist anticipated. The card functions as a projective surface: the images carry associations, and speaking as the card activates those associations in ways that produce genuine discovery rather than rehearsed narrative.

The therapist’s role during a SoulCollage reading is to hold space, follow what emerges, and ask questions that deepen the dialogue: “What do you need?” “What are you protecting?” “What do you want this person to know?” These questions mirror the approach of parts-based work — because in the SoulCollage framework, every card is a part that deserves to be heard.

Working With Specific Presentations

SoulCollage has particular clinical relevance in several presenting contexts:

Trauma and dissociation — for clients whose trauma has fragmented their sense of self, SoulCollage offers a way of mapping the inner landscape that does not require narrative coherence. Each fragment can have a card; each part can be known and honored without being required to integrate prematurely.

Alexithymia — the difficulty identifying and naming emotional states that appears across many presentations, including depression, autism spectrum presentations, and some personality structures. Image selection accesses emotional experience through a different channel than verbal labeling, often reaching clients who report not knowing what they feel.

Identity exploration — SoulCollage is well-suited to the identity questions that bring many adults and adolescents to therapy: Who am I? What do I value? What parts of myself have I lost or suppressed? The deck becomes a personal atlas of the self, built over time.

Grief and loss — cards can be created for the person or thing that has been lost, giving grief a form and a voice that the raw, wordless experience of loss often cannot find on its own.

Life transitions — the deck captures the self as it is in a particular season of life. Cards made during a major transition — divorce, career change, illness, becoming a parent — document and honor the self in transformation.

SoulCollage and the Non-Pathologizing Stance

One of SoulCollage’s most clinically valuable qualities is its fundamentally non-pathologizing orientation. Every card — every part of the self — is approached with curiosity and respect. The inner critic is not a problem to be eliminated but a voice to be heard. The frightened part is not a symptom to be managed but a presence to be known.

This orientation aligns directly with the most effective contemporary approaches to individual therapy, from IFS’s insistence that all parts deserve compassion to the humanistic tradition’s unconditional positive regard. SoulCollage offers clients a lived, embodied experience of approaching themselves without judgment — which is often exactly what individual therapy is working to cultivate.