An Earlier Foray into Psychotherapeutic Photomontage. This is a composite photograph that I made two decades ago, using Photoshop to combine two images into one. That’s me (Ponytail Guy) with my mother as a toddler, her older brother Bob, and my great-grandfather, Alexander Guiterman.
Navigating a Dark Night of the Soul with Photomontage
by Richard Sclove
I’ve been in psychotherapy, engaged in spiritual practice, or both for over five decades. Several years ago, I embarked on a new, deeper dive into my inner world: I began working with a Jungian therapist and I experimented for the first time with psychedelics.
During the past six months, my quest for healing and growth hit a painful rough patch — a “dark night of the soul.” Half a dozen psychedelic journeys, coupled with therapy and Grof breathwork, had unearthed — and then begun to metabolize and release — repressed traumatic memories from my childhood. Now as the repression subsided, I began to be flooded, and at times overwhelmed, by intense feelings that trauma had kept hidden away in my unconscious: childhood sadness, grief, terror, hopelessness, confusion, and desperate loneliness.
One month ago, while struggling to engage constructively with these fossilized feelings passed down from 50, 60 and even 70 years ago, I found myself turning for some relief and comprehension to artistic self-expression. I began creating a series of photomontages representing my inner life.
