Toward an Articulation of Trauma Using the Creative Arts and Q Methodology : A Single-Case Study

In a personal development counseling process, a client who had difficulty verbalizing an experience of trauma was able to express her subjectivity in a series of plasticine sculptures. In an attempt to uncover patterns in the sculpted subjectivity, the person agreed to sort a 28 item sample of pictures of the sculptures under 13 different conditions of instruction. In this single-case study, the conditions of instruction directed the sorting process to both individual and relational subjectivities. The counselor also sorted the pictures according to two conditions of instruction related to her experience of the client. A two-factor solution was chosen with one large factor, The Swing, which represented the client’s existential experience related to the trauma and one factor, Really Me, which represented her realistic view of herself. Discussion focused on the use of creativity and the will as well as meaning-making in the counseling process. One year later, the authors revisited the study using judgmental rotation and chose a three-factor solution based on counseling/therapeutic theory and the lived experience of the counseling process. This solution keeps the transition factor that was excluded in the previous analysis. When the authors showed the three-factor solution to the client, she confirmed the significance of the third factor. The study is another example of Q-methodology’s ability to uncover patterns of subjectivity in a single case, thus contributing to an ongoing therapeutic process.