Rethinking the Synallactic Collective Image Therapy (SCIT) Technique: Participatory Drawing and Co-Creation in Group Psychotherapy

This paper rethinks the Synallactic Collective Image Therapy Technique (SCIT) as participatory drawing in group psychotherapy and approaches the therapeutic group process as a living relational arena in which meaning, subjectivity, and belonging are co-constituted. Grounded in systemic epistemology and interpersonal neurobiology, it presents a case study of a systemic-dialectical psychotherapy group in which women collaboratively created a shared drawing in the here and now of a group psychotherapy session. The analysis suggests that participatory drawing-making functions not merely as an expressive variation of the SCIT technique but as an embodied and nonverbal process through which emotions, memories, bodily resonances, and relational patterns become visible, shareable, and transformable within a common experiential field. In this co-creative process, members encounter themselves through others and others through themselves, negotiating autonomy and interdependence without erasing individual characteristics and personal histories. The paper further situates this therapeutic practice within contemporary conditions marked by loneliness, weakened communal bonds, and intensified individualization, arguing that collective forms of nonverbal co-creation through participatory group drawing may help reactivate interconnection, interdependence, and coexistence. Although based on a single case study and therefore not generalizable, the paper highlights the potential of participatory drawing to support emotional attunement, co-constructed meaning, and psychological and neurobiological flexibility in therapy groups. More broadly, it argues that therapeutic change emerges not only through verbal communication, but through embodied participation in relational processes that reaffirm the fundamentally relational character of human becoming.