Play (with) Me (2024)
A darkly surreal zine of therapy abuse, power dynamics, and escape.
Trigger warning / author's note / disclaimer: this article explores therapy abuse, emotional abandonment and mature themes. Viewer discretion is advised. To know more about the creative process of the zine, please read this page. All the details of the zine are anonymised to ensure privacy and safety. This zine aims to give form to a difficult and often silenced experience, encouraging a necessary conversation about accountability, ethics, and client safety in therapeutic practice.
Play (with) Me is a visual narrative that explores the predatory power dynamics that can emerge when a therapist takes advantage of a young client's vulnerability. The 8-chapter zine explores emotional abandonment — when the person who is supposed to heal becomes the source of harm. By turning innocent childhood games like ghost leg, cat’s cradle and flipbooks into sinister metaphors for manipulation, the booklet immerses readers in the despair and destabilizing experience.
The project explores the collision between the client’s dark secrets and transference and the therapist’s countertransference — his unspoken desire for control and subsequent punishment of the client for failing to 'support' him during his hard times. With eerie photos, striking black and white surreal, sometimes sensual illustrations, and experimental typography, the zine is a brutal depiction of emotional entanglement and how therapeutic trust, when exploited, can descend into a grotesque power play.
