Emotion-image therapy (EIT) [analytical and effective]. Nikolay Linde

      If a person wants somebody or something he already owns the desirable object in his imagination or is in contact with it. For example, while sitting at the table during some celebration guests look at various dishes put on the table by the hosts they taste these dishes in their mind. You can say that their “virtual mouths” are already eating different dishes, and if some guest likes the imagined taste of food he says: “Would you give me a little of this, please…” That’s why it is so important that food be not only tasty but look nice and appetizing. It means that a person radiates some psychological part of himself which establishes an imagined contact with the desirable object and if this imagined contact is pleasant then the person tries to establish a closer contact with the desirable object, to possess it in some form. It doesn’t always mean physical contact, nor does it always mean absorbing the object, but the subject seeks a desirable actual interaction.

      Suppose that one of the guests failed to have the dish which he wanted to taste very much. He may leave disappointed and in his mind leave his “phantom mouth” in this dish, tasting the food when he could still have it. Until this process continues in his mind, he will suffer even if he suffers just a little, feeling sorry about the missed pleasure. After some time he will take his “mouth” out of the imagined dish, will let the dish go and his suffering will stop and he will recover his good health. If he doesn’t do so, he will remember his unrealized desire from time to time and feel disappointed again. He can forbid himself even to think about his loss push his feelings into the area of subconscious, but they will go on influencing his state even from there, and can become a chronic unconscious suffering.

      The solution of the problem will be returning your feelings and parts of your personality connected with the desired object. During this process the subject integrates again with lost emotions abs parts of his personality and only then he really lets go the object of his desires. In other case a person may let go the barrier, if he put into it important feelings, but in fact it was an illusion though it prevented achieving normal goals. In the first case the person stops suffering as he doesn’t have conflicting feelings any longer he becomes indifferent to the object. In the second case the subject can achieve the desirable aim, the question is whether it is good.

      In other kinds of psychological problems, the task of a psychologist may be, for example, to help the client accept this or that aim or barrier, return the rejected parts of his personality and recover his personal integrity. As a result, the pathogenic emotional state, that causes undesirable or neurotic behavior and/or negative psychosomatic state disappears. When a client complains about a domineering negative state, the image of this state will show the doctor the essence of the emotional fixation which makes the basis of his problems. The doctor’s task is to understand the reasons of the fixation, to help the client realize what these reasons are and get rid of the fixation by, for example, integrating with lost earlier positive feelings and/or parts of his personality. There may be other methods but I’d like to point out one more time that we choose the method which will deliver from ecologically wrong attachment or fixation. You can achieve this by mentally influencing images, but as images are the embodiment of the emotional state of the person, as a result, these states change and the fixation disappears.

      Let’s repeat actions may be different. Sometimes it is necessary to let go some offence or forgive yourself some mistakes of the past, sometimes it is necessary “to unclench the paw” to stop holding the image of the sweetheart who was unfaithful, or to say farewell to the dead. Sometimes it is necessary to accept yourself as a loser, to forgive your father who abandoned you, to refuse some inadequate prohibitions imposed by your parents in your childhood, to stop identifying yourself with some pain that you experienced in the past, with shame or any other psychological trauma. The EIT helps the client fulfil these tasks. Chapter six describes various methods of overcoming emotional fixations.

      SUMMARY

      1. The structure of a psychological problem is determined by fixed energy of desire which can’t be realized because there exists some barrier.

      2. Fixed energy of desire is subjectively experienced as agonizing unrealizable feeling which causes suffering becoming a chronic negative emotional state.

      3. The reasons which don’t let solve the psychological problem are in the psyche of the person himself.

      4. The solution of the problem always presupposes liberation of the person from this or another fixation.

      5. The initial problem may be one of the five indicated earlier [see above]. On the basis of the initial problem a person forms six methods of adaptation, which create symptoms and new problems.

      6. Problems can be of different levels and types. The level is determined by the degree of the damage of the personality and is a function of the strength of the emotional fixation.

      7. The type of the problem is determined by peculiarities of adaptation mechanisms, created by the person to adapt to the existence of the initial fixation.

      8. The initial fixation [model one] is determined by the fact that the subject connected in his mind some feelings and/or parts of his personality to have a contact with some object.

      9. Liberation from the fixation and the end to suffering may often be achieved when feelings or parts of the personality “invested” before are returned.

      Chapter 4.

      MAGES AND ANALITICAL WORK WITH THEM

      It is clear from the previous chapter that our aim is to transform “pathogenic” emotional states and images are the means to do it. Images are just a leverage letting to apply an effort for the necessary transformation of emotion. But besides images are an effective means to analyze psychological problems of a person. Because images are the language of the subconscious. It was yet in Sigmund Freud ’s psychoanalyses that they were used as material for analyses, first of all for interpreting dreams [20]. Sigmund Freud ’s interpretation of dreams is still important. But when you use spontaneous images expressing the emotional state, which the client is complaining about, diagnosing usually comes very quickly.

      At first when I started to develop this approach I simply wanted to use images in order to influence the actual negative emotional state thanks to psychological link between image and state. But I was at once disappointed about mechanistic methods of influence on the image in order to change the state. Removing a negative image from the body, its destruction by any means, like burning or burying, changes nothing in the actual state of the client. It may even do some harm if the real problem which made him come, remained undiscovered and is not being solved in the course of working with the image. All such forcible and mechanistic methods are from the point of view of psychoanalyses nothing but psychological defenses, covering up emotional conflict and not resolving it.

      Sometimes the client’s accepting a negative image, expressing good feelings toward it and turning it into a positive image leads to curing the initial problem. For that reason the EIT attaches the key meaning to the analyses of that inner conflict and that initial fixation which lead to emergence of undesirable symptoms. The method of influence is chosen depending on “psychological diagnosis” which becomes revealed by “a solidified” in the person’s psyche unresolved emotional conflict, which makes the basis of a pathogenic attachment [fixation].

      Images are the primary language of the psyche, the language of the subconscious, they are more closely connected with emotional world than verbal expressions. Verbal influence doesn’t have a very strong connection with emotional world, even if it does influence emotions it does so mainly because of imaginative expressions that are used by writers and poets in their works. Speech is a secondary language