Emotion-image therapy (EIT) [analytical and effective]. Nikolay Linde
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is to bring information about outside world, to be more exact to model inside yourself some properties of objects, outer space, other living beings. You can “play” with these models of the outside world forecasting future events, rehearsing your actions and assessing other people’s reactions. But this part of images only partly relates to psychotherapeutic work. In fact realistic images are used by psychotherapists too. Arnold Lazarus, for example, reports how imagined trainings [a real game was imagined] helped a tennis– player who had broken his arm to prepare for the would be match [24]. Imagining real situations helps to arouse real feelings in the client, can help work pour skills in your mind. In the EIT the psychotherapist is interested in the images modelling tin inner world of a person, telling something about him, that means images of his fantasies, reflecting feelings and features of the personality that creates fantasies. These fantasies are not accidental they reveal the essence of his inner conflict.
All psychologists are aware of projective methods of studying a person. An individual is offered to demonstrate his imagination by different means: to draw a man, to draw a family, to draw an animal that doesn’t exist, to make up a story about a picture, to finish a sentence, to tell what images he can see in some senseless colored stains and so on. As is known in these creations a person involuntarily expresses his personality, his character and his problems what is necessary is to be able to interpret these creations. These interpretations are not a final proof, but they are based on the experience accumulated by many generations of doctors, as well as on the personal experience of a certain doctor and his intuition. These interpretations should be confirmed by other information, for example, if you share your hypotheses with the person you test and he will willingly confirm them then the possibility of a mistake becomes much smaller. However, in practice not always you can share your interpretations [for instance for ethical reasons] and this makes your work harder.
The doctor who was the first to use projective methods in psychotherapy was again Sigmund Freud. He created the method of free associations when a client was lying on a couch looking at the ceiling and saying everything that was coming into his mind not hiding anything from the doctor. Not for nothing they say: “He who has pain is speaking about it”.
The doctor made up a picture from the free associations and interpreted this set of seemingly disconnected fragments of consciousness as the result of past events and related to them emotions. Amazed by the insight of the psychoanalyst the patient confirmed that those events and feelings really took place in his life, but he forgot them. He was surprised that those events and feelings in fact were the reason of his neurotic symptoms! After such realization [insight] the undesirable symptoms could disappear. At that time it was a real revolution!
As was mentioned, Sigmund Freud created a method of interpreting dreams [27,28]. He understood that some unrealized desires of a person were projected in dreams. He showed that all images and the plot of a dream are not accidental, they have some hidden meaning which could be deciphered. So a dream provides to the psychoanalyst some very important information about his patient. This information comes out of the patient’s subconscious and in a symbolic way expresses his hidden problems, something that he doesn’t know and even doesn’t want to know about himself. Sigmund Freud considered the analyses of dreams to be “a tsar’s way” to the subconscious, because when a person is asleep his inner censorship weakens and his desires move around defenses and penetrate into the consciousness in an allegorical form which makes the work of a doctor easier.
The meaning of many images of different people’s dreams proves to be the same. It became a truism that the image of a snake corresponds to phallus and the image of a sink corresponds to women’s genitals. But it would be wrong to interpret all dreams only as sex symbols. Even the image of a snake may mean just a snake, if a client was really frightened having met a snake and then having such a dream. Putting questions to the dreamer the doctor specifies the subjective meaning of images and of the whole collision expressed in the dream. Let me explain these points by one example from the book by R. Osborn “Freud for beginners” [29].
A woman asks her psychoanalyst why in her dream she was suffocating a small white dog.
– And didn’t have a conflict with somebody the previous day?
– Oh, no. Just my sister – in – law came. She is so mean; she always says nasty things. I told her: “Go away, I don’t want such a mean biting dog here!”
– And incidentally, isn’t she small and white?
– Yes, she is…And how do you know?
Those interpretations of images which are true of dreams are also true of fantasies, projective pictures, the creations of art– therapy, symbol drama and of the images which you get working with the EIT method. But a doctor must always take into consideration the individual character of the client and what is special about his life situation, not to make a mistake in his interpretations. It is better to put questions to the client which will allow to confirm your hypothesis or will lead you to some new ideas because it is the subjective meaning that the client attaches to his images that is the most important. Standard interpretations can be road– signs, but you shouldn’t fully rely on them. At the end of the book we give a brief dictionary of images, which may be often met in the EIT, and their standard meaning. But it is more important to master the methodology of getting the meaning of any image, because in our practice we constantly face unexpected images or unexpected meanings of familiar images.
But…resorting to dreams while analyzing a certain problem is somewhat difficult for a few reasons. If a client comes to you he seldom has in his mind a ready dream that could be a clue to solving his problem. Even if he remembers some dream then not all dreams are related to the problem he told you about. They may be of a special local nature. For instance, some conflict could take place at work on the previous day and it was reflected in a dream but it doesn’t relate to a phobia that the client complains about. Usually either the interpretation of dreams is specially dealt with or when a client comes to a regular séance under a strong impression of a new dream. During my practice, I interpreted hundreds of dreams and I will give an example of an unexpected and revealing case.
I was taking an exam in a private institute pf higher education. A student, a grown– up woman answered the first question and then hurrying and worrying asked me to explain her dream, that had been torturing her for the past two months. I understood that the problem was very important for her and agreed.
It was a repeatedly coming nightmare. In her dream, she is in some room and wants to get out of it but some people don’t let her do it. She can’t leave and has to watch how some man is being executed. She sees his neck covered with blood when his head is being cut off. It was horrible…and it repeats every night.
I said that I couldn’t be sure but there was no time for a more detailed analysis, but one thing is obvious in her real life she was in a very unpleasant situation, that she wanted to escape from, but failed. It was also clear that she had a very serious conflict with some man.
She confirmed my thoughts but explained herself very carefully.
– Yes, I want now to divorce, but can’t do it because I have a baby. It is a year and two months. The main thing is that I don’t understand why I want a divorce. But after the baby was born I began to hate him more and more. Though before that everything had been all right with us, we loved each other very much. We had a wonderful sex – life…He has some shortcomings, he is somewhat difficult, but I don’t have any serious complaints.
– Maybe he was unfaithful, or beat you or did something else…
– No, no! He treated me very well, but I can’t do anything with myself. Why can it happen so?
– It’s difficult to say…But often after a baby is born in the mother’s psyche the conflicts that happened in her parents’ family may come to the surface, because involuntarily she sees herself in her baby. Do you have a girl?
– Yes…My father abandoned the family when I was a year and a half.
– May be a program lives within you that when a baby is a year and a half you must divorce your husband…But I am not sure.
– True,