Emotion-Image Therapy. Analysis and Implementation. Nikolay Linde
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, I divorced my first husband when my baby was a year and four months.
– If it is so we can say with confidence that you are following this program.
– And why I hate him more and more?
– You simply want to have an emotional basis for the ready-made decision.
– Goodness gracious! [She grips her head], What a horrible woman I am! What should I do? Is it possible to correct the situation?
– Come to my séance. We don’t have any time now.
Commentary. She didn’t come to the séance, and I am not aware of the distant results of this short analyses. I hope she was sensible enough not to spoil her own and another person’s life, proceeding from scenarios acquired in her childhood. I am sorry I didn’t ask her about what her mother told her about her father and I didn’t interpret the execution of a man in her dream as realization of her hatred of her father because he left her… Then it could be clear that her hatred toward her husband is a typical example of a transfer, and it would help her to overcome these feelings. But had very little time…
The reason why it is difficult to use dreams is that not everybody remembers his dreams or remembers only a part of them. Dreams have lots of details, many different images, sometimes even a number of stories. To decipher content of dreams takes a lot of time and ends in realization, but not every time it leads to cure or to taking the right decision. In the EIT the interpretation of an image is just the beginning of the way to the solution of the problem and the change of the state of the client.
Consciousness is a part of the mental area of psyche, but the problem lies in feelings rooted in subconsciousness. Consciousness can’t be permeated by feelings but this is necessary for real changes. It is specially created this way to be a dispassionate observer. The realization must be accompanied by some remorse that is by the desire to change, to remake everything. This is the understanding of your mistakes filled with sincere feelings. But this is not all, you must really do something with your feeling which don’t obey your reason. The heart is still loving or hating, you still want something forbidden, you are still feeling pain because someone hurt you… What can be done with it? Psychoanalyses relies only on new insights, on a thorough work on the whole life history from the viewpoint of the basic conflict, on ever more profound realization.
In this sense the EIT has some analytical and corrective advantages over the psychological method of dreams interpretations. We ask the client to create a spontaneously emerging image the one that expresses the emotion which is the clue to his problem [more details are below]. So the created image, as a rule, fully corresponds to the essence of the problem, its interpretation is not really difficult and proves “to hit the aim”. Naturally this a bit of a simplification. Not infrequently the work with the EIT turns into a long analytical work with all the “intricacies” of the traditional analyses. Besides, the created image makes it possible to do the corrective work at once guided by the same image. As the image is associatively connected with emotion adequate influence on it will automatically tell on the emotion fixing the problem. As soon as the emotion disappears the problem stops existing any longer. The client thinks that he works with his image but in actual fact he works on himself. Let me give the examples of such quick work in two claustrophobic cases.
Example 6. “A little hedgehog and a drum”
At an instructing seminar a woman psychologist asked me to help her get rid of claustrophobia: “It is not so bad, but all doors in my home are taken off”, -she said. The problem emerged after her baby was born, and the baby was seriously ill during a year.
I asked her to imagine that she was in some closed up space, a room, for instance, and to tell me about her feelings. She replied that even just imagining the situation she is very nervous; her hands are shaking and her heart is throbbing. It is difficult to bear this state. Then I asked her to imagine the image of this feeling right in front of her. Without a long consideration, she said that for some reason it was like a small hedgehog who was beating a drum with wooden sticks. At first sight it is nonsense, how can claustrophobia look like a small hedgehog with a drum? However, a hedgehog is always a man, and a small hedgehog – a boy. I asked:” Have you got a boy?” and the answer was affirmative. Then it became clear that the mother’s worrying about her sickly son brought about the fear of closed up spaces where she couldn’t control what was happening to him. And the drum is the mother’s heart that is worrying about the hedgehog.
And how can this problem be solved? Obviously, the fear about the baby is connected with the customary feeling that he is helpless and needs her control. So I proposed:” Obey me, and later I will explain everything to you. In your mind tell the hedgehog that you allow him to be healthy and independent and not to need you support and constant control”. She repeated this in her mind several times, feeling better and better. Soon she saw that the hedgehog dropped drum sticks went to another room and played with some toys, he didn’t need her control anymore… Her heart calmed down, her hands stopped shaking. The test by imagining her in a closed-up space showed that she was quite calm, claustrophobia passed. Then I offered her my explanations. All the work took ten minutes. On the following day she confirmed the result.
Example 7. “Claustrophobia”
At the international congress that took place in Ekaterenburg under the auspices of the Professional Psychotherapeutic League I managed to remove claustrophobia during just five minutes. This is how it happened… Before the final meeting after which I had to immediately go to the airport, a colleague of mine came up to me and asked if I could receive her friend who very much hoped to get my help… Only ten minutes were left before the beginning of the meeting…
– Aren’t you staying for two more days? What a pity, and we hoped…
– Invite your friend at once, sometimes you can say something important during ten minutes only…
She ran… and found her friend at another seminar. We took our seats on the center of a large hall, where different lessons were taking place in different parts