Emotion-Image Therapy. Analysis and Implementation

Let me underline one more time that a subjective barrier is also usually the result of an inadequate emotional fixation. So the aim, no doubt, is not to completely deliver from all desires but from suffering. As a result of correct work the person always gets the feeling of liberation and getting back to the open world of new opportunities, his ability to satisfy his reasonable demands increases.

Let us repeat, in any case the essence of psychological work is to deliver the individual from some dependence on an object or on an inadequate barrier that makes him suffer. In different schools and traditions of psychotherapy this aim is reached by different means. But in all cases a person must become more free than he was before, he must to a greater extent become the subject of his own life than before.

We’d like to emphasize that the above given schemes reflect only the primary [initial] problem structure. Further on, as we have said before, the problem is developing and growing, giving rise to numerous symptoms and new difficulties.

The subject of the inner structure of psychological problems has already been analyzed in different publications several times, so here we will dwell on it briefly.

The first two variants of psychological problems structure are mentioned as far back as in the Buddhist philosophy. As Buddha said there are two reasons for suffering: when a person can’t get what he wants and when he can’t get rid of what he doesn’t want. The general Buddhist recipe is also known: you will not suffer if you don’t have any attachment.

You can think that the EIT method is aimed at complete liberating of an individual from any desires, but that is not so. Every person has a lot of natural and quite normal desires and attachments, satisfying which is necessary for a healthy and happy life. The simplest example – the need to breathe. Most people satisfy this need easily and simply without any difficulties, so they even don’t notice it. However, when breathing becomes difficult because of a cold or asthma every person starts to understand how important this need is. The task certainly is not to make a person stop wishing to breathe freely but to deliver him from the barrier that prevents free breathing. This barrier may be based on some hidden or suppressed emotions, and if these emotions are freed or adequately transformed breathing will get free by itself, as often happened during our séances [see examples given further on]. We seek to free an individual only from such attachments which make him suffer, restrict his life activity and personal growth. Buddha offered the middle way:” If you don’t pull the string it will not sound, if you pull it too hard it will break”.

We gave the example with an alcoholic that shows how a big cluster of problems grows from only one initial cause. Here is another example illustrating how system problems appear on the basis of some initial conflict. A girl was dreaming of making a family of having a beloved man, she thought that life without this is not worth living. But she was convinced that no one will ever love her because she was ugly. That was not true but she thought so because when she was born he father said that:

“this fat-legged ugly creature can’t be given his favorite name Nastja”. The girl was given another quite nice name, but she was told the story for some strange reason. The father criticized her figure later and never embraced her… Unfortunate love added to this and she it was a final proof that she would never obtain happiness. Her father’s directive became an absolute prohibition for her, an obstacle to reach her desire.

The method of adaptation that she accepted was to struggle with herself. The meaning of life for her disappeared, sometimes she had suicidal thoughts. From the age or ten she deliberately suppressed her feelings. A powerful muscle shell held back her feelings, all her body was tense, the girl stooped, her neck got into her shoulders, the brow became immovable like the brow of a marble statue, the countenance became gloomy and hopeless. She isolated herself from people, had only one friend and thought that everybody hates her. She stopped taking care about her looking attractive, stopped looking after her hair, her clothes etcetera. She suffered from insomnia and attacks of hatred towards herself. Sometimes she made little cuts on her wrists with a blade in order to ease the strain… At the same time she successfully studied at a higher educational college and still considered herself a looser.

The client asked the doctor to completely deliver her from sexual desires so that she could live calmly. Naturally this demand was impossible to meet. She has already been in the state of deep depression, suppressing her natural feelings. So the doctor refused to sign such a contract and focused his efforts on discrediting her father’s claims which served a psychological barrier in her problem structure. It was difficult because she lived him. The work lasted about two years, little by little the girl was getting back to being natural and womanly, she started sleeping normally and stopped cutting her hands and so on. She began taking care about herself, it turned out that she had a long fine neck, big eyes, nice hair… But only after disappointment about her father’s criteria her depression practically passed. “I still have a lot of problems, – she said, – but I remember what I was two years ago. It was terrible, I don’t want to be like that anymore”. She met her boyfriend and got married.

Why are these models describing how problems appeared important for the EIT method? First, because they show how to look for the initial conflict properly, using for this purpose images, expressing problem emotional state. Second, because these models prompt how you can remove the initial conflict, when its origin is discovered, if you use an adequate mode of impact. Modes of impact are oriented at a particular origin of emotional fixation, and they always have the same aim which is to help liberate from some emotional fixation. The main methods of working with initial conflicts will be described further on.

Buddha long ago spoke about the role of attachment, and Sigmund Freud long ago spoke about the role of libido fixation on some object. But why does an attachment or a fixation on this particular object occur? Psychology actually doesn’t answer this question. However, a more detailed analysis of scheme one may clearly show how it happens at, so to speak, micropsychological level. Let us remember the metaphor about the monkey that grabbed the bait in in a hollowed up pumpkin and could not pull out its fist, see Fig. 3.

Figure 3a

Figure 3b

On Figure 3 [a, b] we analyze psychological problem of type one and its possible solution in greater detail. Besides the aim, the desire and the barrier it shows a “phantom paw” [an arrow above the barrier] by which a person is holding his aim or his barrier. A small heart shows the feelings that the person has for the desirable object. It is this “phantom paw” that a person cannot or does not want to unclench to let go the aim or the barrier determines his dependence and chronic negative emotions he feels. It determines further painful forms of adaptation to this unnatural situation. And he can’t unclench “the phantom paw” because he put into the object some very important feelings, hopes or even a part of his own personality. When the small heart returns the attraction disappears, which is symbolized be a light arrow directed from the former aim and barrier [pic. 3b]. To resolve other problems different techniques may be used, picture 3 is given as an example.

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. Images 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 of the psyche and relates more to consciousness and social interaction.

The main function of images 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.

Example 5. “Cut off head”

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?