Читать книгу Emotion-Image Therapy. Analysis and Implementation - Nikolay Linde - Страница 4

Psychotherapy is treatment of soul and treatment by soul. This is what the famous Carl Jung said. But this brilliant definition is not sufficient to understand what a psychotherapist does. In our country, a psychotherapist is perceived either as a doctor writing out prescriptions or as a hypnotist filling his patients with what is necessary.

In contemporary terms psychology is a scientific and practical branch of psychology meant to help a suffering person solve his or her psychological problems in the course of specially organized professional communication. Some forms of psychotherapy, for instance, art therapy or body therapy don’t fully match this definition, but the basis of psychotherapy is invariably a conversation, a dialogue. Psychotherapy is conducted either individually or in a group. Most of the clients of a psychotherapist are mentally healthy.

Psychotherapeutic conversation is professional not just because it is conducted according to definite rules, but also because in the course of the conversation the doctor uses the great volume of his professional knowledge and methods aimed at helping the individual to solve his or her own problem. Those are analytical methods meant to discover true reasons of psychological problems. Or they may be teaching methods, meant to work out skills and abilities that could help deal with a problem situation. Or they may be methods encouraging the client to work on himself or herself. Or creating model methods which helps create a, so to speak, “laboratory” model of the problem in order to solve it. Or development methods, helping develop the client’s personality, to uplift it, if we may say so, so that as a result he or she could easily solve the problem himself. Or transformation methods, helping change emotions, behavior or way of thinking of the individual. And other methods…

Somehow or other, psychology can fulfill only two interconnected tasks – to help a client in self-knowledge and to help him in self-change. It cannot and must not fulfill any other tasks. A psychologist or a psychotherapist are only conductors or “stalkers” helping the individual travel around his/her own inner world. The main work is done by the one who came to get some help, and without his work on himself nothing can be done. Rare exceptions only prove the rule.

From that come important consequences. If the client thinks that his problem is caused not by himself but some outside forces, then we can’t help him. In other words, if a client thinks that he can’t control himself, can’t cognize himself and change his behavior, way of thinking, emotions and character then psychological therapy can’t be provided to him. In this case, he considers himself to be a victim of some independent from him outer forces so he can’t change anything.

If he believes that his problem is connected with malfunctioning of his brain, he should turn to psychoneurologists or psychiatrists. If he thinks that his problem is connected with some telepathic influence on him by aliens, the use against him of some psychotropic weapon, influence on him of an inner voice, which orders him to this or that, the influence of his neighbors who pull out his thoughts from his head, he should turn to above mentioned professionals. If he thinks that an evil curse was put on him, that he was bewitched or that an evil spirit got into him, he should go to a person with extrasensory perception, to church or to psychiatrists. If he believes that his problem is connected with some wrong or illegal actions of some people, he should go to the police, to a lower or city administration etc. If he thinks that his problem is caused by the lack of money, he must learn to earn it. And if he thinks that to resolve all his problems he must become the president, change all men [or all women], better the country, all people, the world, morality, in this case he should go to Father Frost, Gold Fish, God or well-known Pike.

If the client doesn’t understand that his problem is rooted in his own self, psychotherapist can’t help him. Psychotherapist will, anyway, try to patiently explain to the client what the problem is, but if the client doesn’t agree to take the responsibility for his problems, the work will fail.

Therapy through emotions and images is not outside the specter of psychotherapeutic directions, it is not magic or panacea from all diseases, it addresses inner forces of the person himself seeking to remove all barriers on the way of harmonization of inner psychic forces and programs. These aims are reached by impacting emotional states of the client through the work with inner that is imaginative images of those very states. The main methods are models, analysis and transformation. Transformation is made by the client himself, in the same way as he himself creates images of his states. The doctor helps him do it, revealing those emotional states which are clue elements for resolving the problems. He also helps produce images, analyze them, he gives his interpretation of the images, offers some ways how to influence them. He helps continue the process of transformation to ultimate completion, controls ecological purity of the result and fixing it in real life.

Different therapy directions work with images; they are first and foremost gestalt therapy and symbol drama. But it was Sigmund Freud who interpreted images in dreams [20], and Carl Jung applied the method of active imagination [21,22]. NLP, art-therapy and many other directions up to behavior therapy also use images [23,24]. Nevertheless, we claim that we have invented something new in this field. There is something similar in all directions of psychotherapy. They have more in common then different. But it is little things, small “details” that make up the style of each method, and the style determines how effective the method is for certain tasks, how easy it is for the doctor, and how simple and understandable it is for the client.

Therapy through emotions and defined as a new our country’s method [modality] of psychodynamic direction in psychotherapy.

We should recognize balanced combination of analytical research and corrective impact in one process of working with images of emotional states [“two in one”, so to speak] as a specific trait of EIT. Another characteristic trait of EIT is that the result is most often achieved there and now, at the same second when an adequate means curing the inner emotional conflict is used. It is determined by the fact that EIT is a causal psychotherapy that is it as aimed at finding the primary cause of the person’s problem and its correction by a pointed, ecologically pure and humane influence. This influence is executed by the client himself, but though it is the work with an image [or images], in actual fact it is his influence on his own emotions or parts of his personality.

Another characteristic feature of EIT is that all problems without any exceptions are considered through their psychosomatic expression. It means that we believe that all problems are rooted in emotional states, but these states can be understood only through bodily feelings. It is the body that expresses emotions; they don’t fly in the air. Our view is that the body is the center of identification, where chronic emotional states are fixed. Transformation of an emotion, regarded as psychosomatic state leads not only to obvious psychosomatic effect but to actual change of the personality which settles the problem at a deeper level than just behavior or intellect. Behavior and mentality change as if by themselves but in fact as a result of the change of deep emotional basis. The transformed emotion is also fixed in the body and then “by passing over in silence” determines new behavior, mentality, psychosomatic states, energy level and traits or character.

We will further describe characteristic features of EIT in greater detail. We will tell about theoretical background of EIT, methodological basis and techniques explaining their meaning in detail. We will explain how EIT differs from other psychotherapy modalities. We will also analyze imaginative exercises, which are used in EIT. There are a lot of examples from practice and they are very important. Many conclusions logically come from examples, but they must be made by the reader himself. Examples may give the impression that the therapy is executed during one session, but it is not true. The examples are given in such a way as to clearly show the possibilities of this or that methodology and causes of typical problems. It is necessary to study prolonged individual therapy; it has its own particulars, which are not covered in this book. Though even in this case every session is aimed at resolving some local problem, and all stages of problem solving make one line, which is determined by theoretical views of the doctor.

At the end of the book we give the list of most typical images, described in the book and their interpretation.