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