The Power of Inner Pictures

How Imagination Can Maintain Physical and Mental Health

Thomas Kretschmar, Martin Tzschaschel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367328511
• eBook ISBN: 9780429921773
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is about inner pictures and how we can access and change these pictures through our imagination. It is written not only for specialists in the field of psychotherapy and coaching, but also for the general public. Thomas Kretschmar, a specialist in the field, and Martin Tzschaschel, a journalist, have together created a book that is both comprehensive and understandable for everybody. The authors start by exploring inner pictures in general and how they influence us in everyday life, in memories, and in dreams, using examples from sports, business and other fields. The book then examines how inner pictures and the imagination can be used for therapy. The applications are drawn from both medical and non-medical treatments, including biofeedback, sleep, hypnosis, autogenic training, and the healing of physical diseases. The authors then examine the methods of imaginative psychotherapy. Additional contemporary methods are also utilised, to make this a completely up-to-date interventional approach. The book concludes with examples of cases from the authors' own therapy practice. Parts of therapy sessions have been transcribed so that the reader is transported into the therapy room. The cases present clients with anxiety attacks, insomnia and burn out, eating disorders, phobias, and OCD.

CHAPTER ONE
The surprising power of representations

In this chapter, you will learn the role that internal pictures play in our everyday lives: for example, in recollections, in dreams during sleep, and daydreams. Other topics include visualisations, applicable in sports and in a working context, as well as the effects of suggestions. In addition, we will reflect on questions regarding the origins of inner pictures.

Inner pictures: our daily companions

What a rather unusual evening: two couples who are friends are seated in a restaurant, unable to see what they are eating. Everything is completely dark. Soft chunks—do they taste like carrots? Or are they potatoes? “No, I believe they’re soft-boiled pears”, a woman speaks out into the pitch-black, her voice muffled by the food inside her mouth. She sounds uncertain.

If everyone could see the servings on her plate, their doubts would vanish, but the friends are dining in a darkened restaurant, astonished by the defeat of their gustatory senses.

A simple example, yet it demonstrates just how dominant the visual system is. About eighty per cent of all information perceived by us in an average given situation is delivered through our eyes. The nerve cells bundle up, forming the optic nerve, which sends electrical impulses along the back of the head, through into the areas specialised to perceive visual information. Forms, colours, brightness, movements, and the distances of objects each have their own “department” in the rear range of the cerebrum. If all of these departments work together harmoniously, our vision functions smoothly, and we remain unaware of the physiological processes involved. Thus, we see.

If we think about it, the fact that our brains create images from electrical signals is nothing short of a miracle. How complicated the process of seeing actually is becomes apparent through the stories of patients who were born blind and had undergone reparative intraocular surgery only at a later point in adulthood. Instead of relief, they experienced an unusual world full of impressions in confusing forms and colours. Their brains had yet to comprehend the information that the nerve cells were receiving.

Only those who have lived and sensed varying external environments in colours and from an early age are able to experience internal pictures in similar ways. Pictures are mental representations, which are shared by all sighted people and instantly revivable through imagining a simple concept such as “wedding dress”, or “elephant”. To hear the word and not think of the image is hardly possible. We are permanently susceptible to our impressions. Moreover, inner pictures that we associate with attraction, grace, and beauty are especially appealing.

In 2001, the American psychologist Nancy Etcoff, wrote in her book, Survival of the Prettiest. The Science of Beauty,

We can create a big bonfire with every issue of Vogue, GQ and Details, every image of Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, and Cindy Crawford, and still, images of youthful perfect bodies would take shape in our heads and create a desire to have them. No one is immune. (Etcoff, 2001, p. 6)

Names of models and magazines may be volatile, but the desire to resemble our inner picture of an attractive model is timeless.

Inner pictures remain important to us even in moments where we hear rather than see. If an orator wants to receive our affirmation, he must speak in a way that is both accessible and imaginative; otherwise he will not reach out to us: that is, we would not get the picture. In rhetoric, some people have an idealised self-image and portray themselves as a living illustration of virtue and tolerance, even though their image of the world might be rigid and their attitude comes across as hostile. Perhaps they follow a different model of thought altogether. In any case, no one lives in a world entirely without inner pictures. This is also true of our language and its use of figurative speech.

Without inner pictures, the world would stand still and wither. Proof: every new idea, every invention, every discovery, once started out as a vivid imagination. When Christopher Columbus discovered a new continent, he imagined its location in accordance to his picture of the earth and India—his original travel destination. When the first engine was built, the designer had already pictured the way the piston would be moving inside the barrel.

Great discoveries and inventions aside, we all experience our own short day-to-day pictures, fantasies, desires, and imaginings. Within us, inner pictures can come to life and broaden our horizon. They are able to limit our perceptions, too: for example, in the selection of a partner.

More often than not, our minds have already formed a certain picture of our future companions. Not only should he or she be honest, funny, and faithful, but also must fulfil our expectations regarding certain physical attributes, be a cat person, and share our taste in music. “Acceptance becomes possible, only when I let go of the pictures I set up inside my head and which I keep comparing my partner’s image to”, the life consultant and Christian author Anselm Grün warns (Grün, 2011, p. 56, translated for this edition).

Katy M had always been certain that her future husband may be short or tall, large or thin, but there was one thing he certainly would not be—bearded. Then, during an internship, she met a colleague of similar age and to whom she found herself talking more and more. She knew he was friendly but considered him completely unattractive, since he had a beard. Until, one day, their boss sent both of them on a business trip, where they would spend an intense amount of time together and learn more about each other. “Suddenly, it just hit me”, Katy remembers. The two became a couple. “And now, I love his beard just as much as the rest of him.”

Inner pictures can exert incredible power on us—in both a good and a bad sense: they can help athletes claim victory, they can help to resolve inner tensions, injuries, and even serious illness, just as they can be the cause of sickness and, if they persist, a negative influence on an entire life.

A sentence such as “You were never wanted, even as a baby”, expressed just once by a parent, can cause lasting scars to a child’s soul, and, further, lead to a destructive self-image, where the child lives his life constantly feeling worthless. There are widely successful men and women that have earned a lot of admiration for their expertise, yet feel inferior and suffer from little self-worth.

Erasing negative inner pictures that have wounded the soul is difficult. How positive counter-images can help is explored in the second and third chapters.

Memories: images captured by emotions

Although we are visually orientated people, exploring our surroundings mainly through sight, pictures are not the most lasting traces found in our memory. Memories connected to certain smells are far more anchored, reaching back as far as early experiences in infancy.

This is due to the fact that the section of the brain that is responsible for olfactory perception is the oldest in terms of evolutionary development. It is also part of the limbic system, located deep in the brain’s centre. The latter contains the same structural arrangements that give rise to primary emotions such as fear and lust, explaining why smells are almost always attributed to feelings. We experience smells as pleasant, nauseating, beguiling, repellent, or stimulating—it is rare that we feel completely indifferent towards them.

This is quite unlike the case of visual impressions. Glancing at blank pages inside a notebook will neither excite nor disturb us. We think that what we see is neutral, because our visual cortex belongs to a younger part of the brain, close to cognitive reasoning but not necessarily to emotional processing. However, just like with our smells, as soon our awareness is awakened to what we see, that is, the moment it strikes our attention, the optical impression will be remembered. To this day, many people still know precisely where they were on September 11—the moment they heard of the two hijacked planes that crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York City. Everyone who saw the images for the first time will still remember what was going on around them in that particular moment. The events of that day are accompanied by strong feelings of anxiety and shock, which recur to us in the form of an inner picture.

The effectiveness of a representation “depends upon emotional intensity and quality of image”, declares Bernt Hoffmann (Hoffmann, 1997, p. 162), a medical practitioner, psychotherapist, and autogenic-training teacher with many years of working experience. Just how vigorous inner pictures can get, if imagination and emotion become tightly engaged, has been described by the novelist Gustace Flaubert (1821–1880) while writing his internationally successful novel Madame Bovary. In a letter to Hippolyte Taine, in which Flaubert answers his friend’s question about the nature of his great imaginative powers, he writes,

My imaginary characters overwhelm me, pursue me – or rather it is I who find myself under their skins. When I was writing Madame Bovary’s poisoning scene I had such a taste of arsenic in my mouth, I was so poisoned myself, that I had two bouts of indigestion one after the other, and they were quite real, because I vomited up all of my dinner. (Flaubert, 1997, p. 316)

Archetypes: images all people share in common

Among the many types of pictures permanently stored in our memories, there is one group distinctively different from others—the motives that we all bear and, yet, to which we are oblivious. Those “experiences” are unlived and somehow still remembered. Inherently extant, they secure our survival in the face of danger. According to neurobiologist, Gerald Hüther, they are “a treasure, every new-born is equipped with” (Hüther, 2013, p. 29). They are usually unpleasant, too; a snake, sudden darkness, a downward view from high up.

Fright induced by certain images can be seen as a beneficial adaptation, subsequent to genetically determined behavioural predispositions. Obviously, this behaviour has proved to have an evolutionary advantage. Our fear of falling from heights enables us to sense danger in a situation, without having to experience a life-threatening fall. If a child were to see both a snake and a rabbit for the first time, it would be unlikely that he describes the snake as “sweet” and the rabbit as “scary”. A collective repertoire of images, shared innately by all humans, is our first guidance of the world. The conscious possession of these primal pictures is not experienced.

Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology (which developed alongside Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis), termed the assemblage of memories shared by all humans the “collective unconscious”. It is “part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal acquisition” (Jung, 1969, p. 42).

Jung describes his Archetypes as part of the collective unconscious. According to his theory, they consist of predetermined structures of our psyche, commonly shared through forms, pictures, legends, and histories from all people of all cultures. Through some miraculous design, they persist inside us, eternalising our ancestral memories, thousands of years old. Examples of symbolic figures that are rooted in the unconscious include angels, hell, the wise old woman, paradise, and the circle as a symbol of eternity. “The archetype structures are imprinted in the people”, says Grün (2011, translated for this edition). “They balance the soul. They lead them to their own centre and true self of man” (p. 24).

Dreams: messages from the depths of our souls

In dreams, archetypes may temporarily come to light. Jung expected them to appear in the shape of symbols, whose meanings could then be further analysed. They contain indications of desires, anxieties, and conflicts, as well as possible solutions. This is essentially why dream analysis with a trained therapist can lead to states of enlightenment and healing.

It is the picture that defines the nocturnal experience, rather than the smell, noise, or taste. Next to sequences intended to process events of the present day, dreams also portray people and situations from our early childhood, school years, or other chapters of our past, often in strange and distorted interpretations we deem to be somehow lifelike. This can lead to irritation when we wake up.

Typical motives of dreams, including scenes where the dreamer is running away from something, can be interpreted as an avoidance of problems or difficult decisions that the dreamer feels he is pressured into or trapped. Flying in a dream indicates a strong desire to unload personal baggage, to untie the strings attached to waking life.

Being naked in a dream might indicate the dreamer’s fear of opening up emotionally or feeling exposed in front of others; perhaps there is a discrepancy between how the dreamer appears on the outside and how he truly holds up. Falling is also a common theme of dreams; a fall can indicate fear of a private or work-related failure, perhaps a hesitation to let go of a certain idea. Note that these interpretations are not carved in stone; whether or not they apply is determined by the feelings the dream transfers. A person ascends a staircase and feels joyous; therefore, his climb could indicate a positive development in his life. On the other hand, if a person faces the stairs in his dream with apprehension or anxiety, he probably feels overwhelmed by the anticipated change. “Dreams are a productive monologue of the soul”, says psychologist and industrial adviser Stephan Grünewald. “Especially our dreams at night give us awareness of our wishes and dreams we would otherwise overlook in our stress-filled, fast paced, workaday lives.” In that sense, “a dream could shed light on unlived desires and enable a new outlook on life” (Höfler, 2013, p. 47, translated for this edition).

Grünewald describes a dream of his own during an interview with the German magazine Stern (Höfler, 2013), in which he watched his wife falling in love with a Frenchman at a party. The Frenchman wore a shirt of Grünewald’s that he himself had not worn in two years—a detail he came to remember after waking. His first thoughts rummaged around the idea of a possible competitor in his marriage, but later he understood: the dream was a reminder “to re-connect with my own French side, my life-indulging and appreciative side that my wife loves so much” (Höfler, 2013, p. 47, translated for this edition).

Sometimes dreamt experiences promote creativity, without a need for us to interpret them. There are artists, writers, and scientists that have used specific ideas from their dreams.

In 1865, the German chemist August Kekulé had a dream in which a snake was biting into its tail. The resulting shape, a circle, was the final push the researcher needed to discover the ring structure of the benzene. According to other reports, he imagined the structure as a row of little men holding hands. The first and last man moved toward each other, reaching out to connect, forming a circle. Friedrich Gauß (1777–1855), the most celebrated mathematician of his time, used sleep to proceed in science; his best ideas came to him in his bed in the morning as he woke up.

A study of the Central Institute for Spiritual Health in Mannheim showed that approximately eight per cent of all dreams have an effect on creative behaviour during the day; for example, by giving incentives to travel, providing the leading idea for a presentation, or by pointing out errors in a master thesis that would have been overlooked otherwise.

All humans dream. Not remembering a dream the next day does not mean the sleep was dreamless. Everyone who is missing out on his dreams can try to consciously summon them: sleep researchers recommend planning to remember the forthcoming dream before falling asleep. The difficulties of the attempt lie in the conscious internalisation of this goal.

A dream journal, in which the events of the dream can be noted down immediately after waking up, might be a helpful reminder. According to experts, the existence of this tool promotes the generation of further dreams significantly after only a few nights.

Another option is to take a specific, unresolved question into the dream. With a little exercise and luck, an answer might appear in dream form. For example, the dream might show a writer who is suffering from writer’s block how the plot of his novel continues.

The term used to describe the deliberate influencing of dreams is dream incubation. It originates from the Latin word incubare, meaning “hatching”. The unconscious of the sleeper broods over the problem in his dream.

Further still, we can succeed in becoming consciously aware of our dream while still dreaming. This special form of dreaming is called a clear dream, or lucid dream. These dreams can go very far. In some extreme cases, the sleeper will lie in bed, know that he is dreaming, and ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE The surprising power of representations
• CHAPTER TWO How internal images heal us
• CHAPTER THREE Catathym imaginative psychotherapy
• CHAPTER FOUR Examples from therapy and practice: how catathym imaginative psychotherapy helps
• CHAPTER FIVE Outlook: imagination can do even more
• REFERENCES
• INDEX