Emotional flooding

Last updated

Emotional flooding is a form of psychotherapy that involves attacking the unconscious and/or subconscious mind to release repressed feelings and fears. Many of the techniques used in modern emotional flooding practice have roots in history, some tracing as far back as early tribal societies. For more information on emotional flooding, see Flooding (psychology).

Contents

Tribal Societies

Tribal communities often have a shaman, or a medicine man, whose primary responsibilities includes: diagnosing illnesses, prescribing herbs and suggesting other treatments to cure the afflicted of their ailments. [1] Many ritual cures include free displays of emotion. [2]

In his book, The Discovery of the Unconscious , Henri Ellenberger claims that shamans historically were primarily practitioners of psychosomatic medicine. [3] These shamans did not consider the possibility of a split between mind and body, unlike the popular beliefs of the Western philosophical movement. [2] Dr. Paul Olsen said, "Implicit in the belief that any sort of illness contains emotional elements is an unverbalized acknowledgment of an unconscious process. It follows that liberation of these elements is a pathway to cure. In essence, the shamans were dealing with a crude but strikingly accurate concept of repression." [2]

The link between these methods and modern techniques is the emphasis upon working with the body. [2] Psychiatrist Ari Kiev said, "[groups that] facilitate change by producing excessive cortical excitation, emotional exhaustion, and states of reduced resistance or hypersuggestibility, which in turn increases the patient's chances of being converted to new points of view [are consistent with modern-day modalities of primal therapy and encounter.]" [4]

According to some researchers, many tribal afflictions were more likely symptoms of disorders such as depression or schizophrenia. Similar to the treatments for these disorders practiced today, historically the treatments shamans practiced often required the patient to recall difficult experiences and to recreate a wide range of emotional accounts. [2]

Early Renaissance

Doctors from the Renaissance period also practiced treatments that resembled emotional flooding for patients afflicted with demonic possession. Paul Olsen says, "Possession was truly a diagnostic category of its day, encompassing practically any form of religi-culturally determined psychopathology.” [2]

Practitioners frequently attributed many ailments, as well as most odd behaviors, now recognized as mental diseases to Satan and other demons. This was particularly true when the ravings, actions, or hallucinatory experiences could be considered blasphemous or heretical. [2]

Cures for possession by the devil focused on spiritual salvation and were aimed at getting to a person's unconscious and unacceptable impulses and wishes. Many people who confessed under the duress of torture may well have been releasing repressed material. In all likelihood, pain stimulated a flood of unconscious crimes, such as murderous rage against authority figures, incest wishes, or any number of socially determined offenses. [2]

Exorcism rituals aimed at rescuing the soul from Satan. The effects of the procedure may have also relieved some of the body's anguish through release of emotional pain. These techniques resembled modern emotional flooding techniques. The emphasis on emotion was strong in exorcism techniques; the exorcist tried to temper its expression or to liberate it. [2]

Nineteenth Century

Pierre Janet and Hypnosis

Pierre Janet was a French hypnotist who used hypnosis to study the dissociative tendencies of the mind. [5] Researcher John Ryan Haule studied Janet's work and observed that Janet referred to the hypnotic process as 'influence somnambulique.' [6] Before 1900, Janet saw somnambulism as the essential condition, of which hysteria, hypnosis, multiple personality, and spiritualism were variations. Janet used the word somnambulism to refer to any kind of activity pursued while in a dissociated condition, not just to sleepwalking. [6] Janet used hypnosis to manipulate the somnambulistic condition. He identified three phases. [6]

1. Fatigue: The treated patient feels exhausted upon awaking from the hypnotic trance.

2. Health: When the fatigue is gone, the patient seems to be in perfect health. All symptoms of the disorder are gone, and the patient appears to be "back to normal." However, the patient is not cured and this phase is temporary. The only sign that something is odd is the patient's obsession with the hypnotist.

3. Obsession: Following the brief phase of apparent good health, all symptoms return. The patient has a strong desire to be put to sleep, almost like withdrawal symptoms, and wants to undergo hypnosis again. The patient also has a strange, almost sexual, obsession with the hypnotist. [6]

Janet was not only a hypnotist. He would engage the patient, talk to him, address the "sick" forces within him, and attempt to use hypnosis to contact the unconscious. [2] Like exorcism, hypnosis also attacked the unconscious.

Experts now refer to Janet's approach as the cathartic method. [2] In A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Charles Rycroft said that abreaction was the term applied to the expression of affect, with the subsequent alleviation of symptoms being the catharsis. [7]

Later, Sigmund Freud and his followers deemed the cathartic cure to be unsuccessful because it did not stimulate awareness of unconscious factors and did not result in insight, which meant that there may be symptom substitution which could lead to no real cure. [2]

Wilhelm Reich and the Therapeutic Approach

Over time, psychiatrists abandoned hypnosis and the cathartic cure and adopted the therapeutic approach as the accepted practice. [2] The therapeutic approach emphasized the expression of emotion, as a by-product of the goal to make the unconscious conscious. [2] rather than as the main event.

Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian-American psychiatrist who worked with Sigmund Freud. Reich focused on the body, trying to make body-mind duality a seamless concept. [2] He believed that the body was the unconscious and that the psychologist must break through the body's armor to reach the subconscious. He called the body's defenses armoring. [8]

W. Edward Mann called attention to the body's visible displays of character armor such as muscular tension and stated that armoring was the character structure in its physical form. He explained that if one could break down the armoring one would be able to change the neurotic character structure. [8]

Researchers now understand these displays as physical defenses; the body reacts in certain ways to defend the person against the expression of undesirable emotion. Mann explains the build-up of armoring as the build-up of armoring as the body's physical response to create blocks for natural biological movements such as curiosity, play, sex, exploration, or defiance of authority. [8] Reich's writings imply that there are no benefits in armoring, a belief that most modern-day experts do not accept. [2]

Essentially, the technique meant that to properly treat the problem, the therapist must break down the body's defenses to allow repressed emotion to come out. [2]

Contemporary Practice

Modern uses of emotional flooding include:

Citations

Related Research Articles

Hypnosis State of increased receptivity to suggestion and direction

Hypnosis is a human condition involving focused attention, reduced peripheral awareness, and an enhanced capacity to respond to suggestion.

Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind, and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, who developed the practice from his theoretical model of personality organization and development, psychoanalytic theory. Freud's work stems partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions, mostly by students of Freud, such as Alfred Adler and his collaborator, Carl Gustav Jung, as well as by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sigmund Freud</span> Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis (1856–1939)

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies in the psyche through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.

Milton H. Erickson American psychiatrist (1901–1980)

Milton Hyland Erickson was an American psychiatrist and psychologist specializing in medical hypnosis and family therapy. He was founding president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis and a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychopathological Association. He is noted for his approach to the unconscious mind as creative and solution-generating. He is also noted for influencing brief therapy, strategic family therapy, family systems therapy, solution focused brief therapy, and neuro-linguistic programming.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hysteria</span> Excess, ungovernable emotion

Hysteria is a term used colloquially to mean ungovernable emotional excess and can refer to a temporary state of mind or emotion. In the nineteenth century, hysteria was considered a diagnosable physical illness in women. It is assumed that the basis for diagnosis operated under the belief that women are predisposed to mental and behavioral conditions; an interpretation of sex-related differences in stress responses. In the twentieth century, it shifted to being considered a mental illness. Many influential people such as Sigmund Freud and Jean-Martin Charcot dedicated research to hysteria patients.

Catharsis is the purification and purgation of emotions through dramatic art, or it may be any extreme emotional state that results in renewal and restoration. In its literal medical sense, it refers to the evacuation of the catamenia—the menstrual fluid or other reproductive material from the patient. But as a metaphor it was originally used by Aristotle in the Poetics, comparing the effects of tragedy on the mind of a spectator to the effect of catharsis on the body.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Orgone</span> Pseudoscientific concept by Wilhelm Reich

Orgone is a pseudoscientific concept variously described as an esoteric energy or hypothetical universal life force. Originally proposed in the 1930s by Wilhelm Reich, and developed by Reich's student Charles Kelley after Reich's death in 1957, orgone was conceived as the anti-entropic principle of the universe, a creative substratum in all of nature comparable to Mesmer's animal magnetism (1779), to the Odic force (1845) of Carl Reichenbach and to Henri Bergson's élan vital (1907). Orgone was seen as a massless, omnipresent substance, similar to luminiferous aether, but more closely associated with living energy than with inert matter. It could allegedly coalesce to create organization on all scales, from the smallest microscopic units—called "bions" in orgone theory—to macroscopic structures like organisms, clouds, or even galaxies.

Index of psychology articles

Psychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally, in addition or opposition to employing the scientific method, it also relies on symbolic interpretation and critical analysis, although these traditions have tended to be less pronounced than in other social sciences, such as sociology. Psychologists study phenomena such as perception, cognition, emotion, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships. Some, especially depth psychologists, also study the unconscious mind.

Free association is the expression of the content of consciousness without censorship as an aid in gaining access to unconscious processes. The technique is used in psychoanalysis which was originally devised by Sigmund Freud out of the hypnotic method of his mentor and colleague, Josef Breuer.

Dissociation, as a concept that has been developed over time, is any of a wide array of experiences, ranging from a mild emotional detachment from the immediate surroundings, to a more severe disconnection from physical and emotional experiences. The major characteristic of all dissociative phenomena involves a detachment from reality, rather than a loss of reality as in psychosis.

In psychology, the subconscious is the part of the mind that is not currently of focal awareness.

Countertransference is defined as redirection of a psychotherapist's feelings toward a client – or, more generally, as a therapist's emotional entanglement with a client.

Vegetotherapy is a form of Reichian psychotherapy that involves the physical manifestations of emotions.

The Nancy School was a French hypnosis-centered school of psychotherapy. The origins of the thoughts were brought about by Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault in 1866, in Nancy, France. Through his publications and therapy sessions he was able to gain the attention/support from Hippolyte Bernheim: another Nancy Doctor that further evolved Liébeault's thoughts and practices to form what is known as the Nancy School.

Somatic experiencing (SE) is a method of alternative therapy aimed at treating trauma and stressor related disorders like PTSD. The primary goal of SE is to modify the trauma-related stress response through bottom-up processing. The Clients’ attention is directed to internal sensations,, rather than to primarily cognitive or emotional experiences. The method was developed by Peter A. Levine.

Pierre Janet French physician and psychologist who developed influential theories about trauma-related disorders

Pierre Marie Félix Janet was a pioneering French psychologist, physician, philosopher, and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory.

The development of concepts, beliefs and practices related to hypnosis and hypnotherapy have been documented since prehistoric to modern times.

Psychoanalytic conceptions of language refers to the intersection of psychoanalytic theory with linguistics and psycholinguistics. Language has been an integral component of the psychoanalytic framework since its inception, as evidenced by the fact that Anna O., whose treatment via the cathartic method influenced the later development of psychoanalytic therapy, referred to her method of treatment as the "talking cure".

Within the work of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), orgastic potency is a human's natural ability to experience an orgasm with certain psychosomatic characteristics and resulting in full sexual gratification.

Marie Wittman French hysteria patient, 1859–1913

Marie "Blanche" Wittman was a French woman known as one of the hysteria patients of Jean-Martin Charcot. She was institutionalized in La Salpêtrière in 1877 and was treated by Charcot until his death in 1893. She later became a radiology assistant at the hospital, which resulted in amputations of her arms due to radiation poisoning.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.