of normal sensations, but they are available for testing by augmented cognition” (Jaspers, K., 1997, p. 283). He called the field of science that deals with the sensations in the body “somatopsychotherapy’. The earlier name of psychocatalysis was “somatopsychotherapy’.
Sensations that accompany various worries are quite concrete. Just think how feeling happy makes us fly, and this sensation seems to be very strong. The weight of unresolved issues often pressures a person, and it is quite tangible. For each emotion and each psychological process, there is its specific configuration of characteristic sensations.
Concentrations and discharges, rises and falls
When a person closes his or her eyes and starts paying attention to the sensations at the level of the body, then it turns out to be quite easy to determine the places of fullness and emptiness within the internal space. These places often manifest themselves as concentrations of light, air, water, some matter, lava, golden or silver sand or other pleasant substances. However, one can also discover blackness, darkness, and greyness of different degree of density: it can seem like dust, soot, pieces of glass, chips of stones, and other elements, which one perceives as disturbing, unpleasant, and as a foreign object causing tension around itself.
According to people’s perceptions, the body itself may appear as a mighty tree standing on the top of the hill, and, on the contrary, it may look like a scrag. Sometimes, it’s a beautiful vase filled with jewellery, and sometimes it is an old dusty room. All these images send their message as they reflect the state of a person. When we begin paying keen attention to these sensations, it opens up access to the regulation of spontaneously provoked conditions.
Meditation-based practices
Due to sensations that have to do with the realm of consciousness, they are easier to register when having one’s eyes closed. That is why the major part of such practice is meditation-based: a person closes his or her eyes and observes the processes that take place inside and consciously takes part in them.
One should add here that observation practices go a long way back in history, and their efficacy has been noted.
“Let’s observe together…”
During one of the international congresses on psychology, I was sitting next to a Hindu who was an heir of the ancient tradition of internal work. It was obvious from his behaviour that he was a real guru. He was a very sympathetic and warm person. When one Russian woman who looked very sad told him that her heart was aching, his reply was the following: “When I finish the Q&A session, we’ll go and sit together in the hall, and we’ll have a look at it together18.”
Psychocatalysis has quite a lot in common with various ancient and modern practices, but it also brings them to the next level. This method has a diagnostic stage that is similar to Western analytical practices. However, if traditional analysis of a certain feeling can take years, in psychocatalysis, it takes about 3 minutes. Then, there is a stage when the patient observes the changes of his or her state, and this aspect of the method brings it closer to Easters meditation-based practices. Yet again, if traditional meditation-based approach may last for years, therapeutic stage of psychocatalysis takes minutes. There is a bridge between these two stages: a kind of a transitional stage that unites the work of the conscious mind and the innermost wisdom. This is the stage of evaluation and decision-making, and it takes as much as one needs to grasp the discovered situation and find a solution to it. In many cases, it just takes seconds, but it is those seconds that matter most because they are followed by switching from the reflection to the healing observation.
“A clever fight’ and other congenial practices
An attentive reader will find a certain correlation between psychocatalysis and “a clever fight,” which is a practice from Orthodox monarchism: to observe everything that is happening in the internal space in order to preserve the purity of your heart and yourself as a good vessel for the Holy Spirit19.
Some readers may also see that psychocatalysis has something in common with the methods used by the country quacks. They admit that the change in the state of a person is connected with the fact that our soul receives or loses particular substances, the way it happens with hiccups, for instance. Hiccups “attacks’ a person and then, when one is healed, it comes out and disperses. By the way, in psychocatalysis, you would not “send’ hiccups to anyone, as there is no such need for it. It just stops getting the support of the body and disappears.
In some way, it also reminds me of a Russian fairy-tale about Trouble. Once upon a time, there were two brothers: one lived happily, and the other did not. The unhappy brother decided to find out the secret of happiness from his brother. “I buried my troubles in the field.” The unhappy brother was also envious, and instead of burying his troubles, he dug up that of his brother. Then he dug up Trouble and said to it: “Go back to my brother.” “Why would I go back to him: he’s a bad person, he buried me but you’re good because you’ve dug me up, I’ll stay with you.”
Shaman practices are based on the attitude very close to that of the quacks: some parts of the soul can be lost and some foreign objects, on the contrary, can take their place inside our soul where they should not be. Shaman will be sending the “snake,” which causes distress from the stomach to the centre of the Earth, and that pure part of the soul, which has been rescued will be sent back to the body. Here, we need to add that psychocatalysis does not offer standard solutions like “everything bad will be sent to magma,” etc. The principle of reverse development of the symptoms suggests involution of harmful states, using the same way they appeared in the first place. Fright experienced during one’s life goes away through the top of the head; if it was experienced in mother’s uterus, it will leave the body through the navel; and if this fright is ancestral, then it will go away through legs and feet. Sometimes, it comes out of “all pores.” The way it appeared, it will disappear – it is the same movement, but backwards.
Psychocatalysis is also a close autosuggestion of I. Schultz. However, we do not simply work with wishful thinking. When the warm feeling of psychocatalytic reaction spreads all over the patient’s body, it has its origins and appears for a reason. What makes psychocatalysis different from autosuggestion is the approach to the fact, where warmth and heaviness are initially located and what keeps them there. This is autosuggestion with a diagnostic phase and with solutions concerning spontaneous “formations’ in the body before the’ training’. During the session of psychocatalysis, patients observe the movement of negative sensations to the periphery because there is nothing left that would hold them in the centre. In the course of the session, the “cause’ stops receiving any supply, then it is sent to a reasonable distance, and after that, the patient finds an antidote in order to stop the cause “poisoning’ his/her life. As a result, this person achieves not only a temporary state of relaxation, but also an actual reinvention that will give him/her peace for many years ahead.
Some people call this practice “hypnosis without hypnosis,” or even “hypnosis inside out.” They refer to it as “hypnosis’ because what happens during the session is close to what we witness at the session of hypnotic trance. It is “without hypnosis’ because we don’t confront our consciousness and that is why it is unnecessary to turn it off. On the contrary, our consciousness has to take an active part in everything that is happening during the session. For this exact reason, this method can be called “hypnosis inside out,”
Moscow, 2010.
See also: “Добротолюбие” (Dobtorolyubie), 4 volumes.
