Vertigo is the feeling of imbalance that is usually associated with organic diseases such as infection of the inner ear or the vestibular nerve (responsible for capturing sound and maintaining balance). Recent research (Germany) has shown that it is a symptom suffered by more One third of the cases do not have organic causes but rather psychological alterations related to episodes of emotional pressure (anxiety, anguish) at home, with a partner or at work. There are patients who do not suffer from an organic deficiency and experience with the same intensity the psychological alteration of balance called: “somatoform vertigo” (Tschan & Wiltink, 2012). Mood fluctuations, emotional confusion, prolonged stress due to life events such as a separation, loss of a loved one, traumatic experiences, can trigger vertigo.
For Adler, a neurotic condition, like all its symptoms, are not only influenced but constructed in relation to a fictitious final goal. The symptoms arise in the face of an exogenous demand, created to avoid the fundamental tasks of man: friendship, work and sexuality.
What underlies all “social deviation” is a feeling of inferiority where the individual presents himself as incapable of adapting to changes with freedom and responsibility. All symptoms have the objective of ensuring the patient’s prestige.
Adler addresses a series of typical dreams and refers to “fall dreams.”
Bernstein states that: “the drama of the neurotic is the drama of the man who cannot because he does not believe he can; that he has become neurotic because he did not believe he could be anything else. That’s because as Seneca said: ‘Everything depends on opinion. Everyone is as miserable as they think they are’” (28).
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Patients with vertigo fear losing control in public, they are hypersensitive to body oscillations because they consider them anticipatory signals of attacks, which causes them to enter into muscle tension predisposing to a vertigo attack.
In Germany it is estimated that only a third of those affected receive appropriate therapy that takes into account the psychological motivations to address the disorder, but more precisely, the total personality.
For us, the recommendation for so-called mental illnesses such as depression, panic attacks and vertigo is a brief Adlerian psychotherapy with the complement of laughter therapeutic groups.
At the bottom (unconscious) of all these so-called diseases is the anguish of not being able to solve life’s problems. Ernest Jones In his book “The Nightmare”, he characterizes nightmares as: (1) a mortal fear, and comments that the best word he finds to define it is “Angst”, because it denotes the precise combination of fearful apprehension, terror, panic and anguish. paroxysmal, the dominant feature is its intensity. In this regard, Macnish says: “it reduces the courage of a hero to that of a child,” (23); (2) A feeling of oppression that makes breathing alarmingly difficult and (3) an extreme feeling of helplessness, of paralysis (Jones, 1967).
In “The Meaning of Life,” Adler addresses a series of typical dreams and refers to “fall dreams,” stating that they “reveal the dreamer’s anxious disposition to lose absolutely nothing of his sense of his own worth; but they express at the same time, in a spatial way, that deep down they believe themselves “higher than they are” (258, 1959).
“Having the courage to be imperfect”
In the Adlerian essay “Fundamentals of Teleological Deep Psychology” by Hazán & Titze they narrate a case of encouragement and positive psychology: “When a child has a nightmare in which he feels himself falling, his parents tell him that it is something wonderful, that this dream can lead you to many good things, provided you explore the site of the fall and see how magnificent it is there. For the adult senoi, all dream images have meaning and encouraging promises because as a child they have been taught to make friends with them. A nightmare in this case is a trip to the land of the spirits of the fall, who love the dreamer and will give him spiritual pleasures and powers” (109 – 110, 2011).
In Adlerian psychotherapy the patient is encouraged not to fight with his feelings but rather to accept them as part of the motto of “having the courage to be imperfect.” Once the unconscious motivations that drive their behavior and the emotions that precipitate their disorder have been explained, they are invited to intentionally have a vertigo attack with the aim of losing the fear of having them. In addition, therapeutic groups are prescribed to recover body balance and vitality in relationships.
Paradoxical interventions have the seal of Alfred Adlerthe paradigmatic example was when he asked a girl with aggressive behavior towards her parents to put up a sign with capital letters saying “I must bother my parents.”
The one who used paradoxical interventions systematically was Milton Erickson, when someone came for addiction problems I did not ask them to quit the habit but on the contrary, to intensify it. Once a patient arrived who wanted to give up cigarettes and alcohol, but instead of giving in to the demand, Erickson sent him to buy the merchandise not in the stores in his area but in others that were a mile away, this way. way made him reconsider his habits. Another case of “indirect logic” was with a woman who wanted to lose weight, she weighed 95 kilos and wanted to weigh 75. The patient was trapped in the pattern of gaining weight and losing weight. Erickson told her that he could help her as long as she kept a promise. The woman accepted and her promise was that she had to gain weight up to 100 kilos. She resisted but achieved the target weight, however she was so desperate and eager to be “allowed” to lose weight that she reached 75 kilos without a problem. Erickson concludes that change can only be achieved in a person if he “owns” his own change.
The horizontal man is more democratic and tends to go from less to more
In this case, from the affective angle, Erickson reversed the pattern of go up- go down go up: “his usual pattern had been lower weight and then increase. I invested it: I made it increase first and lower after. And she was satisfied with the result and stayed at that weight. She did not want to endure that horrible agony of gaining 10 kilos anymore.” Rosen analyzes: “This method of reversing habitual patterns or looking at things in an opposite way was one of Erikson’s favorites for modifying mental dispositions. She liked to show her patients a book called Topsys & Turvys (heads up, heads down) whose illustrations and stories changed meaning by reversing the volume” (111).
Lidia Sicher, one of Adler’s first disciples, classified human beings as horizontal and vertical. The vertical man is that he points to power (below and above). While the horizontal man is more democratic and tends to go from less to more. Let us keep in mind that etymologically vertigo, either from vertical but also from “vertere” (to spin, turn) is typical of those who do not dare to face the problem as their own.
Bibliography
Alfred Adler. (1959). The neurotic character. Buenos Aires: Paidós
Alfred Adler. (1959). The meaning of life. Barcelona: Luis Miracle
Hazán Y. & Titze M. (2011). Fundamentals of Teleological Depth Psychology. Montevideo: Psicolibro.
Ernest Jones. (1967). The nightmare. Buenos Aires: Paidós
R. Tschan & J. Wiltink. Vertigo. In Mente y Cerebro Magazine, no. 55, 2012, Barcelona (76-79)
Sidney Rosen. (1991) My voice will go with you – the educational stories of Milton H. Erickson. Buenos Aires: Paidós