by Richard@DecisionSkills » Sun Jan 24, 2016 2:37 pm
I can give you my understanding. I'm not saying I'm spot on, but here goes:
An unconscious symbol can be any mental image or memory, for example mother, father, house, spider, water. The symbols can be more complex than a single word, it is more a schema. Schema's are associations, one symbol triggers a particular sequence of brain activity, so church triggers associations with father John, etc.
Now if you and I were to have a long conversation or if I had you type out a lengthy description of your issues I could then run it through analytics and develop a word cloud. They use this technology these days with all sorts of things just to have fun. For instance, they will take short conversations with 1,000 people, run it through analytics and come up with the most frequent words for say a presidential candidate. They will say the most common words associated with the candidates is liar, or honest, scoundrel or dedicated, etc.
If you have not played around with word cloud analytics it can be kind of fun. The value? Eh...not really sure.
Anyway, back to rapid elicitation. A similar concept is that when a person is talking to the therapist they will repeat certain words or concepts unknowingly. The patient doesn't realize they keep mentioning the church or father John, etc. They are not conscious they keep repeating the same symbols.
So the original question by the OP is wanting to get these symbols from the patient in under 10 minutes. Why 10 minutes? The OP just pulled it out of thin air, but don't tell the OP it can't be done. So, I'm not. I think it can be done and I'm trying my best to help. After 10 minutes, I have arbitrarily decided 7 minutes is the next barrier as it is a nice number. I like the sound of 7 minutes.