Phototherapy – 5 basic techniques

The five Phototherapy techniques are interrelated and interdependent — and like the five fingers of one’s hand — they are most effective when working together. Each therapist using Phototherapy techniques will use them a bit differently, depending upon their own professional training and theoretical preferences, as well as each client’s particular therapeutic needs and goals. Thus, there isn’t one single fixed or correct way to use these techniques, nor are there any requirements about applying them in any particular sequence or combination as long as the client is treated ethically.
The therapist’s primary role is to encourage and support clients’ own personal discoveries while exploring and interacting with their personal and family snapshots. Phototherapy is not about interpreting people’s photos for them; instead, the input should always come from the client, guided by their therapist’s photo-stimulated questions, while both explore the image and its emotional impact together.

Memories, feelings, and thoughts that emerge during the photographic dialogue, almost as by-products of the process, often lead to clients’ increased awareness of how their inner value system, beliefs, expectations, and attitudes shape how they communicate. Asking questions about photographs, and to them — as if they were alive and could speak for themselves — further enhances the therapeutic possibilities, as clients learn more about how they make sense of their world and their place within it.
Phototherapy is best viewed as an interrelated system of photo-based counseling techniques used by trained mental health professionals as part of their therapeutic practice while helping clients consciously probe, and subsequently cognitively reintegrate, their photo-precipitated insights in order to better understand and improve their life.

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The five Phototherapy techniques are based on the different ways that people interact with cameras and photographs:

Photos that have been taken or created by clients

Whether actually using a camera to take the picture, or “taking” (appropriating) other people’s images through gathering photos from magazines, postcards, Internet images, digital manipulation, and so forth.

Photos which have been taken of clients by other people

Whether posed on purpose or taken spontaneously while the person was unaware of being photographed — but where people other than the client have made all the decisions about timing, content, location, and so forth.

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Clients’ Self-portraits

This means any kind of photos that clients have made of themselves, either literally or metaphorically (but where in all cases they themselves had total control and power over all aspects of the image’s creation).

Clients’ Family albums and other photo-biographical collections

Which were put together for the purpose of documenting the personal narrative of the client’s life and the background from which they developed. These could be photos of birth family or family of choice, whether formally kept in albums or informally placed on walls, refrigerator doors, into wallets or desktop frames, or digital collections.

Such albums tell a larger story as a whole than the individual images which sequentially comprise them, and finally…

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Clients’ Photo-Projective Interactions

Which explains how the meaning of any photo is primarily created by its viewer during their process of looking at, taking, or even just planning it. This reflects the projective process arising from inside their own unconscious inner map of reality, which determines how they make sense of what they see. Therefore this technique relates to all photos because it is about how people interact with them.

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