What If You’re Looking in the Wrong Place?
Over the years of working with people from a wide range of professions and life circumstances — entrepreneurs, executives, politicians, specialists, authors, as well as individuals going through difficult periods in their relationships, finances, or health — I have continuously searched for and studied methods that allow us to understand the essence of what is happening more quickly and more accurately.
What has always interested me is not so much the symptom or the problem itself as the mechanism behind it.
What exactly enables a person to see something they were unable to see before?
What helps them gain access to information that already exists within their experience, yet remains inaccessible in their ordinary state of consciousness?
And most importantly, what caused a particular problem to arise in the first place, including health-related problems?
In recent years, I have devoted particular attention to the study of hypnosis, trance states, mechanisms of identification, and symbolic thinking. At the same time, I continue to collect and systematize the fundamental principles upon which my work and the philosophy of Maison Duval are built.
It was during this period that I arrived at an observation which, at first glance, appears very simple. Yet the longer I reflect upon it, the more fundamental it seems.
If something exists in our experience as a coherent whole, we are capable of conceptualizing it.
If we are capable of conceptualizing it, we are capable of creating or discovering its symbolic representation.
If a symbolic representation exists, it becomes possible to establish contact with it.
And if contact can be established, it becomes possible to explore it, ask questions, and receive information from it.
At first glance, this may sound abstract. But let us look more closely.
Imagine a person who says:
“My relationship is complicated.”
Most often, we begin by analyzing the people involved in that relationship.
What did one person do? What did the other person do? Who is right? Who is wrong? What needs to change?
But at a certain point, an interesting question emerges.
Why do we call it a relationship?
If we were speaking only about two individuals, we would speak exclusively about those individuals.
Yet we say:
“My relationship with this person.”
In other words, the psyche has already distinguished a third element.
There is one person. There is another person. And there is the relationship between them. We perceive that relationship as an autonomous system.
And if it is an autonomous system, it can be conceptualized.
If it can be conceptualized, it can be represented through a symbolic image.
At that point, it becomes possible to explore not only the people involved, but the relationship itself as a distinct system.
It is precisely at this moment that an entirely different point of observation becomes available.
Because at that moment we stop looking at the situation exclusively through the eyes of one participant.
We gain the ability to temporarily shift our point of observation.
A similar approach can be applied to learning a foreign language.
Most people believe that language consists of words, rules, and grammar.
In practice, however, it is far more than that.
For one person, a foreign language is associated with freedom.
For another, relocation.
For a third, a career.
For a fourth, the fear of making mistakes.
For a fifth, love.
For a sixth, a sense of personal worth.
As a result, language becomes far more than a collection of words. It becomes a complex system of meanings, emotions, expectations, and inner responses.
And if that system exists as a whole within a person’s experience, it too can be explored through symbolic representation.
This is where I believe it is important to recall the work of Carl Jung, who explored the archetypal structures of the psyche; Milton Erickson, who used trance states to access hidden human resources; and Vladimir Raikov, who studied the phenomenon of creative identification and the human capacity to temporarily alter perception through deep immersion in an image.
Yet what interests me today is not so much the image itself as the process.
I increasingly notice that many difficulties persist not because people lack information.
More often than not, they already possess more than enough information.
The difficulty lies elsewhere.
It lies in the fact that they continue to view the situation from the same point.
From within their personal history. From within their beliefs. From within their fears and expectations.
For this reason, I have become increasingly interested in what I call conceptual identification.
If a system can be distinguished as an autonomous reality of experience, contact with it becomes possible. If contact is established, exploration can begin. And when that exploration is carried out skillfully, a process of decoding begins.
In my view, decoding is one of the most underestimated skills in contemporary psychological work, because the value lies not in the appearance of a symbol or an image, nor even in the trance state itself, but in the ability to understand what information the symbol carries and how that information relates to a person’s real life.
This is why I find myself less and less interested in endless discussions about problems and increasingly interested in methods that allow a person to perceive the structure of a situation as a whole, deeply enough to see what had previously remained beyond awareness.
And this applies to every sphere of human life.
Whenever we are able to recognize something as a coherent system of experience, we gain the opportunity to enter into dialogue with that system, explore it, and access information that remained hidden as long as we viewed it from only a single perspective.
What I am describing in this article represents one of the most elegant, profound, and at the same time practical approaches to exploring human experience that I have encountered in my work.
That is precisely why this idea fascinates me so deeply.
It allows us to look at familiar life challenges in an entirely different way.
To move beyond theory, let me offer two examples that arise regularly in professional practice and concern millions of people regardless of age, profession, or educational background.
The first example relates to professional fulfillment.
Imagine a talented surgeon who has spent years performing highly complex operations, earning the respect of colleagues and patients alike, and excelling in their profession. At a certain point, this person is appointed head of a major department. Formally, nothing has changed. We are looking at the same individual, with the same intelligence, experience, education, and professional skills.
Yet after some time, difficulties begin to emerge.
From the outside, these difficulties are often explained by overload, stress, lack of rest, or excessive responsibilities.
But a deeper examination frequently reveals something entirely different.
Before the promotion, this person was engaged in ongoing relationships with medicine, surgery, patients, and science. After the promotion, new systems enter their life: leadership, management of people, responsibility for a team, decision-making, allocation of resources, and interaction with administration.
Each of these systems exists not only in the external world. It also exists within the person’s psyche. And this is precisely where the ideas discussed earlier become important. If a system exists, it can be conceptualized.
If it can be conceptualized, it can be represented through a symbol. And once a symbol appears, dialogue becomes possible.
For example, managing people ceases to be merely a job responsibility.
It becomes an autonomous system of experience, possessing its own meaning, its own symbolic representation, and its own place within the person’s psyche.
For this reason, the exploration is directed not only toward the individual and not only toward their biography. It is directed toward the system itself. It is symbol. It is image.
And the dialogue that emerges through contact with that image.
Then the process of decoding begins.
And it is often at this point that something remarkable occurs. What had been experienced as a complex problem for years begins to appear surprisingly obvious. Sometimes no lengthy explanation is required. The person sees the symbol. Sees the structure. Understands the meaning.
And a solution emerges almost immediately.
It is as though a wall that had blocked the view for years suddenly disappears. Not because new information has appeared. But because something that had remained hidden for a very long time finally becomes visible — something the psyche had perceived as a source of tension, threat, or inner conflict.
The second example concerns foreign languages.
It is in this area that I most often encounter the extent to which modern education underestimates the deeper mechanisms of the human psyche.
When people are asked what a foreign language represents to them, they usually answer from the level of conscious thought.
Travel.
Culture.
Literature.
Career.
A particular country.
Music.
Beautiful pronunciation.
Yet practice shows that these answers do not necessarily explain why one person begins to master a language fluently while another remains at the same level for years.
Because within the psyche of a particular individual, a foreign language rarely exists merely as a collection of words, grammatical structures, or cultural associations. More often, it is connected to a much deeper system of meanings, goals, fears, expectations, and life tasks.
For one person, it is connected to relocation.
For another, a new profession.
For a third, the necessity of receiving medical treatment in another country.
For a fourth, a scientific project, a book, or a life’s work.
For a fifth, the realization of a path they perceive as their calling.
Very often, the study of a language conceals a far deeper system than immediate practical necessity or surface-level symbolism.
And it is precisely that deeper system that deserves exploration. Not a vocabulary list. Not another study plan. Not another table. Not another language organizer. But the internal structure of which that language has already become a part.
The more deeply I study learning and human development, the more convinced I become that a specialist working, for example, as a language coach cannot rely solely on linguistic knowledge.
Such a specialist must understand the mechanisms of perception, attention, memory, motivation, thinking, and the functioning of the human psyche as a whole, as well as the unique psychological reality of each individual client.
Because in the end, the subject is not language.
The subject is the human being.
This is precisely why working through the symbolic representation of a system can be so interesting and effective.
If a significant system exists, it can be conceptualized. If it can be conceptualized, it may possess a symbolic representation. And if a symbolic representation exists, it becomes possible to enter into dialogue with it. It is often at this point that a person gains access to information that had previously remained hidden from their ordinary way of seeing. It is often here that solutions emerge which years of direct analysis failed to uncover.
And it is here that we begin to appreciate the extraordinary capacities of the human psyche when we stop working exclusively with an isolated problem and begin exploring the system within which that problem exists.
This applies to virtually every sphere of human life: health, money, business, love, partnership, creativity, education, professional fulfillment, and personal development.
Because every time a person stops viewing a difficulty as an isolated event and begins to perceive the system within which it exists, access to an entirely different level of understanding becomes possible.
And with that understanding come solutions that may have remained invisible for years.