What is the communicative approach?

The communicative approach (CA) was developed by Robert Langs MD, In the early 1970's. It is a new theory or paradigm of emotional life and psychoanalysis that is centered on human adaptations to emotionally-charged events--with full appreciation that such adaptations take place both within awareness (consciously) and outside of awareness (unconsciously). The approach gives full credence to the unconscious side of emotional life and has rendered it highly sensible and incontrovertible by discovering a new, validated, and deeply meaningful way of decoding unconscious messages. This procedure-called trigger decoding--has brought forth new and highly illuminating revisions of our understanding of both emotional life and psychotherapy, and it calls for significant changes in presently accepted psychoanalytic thinking and practice.

The CA has exposed and offered correctives for much of what's wrong with our current picture of the emotional mind and today's psychotherapies-critical errors in thinking and practice that have cause untold suffering throughout the world. In essence, the approach has shown that emotional problems do not arise first and foremost from disturbing inner memories and fantasies or daydreams; nor do they arise primarily from consciously known thoughts and patterns of behavior. Instead, emotional disturbances arise primarily from failed efforts at coping with current emotionally-charged traumas. The present-day focus by mainstream psychoanalysts (MP) on the past and on inner fantasies and memories has been replaced in this CA with a focus on the present, as experienced and reacted to consciously and unconsciously-in brief, the primacy afforded by MP to fantasy and imagination has been replaced by the primacy afforded by the CA to reality, trauma, and perception (especially unconscious perception).

Perhaps the best way to appreciate the key feature of the CA is to contrast it with mainstream psychoanalysis (MP):

MP: Emotional problems arise from our inner conflicts, especially distorting memories and fantasies.

CA: Emotional problems arise because an emotionally-traumatic current event has gone unmastered. This failure to cope is secondarily affected by a person's past life history and current inner mental life.

MP: The central problem in emotional life involves resolving past conflicts that have become inner-mental conflicts in the present.

CA: The key problem in emotional life involves coping with a contemporaneous emotional trauma and its ramifications.

MP: Unconscious messages are conveyed in every conceivable way, in everything we do and say.

CA: Deeply meaningful unconscious messages are conveyed exclusively by narratives--the stories we tell ourselves and others, including dreams, daydreams, and other types of tales. There is little in the way of deep unconscious meaning in our analyses, speculations, explanations and other intellectual-reasoning activities-unconscious meaning is expressed in stories.

MP: "The unconscious" can be inferred directly from what people say and do. It is to be formulated in terms of patterns of behavior and unrealized memories and fantasies. Images can be explored at face value for their implications and symbolic meanings.

CA: The critical unconscious meanings disguised in our stories cannot be inferred directly-they can be discovered only through a decoding effort. This decoding method - trigger decoding - is initiated with a search for the decoding key, the current event that has provoked the encoded message (note the role played by coping or adapting). These traumatic incidents take the form of emotionally-charged experiences -- triggering events or triggers, for short. In order to properly decode an unconscious (encoded) message, you must know the incident to which it is a response. This enables you to decode a story in light of its evocative trigger-unconscious messages are never conveyed directly or manifestly, but always in disguise.

Brief example: A patient tells her therapist a story about her butcher having his finger on the scale and cheating her. The therapist mistakenly tells the patient that her problem is that she sees men as trying to exploit her (an MP intervention-the problem is in the mind of the patient). But there is a trigger for the story the patient just told: The therapist had just handed the patient her bill. Consciously, the patient looked at the bill and accepted it as such. But she then thought of this story, which conveys an unconscious perception that her therapist has over-charged her-which he has.

As always, the unconscious mind knows what's really going on (it's incisively in touch with reality), while the conscious mind misses a lot (it's inclined toward defensive obliterations and denials-all conscious-system therapies self-explorations and therapies suffer from this deficit). The trigger of the therapist's over-charge evoked this encoded story in which the butcher is used to allude in disguise to the therapist (displacement is involved). Notice too that even though this error was not recognized consciously, it was registered unconsciously via unconscious perception and processed with a deep unconscious intelligence.

In general, we tell stories about another time, place and person (displaced tales) in order to convey in disguise our unconscious experience of an immediate situation with someone who is upsetting us. Direct readings of images and symbolic interpretations cannot uncover these critical disguised messages-they are revealed solely through trigger decoding.

MP: The emotion-processing mind has many functions and tasks-perception, memory, defense, adaptation, self-observation, etc.--all of relatively equal importance.

CA: The single most important function of the emotion-processing mind is to cope with (adapt to) emotionally-charged triggering events.

MP: The emotional mind is a single system with conscious and unconscious components.

CA: The emotion-processing mind is a two system entity. There is a conscious system that is linked to awareness and it serves as the system with which we cope directly. The system is, however, extremely defensive and inclined toward obliteration and denial-much of it, at bottom, in the service of the denial of the unbearable prospect of personal death (death-related issues are connected to every trauma a person suffers). As a result of this defensiveness, our conscious view of the emotional world is extremely restricted and often in error-conscious perception and thinking are an unreliable basis for making emotionally-charged decisions.

The second system, the deep unconscious system, takes in information and meaning through unconscious (subliminal) perception and processes these inputs unconsciously as well. Once the processing has been completed (and it's very rapid), the system emits encoded messages that reflect the nature of these adaptive efforts. Operating outside of awareness, the deep unconscious system is relatively non-defensive and quite in touch with the true nature of events and their implications-it seldom misperceives. It therefore serves as a highly reliable system for making emotionally-charged decisions-but doing so requires the use of trigger decoding in order to ascertain the nature of unconscious experience.

MP: In psychotherapy, the critical search is for transferences-patients' distortions of what their therapists are saying and doing.

CA: In psychotherapy, the search is for patients' valid unconscious perceptions of the real or actual implications of what the therapist is saying and doing.

The CA replaces MP's largely incorrect formulations of patients' unconscious distortions with formulations of their accurate unconscious perceptions. On the whole, the critical role played by unconscious adaptations and perceptions in emotional life and psychotherapy are missed in MP, while they are placed center-stage in the CA.

All in all, MP and CA have very different conceptions of the unconscious domain. The CA sees the interventions of therapists as the key triggers for patients' unconscious experiences in therapy, while MP ignores most of the implications of what therapists actually do and say in sessions, especially their unconscious meanings. Furthermore, the CA has discovered that patients' unconscious experiences in therapy are focused almost entirely on the therapist's management of the setting and ground rules of therapy, while MP has a naïve and uninformed understanding of the unconscious ramifications of the frame-related and other activities (interventions) of therapists.