You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
These two volumes represent the best and most up-to-date accounts of Langs' work. In spite of this, there is little if any overlap between the two books which supplement one another. In my opinion they are both extremely important contributions to psychoanalytic theory.
A Clinical Workbook for Psychotherapists is a one-volume edition of a three-volume set first published by Newconcept Press in 1985. This book is a comprehensive statement of Langs' theory of technique using a highly innovative format. Brief theoretical discussions are interspersed with learning exercises, enabling the reader to acquire the basic cognitive skills required for communicative psychoanalytic work. Typically, a theoretical concept is introduced, which is then followed by a clinical vignette and a series of questions inviting the reader to apply the theoretical concept to the clinical material. Langs then provides answers which the reader can compare with his or her own. This approach may seem strange to many psychoanalytic practitioners but it flows naturally from Langs' theory which, as the book shows, is a highly systematic and rigorous approach to formulating unconscious meaning and intervening. The book goes several steps beyond such texts, as, for example, Greenson's Technique and Practice of Psycho-Analysis, which use vignettes for illustrative purposes without explicitly inviting the reader to engage with the clinical material.
Langs' work is based on the thesis that the unconscious sector of the mind, which he calls the ‘deep unconscious system’, is specifically designed for exquisitely refined