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The first thing to say about this work is that it contains a remarkable achievement. The authors identify and construct variables with which to formalise aspects of communication between patient and therapist, and do so within structures commonly used in physics. In addition to this, their results have a virtue that is both striking and important: they allow for some fairly simple formulations to be made of the dynamics of the systems they are describing. Thus this work is powerful and, even though difficult, accessible. The second thing to say about their work is that it has left behind Freud's classical formulations of psychoanalysis, and with that has abandoned the psychoanalytical theory of the unconscious.
At one level, at least one of the authors seems aware of this: ‘the communicative approach is very much an outgrowth of psychoanalysis’ and, in terms of one of the variables that he uses for his communication theory, ‘it emerged that selective unconscious perception was far more pervasive than unconscious fantasy and distortion (transference)’ (Langs 1989). However, the term ‘psychoanalysis’ appears in the title of this paper, and ‘psychoanalysis’ and ‘the unconscious’ regularly appear in the development of the text, so there is a problem to address.
From the beginning of Freud's work, a central place was given to functions of distortative transformation. There are in particular two main operations involving the notion of distortion endemic to consciousness that are already present in Freud's work by 1900. The first is the compulsion to construct fictive accounts of reality, experienced by consciousness as a result of the inability of the ego to tolerate gaps in consciousness brought about by repression (Freud 1895):
There seems to be a necessity for bringing psychical phenomena into causal connection with other conscious material. In cases in which the true causation evades conscious perception one does not hesitate to attempt to make another connection … altho