Reply to Langs and Badalamenti

The work that Langs and Badalamenti (1994a) are engaged on is of great importance for the field of psychotherapy generally, and for the theory of communication in particular. I have said this repeatedly, both in public seminars, and in writing: I said it in the response that they comment on (Burgoyne 1994). What continually vitiates the claims that they put forward for their work is a certain lack of focus about the differences that exist between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, and such imprecisions - many of which concern the problems of the nature of science - continue in their latest response (Langs & Badalamenti 1994b). I will try to address some of their comments.

The authors say that I claim that their research ‘is not at all related to psychoanalysis’. What I claimed is that their own theory and psychoanalysis are two competing programmes, each proposing itself as a science of communication or miscommunication; and I said that these programmes are clearly related. I stressed in particular the psychoanalytical roots of Langs's variables. I chose to mention his own description of his introduction of the idea of a Communication-scope: he proposed this innovation as a replacement for what he calls the older ‘Freud-scope’, both instruments aiming to study what in psychoanalysis is called unconscious structure. To say that their work is no longer work on psychoanalysis, which I do say, and to claim that their work has no relation to psychoanalysis are clearly two quite different criticisms.

The claims that they make about the unconscious depend, not surprisingly, on the theories that they hold about the unconscious, and also on the hypotheses that they ascribe to Freud's theory of the unconscious: they seem unaware of this. Furthermore, what it means to ‘validate’ a ‘measure of unconscious communication’ is additionally dependent on one's theory of the function of validation in the processes of science; a parallel caveat could be proposed about their assumption of