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WHILE SERIOUS CONSIDERATION OF THE unconscious communication between patient and analyst had its origins at the turn of the century (Freud, 1900), there are many who believe that its full elaboration still lies ahead of us. It seems likely now that it will require a full century of struggle before psychoanalysts have borne the ripest fruits of this level of understanding. Derived from Freud's (1900) model of the relationship between the day residue and the dream—basically a stimulus and response paradigm—the ramifications of investigations of the spiraling conscious and, especially, unconscious communicative interaction between patient and therapist or analyst (the two will be used interchangeably in this paper) are surprisingly extensive. This presentation will describe the basic components of the communicative approach, detail critical aspects of its most recent thinking as a means of bridging the present and the future, and will conclude by indicating fresh problems that have been crystalized through these endeavors and whose solutions lie ahead of us.
It seems likely that the communicative approach will be one of several avenues that will restore psychoanalysis to its rightful leadership in the study of human psychopathology (madness) and its cure. Much of the loss of faith in both psychoanalytic theory and technique, including their application to psychoanalytic psychotherapy, has arisen because of the failure of psychoanalysts to recognize the flaws in their theory and clinical endeavors. In recent years, efforts to make the necessary corrections have appeared in the development of direct studies of infancy and mother-child interactions,