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SINCE ITS INCEPTION SOME sixteen years ago, the communicative approach has insisted upon a highly definitive listening and formulating process in the therapeutic situation. In particular, the approach has maintained a sharp distinction between derivative (encoded or transformed) and nonderivative (unencoded) communications from patients. This has led to a stress on the distinction between conscious and unconscious communication, and to the realization that the latter is central to the unconscious basis of madness—a term used here in its broadest possible sense to refer to all forms of psychopathology, intrapsychic and interpersonal, psychological and somatic.
The basic listening process adopted by the communicative approach consistently applied Freud's (1900) paradigm of the stimulus-response model that accounts for dream formation (though the present approach recognized the circularity or system aspects, the interactional component of stimulus evocation, feedback, feed forward, and mutual influence). Thus, the communicative approach drew strength from what is in all likelihood Freud's greatest discovery, namely, that human beings have two ways of thinking—one that takes place in terms of secondary process functioning and the other which follows the rules of the primary processes.
Initially, the communicative approach extended this realization to the realm of communication by stressing the distinction between conscious and unconscious communication, and by demonstrating that on the whole, the mechanisms of secondary process functioning apply to the former and those of primary process functioning