Clarifying a New Model of the Mind

A USEFUL MODEL IS AN EVOLVING design rather than a fixed configuration. Created to explain and clarify previously disparate observations and to help resolved vexing clinical and theoretical issues, discussion and research into the model are bound to bring refinements.

A good model should create new concepts, ideas, and challenges. It should serve to evoke debate and to generate additional fresh ideas. Such a model should raise as many questions as it resolves. And eventually, with extended investigation and reconsideration, the model should give way to a new creation which resolves the newly discovered flaws in the initial presentation.

The three excellent and probing papers by Dorpat, Goodheart and Simon seem to attest to the viability of the new model of the mind to which they are responding (Langs, 1986, In press). In the present paper, I will offer further clarification and addenda to the model, ideas that have emerged through my clinical and supervisory experiences subsequent to its inception. Secondly, I will discuss the hypothesis that there are two distinctive modes of repression as a way of illustrating the necessity for, and the distinctions between, the two basic systems of the mind I have postulated—the conscious system (with its own superficial unconscious component) and the deep unconscious system. Thirdly, I will respond selectively to the three discussants and attempt to resolve some of their cogent challenges to and questions about the model I have proposed. Finally, I will discuss briefly the necessity to research this model of the mind and the importance of doing so by introducing a new branch of scientific endeavor—the development of mathematical models and other mathematical approaches to mental phenomena, including the therapeutic interaction and basic models of mental functioning.

In two previous papers, I have offered both visual and verbal presentations of the information processing component of the new