"She Wuz Framed"

LANGS'S PAPER IS ABOUT the what not the how. It's a nice distillation, a précis of his concepts of empowered psychotherapy, which uses what he calls self-processing. It includes a hypothesis that the human mind consists of two parallel processing systems, each with different perceptual adaptive repertoires and responses to anxiety. They're two very different realms of experience and adaptation. The first system itself has two parts, its own conscious and unconscious mechanisms. They have to do with coping with realistic dangers and gratifying needs and necessities such as food, shelter and companionship, sort of like Sullivan's self-system involving satisfactions and security. While messages from this somewhat superficial unconscious system tend to be encoded, they are readily translatable and understood. Langs gives the example of the lateness of a doctor encoded as the lateness of a teacher.

For the more serious and profound anxieties Langs postulates another "deeper" unconscious system. (Are we back with Freud's topology?) This one proves to be remarkably sensitive to the rules, frames and boundaries in life's situations, and, by extension, in psychotherapy (a touch of anthropomorphism?). Langs states that boundary issues are of primary significance because they are crucial to the survival of the living organism, and therefore have critical functions and meanings. True, but how does the psychoanalyst tend to think of boundaries? Does respect for a boundary refer to insularity, to maintaining the status quo, or is a reliable boundary a metaphor for processes of union and differentiatedness?

So, we have two types of communicative output from the human mind—unencoded statements from the mostly conscious system, and superficial, easily translated messages from its unconscious part; and, at the same time, emanations from a deeper unconscious system, which processes the more significant threats to existence, manifesting themselves in an extremely subtle, cryp