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This book begins with a lengthy reprehension of all present-day psychotherapies, including psychoanalysis.
Doctor Langs says that psychotherapy today is in a state of utter chaos. He notes that there are large numbers of psychotherapists who annually change their orientation among the at least 300 forms of existing psychotherapy, and that books on psychotherapy number in the thousands.
The author goes on to state his belief that this deplorable state of affairs is occasioned by a widespread conspiracy between patients and psychotherapists, the aim of which is to keep painful affects suppressed.
Although Doctor Langs does not say so explicitly, his thesis is reminiscent of Glover's concept of the therapeutic effect of the inexact interpretation.
Moreover, according to Doctor Langs, therapists regularly “dump” their own psychopathology onto their patients with the scheming purpose of getting their patients to act as therapists who will help the nominal therapists to work through their own personal problems.
Langs believes that the real basis upon which patients improve is their realization that they are not as sick as their mentors and that this awareness both reassures them and gives them a sense of well-being.
In a chapter entitled, “Trigger Decoding,” Dr. Langs states that it is a mistake to think that patients' productions are always messages deriving from their intrapsychic states as determined by their past histories and their phantasies. Instead, he contends, a patient's material is more likely to be an encoded expression of actual perceptions of the therapist. In other words, they are nontransference in nature and are instead legitimate patient responses to cues insinuated into the therapeutic relationship by the therapist for the purpose of causing the patient to respond in some particular way.
Langs goes on to argue that as a consequence most therapy is “lie-therapy” in which interpretations made derive from the imagination of the therapist and are limited only by