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Here is another in the steady stream of books coming from Robert Langs in recent years. In Empowered Psychotherapy, he develops his conception of the ‘frame’, already an important element in his thinking in Science, Systems and Psychoanalysis, which I reviewed in this Journal (Vol. 39, No. 2, April 1994). Here the ‘frame’ becomes the main therapeutic vector in an adapted version of traditional analytic method which he calls ‘self-processing’.
Langs's work is both radical and conservative. It returns to first principles even as it challenges the accepted wisdom of institutionalized psychoanalysis. ‘Self-processing’ therapy places the structuring properties of the analytic frame, rather than the content of a session, in a position of central importance. It can be conducted by ‘teachers’ for ‘students’ in ‘classes’ as well as in ‘individual self-processing’ sessions, and requires the willingness of all parties to the process to subject unconscious breaches of frame to the most exacting scrutiny. In Langs's view, the ‘deep unconscious system’ (it is a system because its main concern is with communications with others) is deeply sensitive to frame issues in any setting. The impulse to break the frame - the ‘secured frame’ - is a powerful urge in every individual, and remains so throughout life. Langs proposes a ‘deep unconscious’ with ‘hidden wisdom’ which seeks to return the ‘secure frame’ of the boundaried relationship. Intra-psychic conflict arises because the ‘secure frame’ situation can be experienced as a ‘claustrum’, while at the same time, ‘secure frame breaks’ are experienced as a loss of containment, and as seductions. The ‘teacher’ or ‘therapist’ is no less vulnerable to these unconscious processes than the ‘student’.
The therapeutic vector in ‘self-processing’ therapy lies in sensitivity to and immediate repair of unconscious frame-breaking acts on the part of the ‘students’ or the ‘teacher’. The method is a modified version of the ‘free association’ technique: