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Paradigmatic interventions, by modeling aspects of the patient's implicit assumptions, may help the subject get outside himself and the narrow world he is addicted to. They can dramatize in emotionally meaningful ways unconscious imperatives the patient lives or fails to live by. This might take the form of gross caricature on occasion, but, I believe, is most effective when subtly varied, sensitive to modulations of the subject's quality of awareness. These responses, at their best, often are ambiguously overdetermined, “a sort of cryptogram, an encoded message which touches upon but does not make manifest the meaning of the patient's productions.” (M. C. Nelson, 1966, p. 188). From Don Juan's perspective, “the worst thing one can do is confront human beings bluntly.” (Castaneda, 1973b, p. 10; quoted by M. C. Nelson, 1976, p. 351). Such a tactic is easily assimilable by the subject's defenses. One would need to generate situations that stimulate the subject's reach and lead him toward the gap that makes approach possible (Eigen, 1973, 1977; Nelson et al., 1968).
A more general principle that paradigmatic therapy makes its own particular use of involves the art of shifting “sets” or frames of reference. A frame of reference is a system of relations that forms a context for understanding and interpreting reality. An attitude, for example, may function as a frame of reference which organizes the