You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is a transcription of four tape-recorded dialogues between the two authors. It ranges over many aspects of the use of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, with little differentiation between the two therapeutic modes. The clinical material offered predominantly concerns the treatment of schizophrenic patients, although clinically undocumented comments and claims are made about classical psychoanalysis and the analyzability of borderlines and psychotics. There are both differences and similarities in the approaches of these two men, the details of which have been elaborated upon extensively by each in their publications and presentations.
Searles offers a detailed set of revelations about himself in the discussion, "The Development of a Psychoanalyst," which seems to include no great concern over the impact that such information might have on past and future analysands and therapies. Langs indicates how his views have been influenced by and derived from those of Melanie Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Masud Khan, André Green, and certain Latin American analysts such as the Barangers, Racker, etc. Both Langs and Searles consider themselves far more willing to deal with primitive mental phenomena in themselves and in their patients than are classical analysts who do not adhere to the views and techniques they espouse.
Langs's by now well-reiterated ideas about the bipersonal field and its frame are reviewed as part of his emphasis on the adaptational interactional or interpersonal dimensions of the therapeutic situation. His view of the central position of the unconscious communication between the analyst and patient leads him to the ultimate statement that he takes everything that the patient says as a commentary, valid or distorted, about the analyst. In this connection, he dwells on the concept of misalliance, a fusion or merger