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These Work Books for Psychotherapists contain a distillation of Robert Langs’ “communicative approach” to understanding the therapist/patient relationship. Since 1971, when the central concept was outlined in a paper in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis (Volume 19), Langs has developed and elaborated his approach in many volumes, quoting verbatim supervisory material as illustration.
These present volumes again rely on extensive case material, but differ in as much as the reader is invited to record his responses on the blank pages provided, in what are heralded as the first active learning books in psychotherapy. Langs’ approach relies on a structure derived from two main sources whose application to therapy is to illuminate the relationship as primarily interactive and adaptive. Freud's concept of the dream, with particular emphasis on communication between the unconscious and preconscious, through derivatives, joins forces with a definition of transference derived from Melanie Klein.
What Langs wishes to emphasize is the apparent discrepancy he feels exists between the theoretical role of unconscious process in psychotherapy and what seems to be the case clinically. He begins with the assumption that with the exception of major external trauma, everything expressed by a patient in psychotherapy is directed towards, or is about, the therapist. Langs argues that although the “transference relationship” is regarded almost universally by psychotherapists as crucial to the therapeutic endeavour, when it comes to its clinical interpretation, it is more often than not done by utilizing the most obvious surface implications of the patient's material. At best, this means that whilst the patient's attention is drawn to the unconscious displacement of the fantasy, the content is taken at its face value. Langs concludes that although the therapist might imagine that he is dealing with unconscious process, this is not borne out by careful study of the patient's responses a