Robert J. Langs is a prolific contributor to the literature of psychoanalysis. He has written more books than Sigmund Freud, but when I queried colleagues, I found that they were unfamiliar with his work. Langs edited the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (1972-1985), and Classics in Psychoanalytic Technique (1981), a collection of 40 of the best papers. He has summarized hundreds of papers in The Therapeutic Interaction (1976), written such works as The Bipersonal Field (1976), and The Listening Process (1978), as well as recent works on dreams, supervision, death anxiety, emotion-processing, and new ideas about the unconscious. More information may be obtained on the Web site escp.org.
I conducted the following interview with him about his particular approach to psychoanalysis.
JR: Your contributions to psychoanalysis over the years have been extraordinary: 43 books and countless papers, the editorship of several books and a journal, and yet you're hardly a household name! One might say that you've been marginalized. How do you explain this turn of events?
RJL: As I see it, the bottom line is that my communicative or strong adaptive approach is a new paradigm of psychoanalysis. Human beings—analysts included—are resistant to genuinely new ideas, especially if they're discomforting.
JR: Why do you call it a new paradigm?
RJL: To begin with, it's grounded in a unique, adaptation-oriented listening and formulating process, replete with a method of unconscious validation. It also is a trauma-centered theory of neurosis that gives primacy to adaptation to a wide range of unconsciously and validly perceived death-related events rather than distorting unconscious fantasies, transferences, and patterns of relating.
JR: You have written about an emotion-processing mind. Can you explain the concept to me?
RJL: The approach's model of the mind is a revised version of Freud's topographic model with secondary structural features. Listening to patients' material in light of adaptation-evoking triggers reveals that we adapt very differently with and without awareness. It follows, then, that the emotion-processing mind, the evolved module we use for emotion-related adaptations, has two relatively independent operating systems: conscious and deep unconscious.
The conscious system is committed primarily to defense and denial—the fundamental human psychological defense—that wreaks havoc with conscious coping strategies. Worse still is the finding that deep unconscious guilt misdirects conscious adaptive choices, while our profoundly wise deep unconscious adaptive intelligence fails to do so because its recommendations reach awareness solely through encoded narrative messages.
JR: What does this say about your view of the unconscious mind?
RJL: Rather than stressing instinctual drives, I see it primarily as an independent adaptive system that operates on the basis of unconscious perceptions. It has two major components: A superb wisdom subsystem and a subsystem of pristine morals and ethics. Both are focused on rules, frames, and boundaries and on the search for the ideal archetypal frame. Analysts' frame managing efforts reflect their moral position and their issues with death and death anxiety.
JR: That does sound different from the prevailing views of the unconscious mind.
RJL: The key differences lie with our respective listening processes: Other analysts work with manifest contents and their extractable implications, while I work with encoded contents and decode them in light of their adaptation-evoking triggers. They discover transferences and the like, while I discover valid unconscious perceptions of therapists' interventions and find that they have traumatic unconscious effects that are not visible on the manifest level of expression and understanding.
JR: What else is distinctive about your approach?
RJL: A brilliant mathematician and I found a way to quantify the two classes of communicative vehicles—intellectualized (single-meaning) and narrative (encoded, two-meaning). This distinction is fundamental to human adaptation and communication. On that basis, we forged the first mathematically grounded, formal and lawful science of biology—and psychoanalysis.
JR: What have you contributed personally to the marginalization of your work?
RJL: It's hard to say. I was filled with enthusiasm when my ideas began to unfold. Merton Gill used to advise me to find a way to tell my story nicely. But my story ends with three forms of death anxiety. It informs analysts that their patients' unconscious perceptions of most of their interventions and of the therapeutic environments they create—according to the prevailing ground rules of psychoanalysis—
Joseph Reppen, Ph.D., is the editor of Psychoanalytic Psychology, Journal of the Division of Psychoanalysis, American Psychological Association, and founder and chair of the Council of Editors of Psychoanalytic Journals. His latest book is Way Beyond Freud: Postmodern Psychoanalysis Observed.
are seductive and hurtful. I don't think there's a nice way to say any of that. Read the stories of Semmelweis and Lister and you'll see what I mean.
JR: What is your view on the state of psychoanalysis today?
RJL: Like all conscious system endeavors, psychoanalysis is sorely flawed, but without a paradigm shift, it has no way of seeing its own limitations and error. Read Flatland:A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott (New York: Penguin Books, 1998). Psychoanalytic work is based these days on readings of manifest contents and their implications. On that basis, the field is beset with equally plausible, relatively impenetrable sub-theories whose validity cannot be tested. The field needs to suffer through a revolution, and, in my opinion, that can happen only under pressures from a formal science of the mind rather than the brain.