Robert Langs
Robert Joseph Langs was a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychoanalyst. He was the author, co-author, or editor of more than forty books on psychotherapy and human psychology. Over the course of more than fifty years, Langs developed a revised version of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, currently known as the "adaptive paradigm". This is a distinctive model of the mind, and particularly of the mind's unconscious component, significantly different from other forms of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy.
Overview
Langs treated psychoanalysis as a biological science, subject to the laws of evolution and adaptation. As with any living species, coping with environmental threats—and the resultant stresses and psychological traumas– must lie at the heart of human life including human psychological life. Langs’ research led him to posit the existence of a mental module he termed the "emotion-processing mind," a psychic function which evolved to ensure the survival of the species. Langs contended that it had done so at the cost of adaptive failures and with devastating emotional consequences. He maintained that he had identified the assets and limitations of the emotion processing mind clinically and shown how the insights from this approach can help correct adaptive deficits, allowing more fulfilling lives, both individually and collectively. Langs therefore rejects the prevailing belief among psychoanalytic traditions that sexual or aggressive wishes and fantasies, the need for sound relationships with and affirmations from others, or self-actualization are the main issues in emotional life. For Langs, the latter may be significant in any given clinical situation but precisely to the extent that they raise issues associated with emotional adaptation.Langs revamped the psychoanalytic view of the unconscious mind, in accordance with his evolutionary approach. According to him, the unconscious mind operates on the basis of perceptions outside of awareness – subliminal or unconscious perceptions – much as the conscious mind operates on the basis of conscious perceptions, i.e. perceptions within awareness. The unconscious mind evolved, according to Langs, due to the development of language acquisition, which brought with it the uniquely human awareness of the future and, correspondingly, the sense of our own mortality and other death-related issues. This realization of mortality is often evoked by traumatic incidents and, thus, the anxiety-provoking ramifications of those experiences are barred from consciousness, though perceived unconsciously and then adaptively processed towards resolution. In contrast to classical psychoanalytic theory, which tends to view the unconscious mind as a chaotic mix of drives, needs, and wishes, Langs sees the unconscious mind as an adaptive entity functioning outside of direct awareness.
Because the conscious mind finds death-related traumas and stresses unbearable, it tends to deny the anxiety-provoking meaning of traumatic events but thereby also loses the potential wisdom that the traumatic experience might confer. According to Langs, the conscious mind thereby adapts, by surviving the event that seemed unbearable, but simultaneously fails to adapt, by leaving unconscious what it might have gained from the experience. Thus an important goal of adaptive therapy is to access the wisdom of the unconscious mind, which is denied at the conscious level due to the pain and anxiety associated with the traumatic event.
According to Langs, the activities of unconscious processing reach the conscious mind solely through the encoded messages that are conveyed in narrative communications like dreams. He maintains that, as a rule, dreams are responses to current traumas and adaptive challenges and that their story lines characteristically convey two sets of meanings: the first expressed directly as the story qua story, while the second is expressed in code and implicitly, disguised in the story's images. We can tap into our unconscious wisdom by properly decoding our dreams, i.e. by linking the dream to the traumas that have evoked them—a process Langs calls “trigger decoding”. This process, according to Langs, is the essence of self-healing based on deep insight.
Langs' work also expanded beyond individual therapy into social issues. For example, Langs’ focus on how human beings cope with reality and traumas resulted in his identifying three forms of unconsciously experienced death anxiety and in his showing how each form can mark a universal or archetypal path to devastation, not only individually but collectively. Langs’ work also moved into questions of spirituality, in part because so much of religion deals with death-related phenomena. Langs developed ways of recognizing what triggers death anxieties and also ways of neutralizing their destructive effects.
In summary, Langs' approach to psychotherapy is deeply rooted in the psychoanalytic tradition, but differs from mainstream psychoanalysis in significant ways: he draws his approach from evolutionary biology and the principle of adaptation; treats the unconscious according to adaptive principles; roots psychic conflict fundamentally in death anxiety and death-related traumas.
Life and work
Langs was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York. His undergraduate education was at the University of Pennsylvania, and his graduate medical education at the Chicago Medical School. He worked in various internships and residencies at the US Public Service Hospital in Staten Island, The Albert Einstein College of Medicine, The Bronx Municipal Hospital Center, and The Research Center for Mental Health at New York University. His psychoanalytic training was at the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, from 1959 to 1968, where he supervised with Jacob Arlow. Langs has held numerous professional and academic positions. He was also an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, Regent's College, London, England.Langs has authored, co-authored or edited more than 175 scholarly articles and 47 books, ranging over many distinct genre. Among these genre are systematic psychoanalytic investigations, training texts, substantive transcripts from supervision sessions, popular books of applied psychoanalysis, plays, historical-analytical studies. His publications have been translated into the major Western European languages, as well as Russian and Japanese. Langs was also editor of the International Journal for Psycho-Analysis from 1972 to 1983.
Dr. Langs wrote and lectured all over the world on dreams, emotions, unconscious communication, and the science of the mind. His last speaking engagement was at the Library of Congress. He was a visiting professor at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and an honorary visiting fellow with the School of Psychotherapy and Counseling, Regents College, London. He is the founder of the "communicative-adaptive" school of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
Langs is best known for his rigorous emphasis on establishing and maintaining a secure frame for analysis, his development of the concept of the bi-personal field, and his extensive documentation of encoded transference derivatives in the analytic interaction.
It is useful to divide Langs’ publishing career into four more or less distinct phases, based on the central themes of interest in each, though themes from earlier phases tend to re-emerge in new ways in the later periods of Langs' career. Since there is a major shift between the second and third phases, discussion of reactions to Langs' work will come after the second phase and again after the fourth phases below.
Langs and his wife had a house on Bell Place in Amagansett. He and Ms. Raphael were married in 1990. They had lived in Plainview and Roslyn.
First phase
In the first phase, from about 1968 through the mid-1970s, Langs worked with a classical psychoanalytic approach, focused on the transference and on the analysis of dreams, dreams being interpreted in terms of disguised wishes and fantasies. he was already concerned at this date with the distinction between intrapsychic fantasies and experiences of reality. This distinction, according to him, cuts across both conscious and unconscious realms, thus permitting a careful look at unconscious perceptions. Unconscious perceptions became crucial for Langs' psychoanalytic psychotherapy because, whereas most classical psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious mind suggest that unconscious contents are purely intrapsychic fantasies, Langs insisted that some unconscious experiences are unconscious perceptions of reality, a point with substantial implications for therapeutic practice. For example, if there are unconscious perceptions, one would expect the unconscious mind of a patient to communicate the experience of erroneous interventions on the part of the therapist. In the latter case, the therapist could not assume that such experiences were mere fantasies on the part of the client. Rather, the therapist must assume that there could be some validity to the patient's unconscious perception and therefore that the patient may be perceiving the truth of the matter in experiencing therapist errors.From early on, Langs analyzed this connection between psychic experience and reality in terms of "adaptation," suggesting that psychic phenomena should be interpreted in terms of the goals of adaptation in the individual, an adaptive process which refers not only to the patient's life outside of the consulting room but also and especially to the patient's experiences within the consulting room. There are striking parallels here between Langs' and some of Carl Jung's earlier work, which also emphasized adaptation, though Langs appears to have come to this conclusion independently of any knowledge of Jung's ideas. Though some classical Jungian thinkers emphasize adaptation, Langs appears to put adaptation more at the center of his work than either Jung or most Jungians.