Robert Langs, an experienced and extensively published clinician and psychotherapeutic theoretician, offers in Dreams and Emotional Adaptation a new method of working with dreams. This method maximizes the value of dreamwork and recognizes that neurological correlates of brain activity in dreaming are interesting but of little clinical relevance. Dr. Langs attempts to describe new ways to gain access to the most powerful meanings of the dream experience in ways that are of practical clinical value to psychotherapists.
The techniques he portrays are based on his new “communicative approach,” which focuses on the emotion-processing mind and on adaptation. He believes that the application of basic modes of listening, formulating, and intervening from a microscopic perspective will serve to illuminate the conscious and deep unconscious meanings of environmental inputs and adaptive responses in ways that more general approaches cannot.
The format he chooses for presenting his ideas is a modified workbook with clinical exercises to engage the reader. Important concepts are further amplified in a question-and-answer format.
The fundamental assumption that Dr. Langs makes is that the dream experience, which is anchored in the here and now, is to be understood as an affective, adaptational (solutional) response to an external stimulus (triggering event, day residue). Dreams, it is to be understood, are only about what is important. The dream report contains in its manifest content conscious or close- to-conscious reflections of significant current life events external to therapy and, in the same dream, deep unconscious encoded events that are adaptive (solutional) responses to threatening experiences—which have been triggered by the therapist. These triggers consist of changes by the therapist in the basic agreement between patient and therapist (frame- altering) or confirmations of the agreement (frame-securing).
The exploration of the dream report includes the narrative associations to the report; the dream report in isolation, Langs believes, is useless in establishing meaning. The conscious level of the dream experience reflects the misleading defensive denial reactions of the dreamer, whereas the encoded deep unconscious meaning of the dream, tapped by the use of “trigger decoding,” reveals the intelligence, wisdom, and health-promoting capabilities of the adaptational efforts of the deep unconscious. The dream is seen in this system as constructed to conceal rather than to reveal, as a secret communication from the deep unconscious to the conscious.
The central task of interpretation, then, is to establish the “power themes” revealed in the encoded deep unconscious dream complexes and link them to their triggering events to establish the meaning of the communication. This requires, generally, a professional who is skilled in the use of the trigger decoding method. Once the linkage is established between the stimulus and the adaptive response, then the connection to other adult and childhood traumas, to symptoms, to affects, and to resistances can be made.
Dr. Langs concludes the work with a sketch of an approach he calls “dream psychotherapy,” in which each session is focused on interpreting the deep unconscious encoded meaning of a dream, linking it to its trigger, and exposing its adaptational solution. The dream properly understood will reveal a valid response to a therapist-stimulated threat.
The focus on understanding the dream as a commentary by the dreamer on a frame-altering change initiated by the therapist may well be a useful reminder for some therapists, but it does not offer a new paradigm. Freud's “Irma Dream” in The Interpretation of Dreams is cast in this mode; it is a response to criticism, one that consists at least partially of blaming others.
Assessing the contribution of this work is difficult because the vignettes offered as examples are fictitious. The author can provide whatever confirming evidence he needs; he becomes the judge and the jury, and the testing of other approaches is not possible.
A number of problems arise when the author goes beyond clinical utility and tries to place the dream and his understanding of his method in a naturalistic or biological setting. First, if the dream is a communication, who is communicating with whom and for what purpose? After all, meaning is possible without intentionality. Second, is the dream only a dream if it is recalled and told with narrative associations, as Dr. Langs suggests? The sense of a “world” within dream experience would not be accounted for if this were the case. Third, is memory a process of recall or one of reconstruction? In the system proposed here, the literal nature of the trigger stimulus and its possible occurrence at some past time are both accepted. Yet in studies of memory, reconstruction seems to be more often the case than direct recall. Finally, the evolutionary history of dreaming that is offered to explain the two-level emotional processing by the mind (i.e., a conscious and an encoded deep unconscious) does not seem warranted given the data we have.
It is valuable to be reminded that the inner life can and does provide a metaphorical (analogical) commentary on life experiences that is both interesting and useful to understand. Dr. Langs' Dreams and Emotional Adaptation does this for the reader in a direct but perhaps excessively contentious manner.
Footnotes
Dr. Kramer is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY, and at Wright State University School of Medicine, Dayton, OH.