Gloria decoded: An application of Robert Langs' Communicative approach to
Psychotherapy
Abstract
In the 1970’s the New York psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, Robert Langs M.D. devised the
‘Communicative’ approach to psychotherapy. The proposition of this approach is that the
human mind has evolved to employ deeply unconscious psychological defences of denial and
repression, to serve as a protection from death anxiety. Langs states that there are three forms
of death anxiety, [2004. p86-93].
1. Predatory death anxiety-which is evoked by danger situations that put the recipient at
risk or threaten his or her survival.
2. Predation death anxiety-which arises when an individual harms others physically
and/or mentally.
3. Existential death anxiety-activated in humans by the conscious awareness and
anticipation of the inevitability of personal demise.
When one of these forms of death anxiety is evoked by external triggers, the conscious mind
very often cannot communicate the anxiety and so has developed a communicative defence to
disguise or encode perceptions of death related experiences. Within the context of the
psychotherapy setting unconscious encoded stories are told through narrative or dreams
relating to the patient’s past traumatic death related experiences. Langs proposes that such
communications can take place most effectively when the patient feels safe and secure within
the context of the therapeutic setting. However, Langs’ most controversial contribution to this
theory is that most often it is actually the therapist who creates for the patient an environment
which actually evokes death anxiety. This occurs so frequently and to such an extent that the
patient cannot attend to their own material as they are constantly attending, consciously and
unconsciously, to the deviant setting and the negative behaviour and verbal interventions of
the therapist.
This thesis investigates Langs’ theories through an exploration of the transcripts of three
filmed psychotherapy sessions produced in 1965 by Everett Shostrom. The films were made
to demonstrate the skills of Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls and Albert Ellis, who pioneered Person
Centred, Gestalt and Rational Emotive Therapy, respectively. Each therapist worked with a
woman in her thirties named Gloria. The transcripts of the filmed sessions are analysed in this
research by utilising Lester Luborsky’s quantitative methodology, the Core Conflictual
Relationship Theme method, [Luborsky & Crits-Christoph: 1990]. Luborsky advocates that
the CCRT is a reliable method for the measure of transference. Transcripts are segmented
into ‘Relationship Episodes’ and the CCRT method is utilised to develop categories and
themes. When the data is analysed there should be a correlation between the themes found in
the ‘therapist relationship episodes’ and the ‘other people’ CCRT’s. Luborsky claims that this
demonstrates Freud’s theory, [Freud: 1912] that patients transfer the way in which they
respond to other people onto the therapist.
In this research Freudian theory is reversed to explore Langs’ theory that perhaps the deviant
setting and the therapist’s behaviour and interventions influence the patient’s narrative about
past objects/other people. For example, Freudian theory might suggest that the patient
responds to the therapist as being unhelpful because she had an unhelpful father, as evidenced
through Luborsky’s method in her ‘other people’ responses. Langs’ theory would suggest that
a story about an unhelpful father may have arisen because the therapist really is being
unhelpful, which evokes past trauma about other people, in this case the patient’s father.
Thus, while the ‘relationship therapist’ and ‘other people’ themes may correlate, the
perspective of why this occurs may greatly differ between psychoanalytic and
Communicative approaches.
In order to explore Langs’ theory a qualitative approach is applied to analyse the themes
within each session which have been extrapolated through the quantitative CCRT method. In
this, the patient’s encoded unconscious narrative is decoded, from a Communicative
perspective, to explore what lies behind the CCRT themes, in relation to frame violations in
the deviant therapeutic framework.
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References
Freud, S. 1912.
The dynamics of the transference.
Standard Edition Volume 12.London Hogarth Press
Luborsky, L & Crits-Christoph, P. 1990. Understanding Transference: The Core Conflictual
Relationship Theme Method. Basic Books Inc. New York
Shostrom, E. L. [1965].
Three approaches to psychotherapy [Part I].
Orange, CA: Psychological Films.