Love and Death In Psychotherapy
by Robert Langs, M.D.
London and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006.
With this book and the earlier Fundamentals of Adaptive Psychotherapy and Counseling (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004), the communicative or strong adaptive approach to psychotherapy establishes itself as a basic, universally applicable approach to the human mind, emotional life, and psychological healing which illuminates and informs all forms of emotional healing.
Love and Death in Psychotherapy is a book for all manner of mental health professionals—psychotherapists, counsellors, psychoanalysts, family, couples and group therapists, and the like. It also is intended for psychotherapy patients and general readers.
This wide applicability arises because the book not only revises how we think about love in psychotherapy and everyday life, it also presents newly forged insights into the human mind and life in general and revolutionizes the fields of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. It is a book that will forever change the reader’s understanding of himself or herself and of the world as it exists today. It is one of those very rare ‘must read-change your life’ books.
Highlights of the book:
- The book outlines and validates a set of new insights into the nature of love in psychotherapy and identifies the factors that underlie the vicissitudes of love in the treatment situation.
- On a more fundamental level, the book presents a convincing new paradigm of human emotional life and the therapeutic process.
- A key insight regarding love is the discovery that in its various derivations—sexual, narcissistic, object related, intersubjective, interpersonal, and such—love is not the fundamental issue in psychotherapy or human life.
- Death-related traumas and the three forms of death anxiety they evoke—existential (fear of ultimate demise), predatory (fear of harm from others), and predator (guilt and the need for punishment for having harmed others)—are the fundamental issues and driving forces behind the vicissitudes of love in psychotherapy and everyday life. These issues and the unconscious guilt and conflicts that they engender also are basic to human emotional life as it is lived out each day.
- Also presented is a new view of the emotion-processing mind as an entity with two distinctive and relatively independent operating systems—one conscious, the other deeply unconscious. This two-mind model replaces the prevailing one-mind model which posits a single, continuous mind with gradation of conscious and unconscious experience.
- Describes clinically identifiable, critical distinctions between healing, forms of true love and damaging, forms that are falsely loving. In this regard, the book shows that in today’s various forms of psychotherapy and counseling most feelings and gestures of patient-love for therapists and therapist-love for patients are expressions of false love. The means by which true patient- and therapist-love are conveyed are explored in detail.
- Details the properties of the independently operating deep unconscious system of the emotion-processing mind, an adaptive system that functions entirely outside of awareness and coveys its unconscious perceptions and superb adaptive processing efforts solely through the encoded aspects of dreams and stories.
- Introduces the reader to the awesome and affecting world of deep unconscious experience which differs significantly from the more mundane and ineffectual world of conscious experience in respect to needs, defenses, perceptiveness, sensitivities, moral values, and adaptive processing capabilities. On all counts the deep unconscious mind is far more effective and moral than the conscious mind.
- Shows that the conscious mind varies from one person to the next and is so intensely committed to denial and defense that it is unreliable in virtually all of its emotional-related assessments and decisions, including those that pertain to psychotherapy and emotional life in general. In contrast, the deep unconscious mind proposes choices that are truly in one’s best interests. It is as well the locus of archetypes and universals that are virtually identical from one person to the next.
- Describes a series of clinically powerful death-related archetypes which have major consequences for emotional life and its psychotherapy.
- Offers an adaptive, reality-oriented, trauma-centered, death-related theory of emotional suffering, psychotherapy, and human creativity—a set of ideas of great importance to the psychotherapeutic process and life in general.
- Shows how emotionally-charged events in the life of a therapist, especially those that are death-related, unconsciously affect his or her interactions and interventions with patients. The ways in which therapists can access these strong unconscious influences also is described.
- Details the limitations and errors of present-day psychoanalytic theory and practice and in the various psychodynamic forms of psychotherapy, explains their sources and discusses how they can be corrected.
The book is the culmination of thirty-five years of clinical and formal research into the human psyche using previously neglected methods of quantification and unconscious validation. As such, it proposes a new approach to psychotherapy that is grounded in conscious and especially deep unconscious experiences, one that has been shown to be more effective than present therapeutic efforts.
Rare is the book with so much to offer on so many levels and in so many different ways. This is a landmark book of the kind that will change your life for the better in countless ways. This work also establishes a viewpoint that is pertinent to today’s world; it identifies the deepest sources of our ills and the most insightful and effective means of alleviating these problems to the greatest extent possible.
With apologies that after 35 years of psychoanalytic research and 44 published books I still must speak for myself, please consider that I sincerely believe that this book is:
- A turning point in the history of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
- That it can also be a turning point for you professionally and personally.
- Distinguishes true and false love from both patients and therapists.
- Shows that love in its many incarnations is not the fundamental issue in psychotherapy and human life.
- That `honor' goes to death and the three forms of death anxiety it evokes—existential, predatory, predator.
- Offers a new, adaptation-oriented model of the mind that turns the present model on its ear.
- Reveals three adaptively effective unconscious systems of the mind: death-sensitive, pristinely moral, and profoundly wise.
- Redefines the unconscious realm and shows how to access deep unconscious adaptive activities.
- Offers a new therapeutic modality that negotiates powerful deep unconscious experiences that are awesome and deeply affecting.
- Is applicable and full of new insights for all manner of therapists and counsellors.
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