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There are important reasons for the revitalization of this web site. Over the past months, the communicative or adaptive approach has expanded its insights into human psychology and the psychodynamics of emotional life. Of note is the fact that it has now expanded these insights into areas of life that lie beyond the immediate psychotherapy situation.

Following the publication in 2006 of my book, Love and Death in Psychotherapy, which is a narrative presentation of the approach's guide to sound psychotherapy, in 2008 I wrote and published Beyond Yahweh and Jesus: Bringing Death's Wisdom to Faith, Spirituality, and Psychoanalysis. The book a reexamination and reinterpretation of religious beliefs and doctrines based on perspectives drawn from the trauma-centered adaptive paradigm with its focus on the many ramifications, conscious and unconscious, of the central emotionally laden problem of human life, namely, coping with death and the three forms of death anxiety it evokes-predatory (someone wants to harm and thus destroy us), predator (we have harmed others and in our guilt we should be executed), and existential (we are mortal and need to deny that this is the case).

Early this year, 2009, I came out with Managing Managed Care: Psychotherapy and Medication Management in the Modern Era, a book that provides both mental health professionals and the general public with a set of sound therapeutic principles that can secure and enhance any type of psychotherapy in which there is third-party coverage. Importantly, these principles safeguard both patient and therapist or counselor from causing harm to each other and facilitates the healing process as well.

Then, in October of this year I published an extended exploration of the life and work of Sigmund Freud. Freud's life and the psychoanalysis he gave to the world were deeply affected by a series of mostly obliterated (non-conscious) early-life traumas. The book shows how these unconscious effects unwittingly pushed Freud into focusing psychoanalysis on a series of important issues that nevertheless were used to avoid and detach from the issues related to death that empower, for better or worse, much of human life.

I hope you will read the new (and old) material on this site and will comment freely on your impressions. Reading these newer works are sure to give you a fresh and honest look at life in general and yourself in particular.

New Articles

How Freud's Traumas Have Affected You Personally - For Better and Much of it for Worse

Emerson wisely wrote: There is no history, only biography. The adaptive approach has provided an addendum: When it comes to biography, a person's trauma history tells most of the story. It follows then that the trauma histories of historical figures have a huge say not only in regard to the path they choose for their own lives, but also in regard to the countless lives that their choices affect. Such is the case with the traumatic incidents in the life of Sigmund Freud, the most influential figure in the history of the dynamic psychology and the emotionally-charged unconscious operations of the human mind.

It is, of course, widely accepted that the psychoanalysis that Freud created has had an enormous influence on life in the twentieth and unfolding twenty-first centuries. He brought the concept of unconscious mental processes and the unconscious part of the mind to the world, along with ideas about infantile and other forms of sexuality, many aspects of the therapeutic situation, the means by which threatening unconscious meanings are disguised in manifest dreams, and much more. Most of this appreciation has been based on what I call Freud's second, inner-mental paradigm of the emotion-processing mind with its need-centered view of emotional life. The overall sense is that Freud forged a strong edifice on which subsequent thinking about the mind has been built. Detractors are rare and any sense of error tends to be centered on the details of Freudian and post-Freudian thinking; harmful basic flaws have not been identified and the effects of the early traumas that he suffered have not been considered to any notable extent.

As I stressed in Freud on a Precipice, Freud did forge another paradigm of psychoanalysis which came before, and was replaced by, his second theory of the mind. This first theory was-and still is-adaptive- and trauma-centered. In this approach, the key issues involve external reality rather than inner needs, and conflicts connected with death and death anxiety are central. Given that death clearly is a far greater source of creativity and emotional dysfunctions that any type of inner need, the view of Freud's work from the vantage-point of his own first paradigm (updated as the adaptive approach) begins with the recognition of a basic flaw in his thinking. This is best characterized as the use of lesser set inner-need-based psychological truths to mask and deny far more critical and affecting truths about the universal dangers posed by reality and its challenges. Importantly, it has been possible to show that this flight from reality was strongly motivated by the painful unconscious residuals of at least eight early traumas that Freud suffered in the earliest years of his life. As such, his trauma-based turning away from reality has affected not only the way in which he evolved the practice and theory of psychoanalysis, but also the lives of each and every one of us. Given that there was a basic flaw in Freud's thinking - and in the thinking of his followers-these effects have been quite detrimental to all concerned.

Basically, in leading the world on a flight from the grim truths of reality to the weaker truths of fantasy and inner needs, Freud was exploiting and catering to the flawed design of the emotion-processing mind which promotes a natural avoidance of death-related traumas-we are by evolved design both trauma-and death-phobic. Quite naturally, then, we make use of an endless array of mechanisms and behaviors unconsciously crafted to deny death-and Freud offered his psychoanalytic theory as one such denial system. This denial was based on his personal need to obliterate and avoid consciously facing the series of early-life traumas that had made reality an unendurable aspect of his life-and the recovery of these early traumas a life-endangering process. The denial system he created appeals to us as humans in general because we too are archetypically inclined to use similar denial-based mechanisms to blot out our own early (and later) traumas lest we too become murderously enraged and self-destructive because of the guilt that these murderous impulses causes in us.

As spelled out in Freud on a Precipice, the most likely and most unbearable early traumas suffered by Freud appear to have included the probable suicide of his familial father's (Jakob's) first wife, the likelihood that Freud himself was conceived premaritally, and his enduring uncertainty as to who his biological father actually was-Jakob as the family proposed or his half-brother Phillip, with whom his mother likely had an affair.

The consequences for us of Freud's turning away from trauma and death are many. For one, we have an erroneous concept of unconscious mental processes because we think of disguised needs and wishes in lieu of disguised perceptions of painful realities. As a result, we have a naive view of reality and do not deal effectively with the traumas we endure, especially in respect to their unconsciously mediated effects. The life we live is seriously impaired and harmed by this kind of avoidance. We fail to appreciate that our personal traumas wreak havoc with our lives in that they fuel inclinations and behaviors designed to avenge those whom we unconsciously perceive as having tried to or having actually harmed us. In addition, we have not fully understood the reasons why and the consequences of our tendency to deny death by doing violence and harm to others. These blindspots have had their larger effects in our failure to understand many of the unconscious sources of human violence and its culmination in acts of war and terrorism.

Summing up, reacting unconsciously to his own traumas, Freud failed to prepare humankind for the central battle of life-the struggle against those who have harmed and are harming us, the guilt we experience for having harmed others, and the inevitability of our own death. On a grander scale, Freud's psychology has done virtually nothing to help the leaders of nations to understand the unconscious reasons they go to war and thus has done nothing significant to reduce the evident inclination of humans to try of destroy each other rather than find non-violent ways to resolve their interpersonal and international conflicts. The means of finding and making peace with ourselves and those around us, as well as in the world at large, have eluded us-much of it because Freud was unable to find the means of making peace with himself and his family over the harm they had done to him. It is time then that we found the courage Freud was unable to muster and face reality in both the raw and in our unconscious experience of its more harmful threats so we can make life on earth far more satisfying and harmonious than it has been and presently is to this day.

Integrating the Two Paradigms of Psychoanalysis

In a recent book, Freud on a Precipice, I presented what I believe to be a strong case for the recognition of two distinct paradigms of psychoanalysis. The first has its roots in Freud's initial, trauma-centered theory of neuroses and is currently represented by the adaptive approach. The second has it roots in Freud's shift to a need- and mind-centered theory and is currently represented by the various mainstream schools of psychoanalysis, such as self-psychology, objects relations, and the interpersonal and inter-subjective approaches.

The two theories are fundamentally psychoanalytic because they are grounded in a recognition of the existence and importance of unconscious mental contents and processes in the operations of the human mind. Nevertheless, they are distinctive paradigms because their primary postulates and their basic view of the mind's operations differ in significant ways. They are then two philosophies of the mind.

Among the main differences between the two paradigms, the following loom large and need to be reconciled:

To offer rough approximations, analysts working within the framework of the classical approach tend to address the manifest contents of their patients' material, treat all of a patient's associations - intellectualizations and narratives - as of equal value and meaning, blend detectable conscious meanings into evident unconscious meanings, and extract hidden meanings and implications from the surface of patients' communications. The resultant formulations center around revealed unconscious needs, wishes, and memories that are either being projected by the patient into the analytic situation or evoked by the analyst - the important aspect is, however, how the patient experiences what the analyst has said or done.

While attending to such meanings, the adaptive approach distinguishes between intellectualized communications and those that are narrative in nature-dreams and stories; it views the latter as the sole means through which deeply unconscious experiences and processes are conveyed. Where the mainstream analyst formulates conscious and unconscious needs and fantasies, the adaptive analyst formulates unconscious perceptions largely but not exclusively of disruptive traumatic incidents. Where the classical analyst works mainly with the implications of patient's material, the adaptive analyst works by undoing disguises and decoding narrative imagery in light of the triggering events that have evoked them-a process called trigger decoding. Each approach, then, tends to access a very different type of unconscious experience.

The definition of the primary realm of unconscious experience and the nature of adaptive processing activities.

The classical theories are focused on inner mental and instinctual drive needs, wishes, and fantasies. Its interpretations deal with unsatisfied and conflicted needs, maturational and developmental issues, and on damage to the mental apparatus caused by deprivation and acts of psychological and physical harm.

The adaptive approach is focused on the adaptation to external events, primarily those that are traumatic in nature. Its interpretations deal with the unconscious perceptions and the unconscious processing of many of the most devastating meanings of these events - and their consequence for mental functioning.

The classical theories are grounded in the structural model of ego, id, and superego, each component of the mind having both conscious and unconscious components.

The adaptive approach is grounded in a two-system, topographic model of the mind, each system having distinctive modes of perception, thinking, adaptive processing capabilities, defenses, codes of morality and ethics, and the like.

The classical theories acknowledge the importance of trauma but explores its damaging effects on the psyche without a detailed study of the processes involved. These theories also recognize the existence of death and death anxiety, but views these issues as secondary considerations when it comes to the factors that cause emotional dysfunctions or account for emotional stability and health. All in all, the approach to death anxiety is broad, general, naive, superficial, and based largely on manifest contents from patients.

The adaptive approach views issues related to death and death anxiety as the central concern of humanity and the main adaptive concern of the emotion-processing mind. In its view, most of the experiencing and adaptive processing of these anxieties takes place unconsciously and therefore is conveyed through incident-evoked encoded narrative themes and images.

While linked by the shared concept of unconscious contents and processes, there are then fundamental differences in the two prevailing paradigms of psychoanalysis. How then are these differences to be reconciled and the two theories integrated into a single theory that can serve as a comprehensive theory of psychoanalysis?

The clue to how to accomplish this task comes from a quote from Freud's 1915 comment to the B'nai Brith: -If you want to preserve peace, arm for war. If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.-

This rare comment by Freud on the subject of death per se suggests that it is one thing to prepare for death and quite another to deal with it based on how you have done your preparations. There are, then, two intertwined phases to life: preparation and adaptation.

The analogy to muscles is helpful: There is the investigation of the nature of the essential nutrients and such that are needed to build strong muscles, and there is as well the separate but related study of how muscles function in the services of adaptation. In like manner, with the emotion-processing mind-the mental module that has evolved to enable humans to cope with trauma-there is the study of the developmental task of building sound adaptive mental capacities and there is the separate but related study of how these capacities prepare the individual for his or her life-long struggle with death as evoked by death-related traumas and the realization of personal mortality.

To bring this insight to the task at hand, the first unifying concept is that the second-paradigm, classical analytic approaches are devoted primarily to exploring the necessary ingredients for building a well adapted mind, while the first, adaptive paradigm is the study of how that mind copes with adaptive challenges. In this way the two approaches are complementary and it follows that the classical approach should extend itself into considerations of trauma, death, and death anxiety, while the adaptive approach should pay pay more attention to developmental issues.

While this insight seems to enable us to unify the two paradigms of psychoanalysis, it turns out that the problem is not so easily settled. The adaptive position has discovered several other steps that must be taken to complete this merger. To appreciate these added steps, however, a therapist must have a reasonable grasp of the features of human communication and the emotion-processing mind as seen through eyes of adaptive thinking.

The most basic consideration lies with the listening process of each approach and the realm of experience each accesses. Mainstream listening and formulating (and intervening), addresses patients' manifest contents and their implications. Conscious and unconscious consideration tend to be blended into each other and much of this work involves highly intellectualized efforts to identify and restate or rename what the patient is saying. To the extent that this work touches on an unconscious meaning or implication, that meaning is readily discernible in the patients' material; it is easily extracted directly from the patient's material. Formulations are mind-focused even when the patient is understood to be reacting to an intervention made by his or her analyst or therapist.

All in all, then, when it does touch on unconscious needs and such, this work reaches into an unconscious realm of thought and experience that tends to be self-evident and quite superficial in nature. We may think of this realm as the world of superficial unconscious experience. Adaptive studies have shown that while there is a measure of meaning here, the realm of experience it touches on is close to conscious awareness and relatively weak in its effects on emotional life. Indeed, formulations and interpretations of this kind tend to be invoked in the service of unrecognized unconscious needs in both patients and analysts to make use of denial-based defenses against dealing with active forms of death anxiety-doing so largely by focusing on issues unrelated to trauma and death.

The adaptive use of trigger decoding accesses a very different, relatively undefended, grim world of unconscious experience. Narrative vehicles are the sole carrier of expressions of this realm of unconscious experience. Thus, when patients are allowed free reign to associate narrated incidents to dreams elements, the world that emerges for view in disguised form is trauma-centered, death-related, and populated with unconscious perceptions that are terrible to behold. It is here that the most awful aspects of human life are encoded and there is a universal dread of encoding these experiences and even more so of bringing their meanings into conscious awareness. Indeed, there is a natural, inbuilt series of denial-based, archetypal defenses that humans invoke automatically to defend themselves against becoming consciously aware of the most terrible meanings of the traumas they have has suffered and and those that they have caused others, largely because of the endangering murderous and suicidal reactions and needs that they activate. I have termed this the world of deep unconscious experience and it is the locale of the most powerful determinants of emotional life.

There are then two distinctive worlds of human emotional experience and each is accessed and brought into awareness in a very different way: One is delved into by extracting the implications of manifest communications, while the other is reached solely through trigger decoding. First paradigm analysts recognize these two modes of experience, while second paradigm therapists do not - they have confined themselves to superficially unconscious experiences.

It follows then that in order to create a comprehensive, unified theory of the human mind and a more complete view of the intricacies of the human condition, second paradigm psychoanalysts must recognize a world of unconscious experience that they have not as yet gained access to and thus are quite unaware of. Taking this step will allow analysts of all persuasions to have a choice as to which approach to their patients' communications and symptoms they wish to use - the intellectualized second paradigm approach or the narrative-centered approach. But here too nature proves to be more complex than we would naively expect. The main problem in making such a choice stems from the finding that the highly reliable, deep unconscious wisdom system of the emotion-processing mind is relentlessly critical and disapproving of interventions based on the second paradigm theory. This highly perceptive and reliable system of the mind responds with encoded, non-validating imagery to such efforts and consistently indicates that these interventions are far more harmful than healing. Indeed, it indicates that much of the relief they may bring to patients lies with the ways in which second-paradigm interventions avoid the anxiety-provoking realm of deep unconscious experience and its grim deep unconscious, death-related experiences.

After the two theories are integrated, its perspectives will prompt the turn to new research into the features of the emotion-processing mind and the practical matter of how to best conduct a psychoanalysis or psychotherapy experience. In addition, many unsolved problems regarding our understanding of the emotion-processing mind and the therapeutic process will materialize, and psychoanalysts can be expected to turn their attention to a concentrated investigation of trauma and human violence as they affect individuals and nations - and the world at large. There will, then, be both immediate gains in understanding and the recognition of major uncertainties. Both are signs of a viable and promising theory of the mind.

To those who have read or will read Freud on a Precipice, I offer the following correction. In the book, I assert an archetypal principle to the effect that first theories of the mind and nature are as a rule influenced by the human need to deny death. I cited the sole exception I could think of as the belief that the earth was flat and thus, that proposed that death anxiety did in this case play a role in a first paradigm. Quite by chance, I recently learned that beginning with the Greek philosophers and mathematicians, no one of prominence held to such a belief. The consensus was that the earth was pear-shaped and thus circumnavigable. Thus, unresolved death anxiety was not an aspect of this first paradigm and it is not an exception to the archetypal rule that I had uncovered.

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Welcome to the ESCP Website! Updated January 2010

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New Articles

How Freud's Traumas Have Affected You Personally - For Better and Much of it for Worse

Integrating the Two Paradigms of Psychoanalysis

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