Why the CA is Important to You
In the hundred years or so since Freud created psychoanalysis, there have been few, if any, significant advances in our understanding of the emotion-processing mind and the psychotherapeutic process. Over time, our picture of the unconscious domain has been clouded through vague generalizations and loose usage, and this has led to an unfortunate loss of interest in psychoanalysis and what it has to offer.
The communicative approach is considered by many to be the first major advance in our understanding of human emotional life since Freud's pioneering efforts. As such, everyone should take the trouble to learn what the approach has to tell us about human emotions and make good use of its ideas and decoding methods. The concept of unconscious processes has fallen into disrepute, but the communicative approach has rescued the unconscious from oblivion and given it credibility and usefulness. In fact, everyone should have a grasp of how unconscious communication and experience operate and how we can undo nature's barriers to self-understanding through the use of trigger decoding.
Why the Communicative Approach is Important to You
The communicative approach (CA) offers a sound and critical revision of psychoanalytic thinking and the practice of psychotherapy. Its adaptive approach to, and understanding of, both conscious and unconscious coping efforts in response to emotionally-charged triggering events has been developed into a comprehensive theory of the emotion-processing mind. The insights derived from this theory can help everyone to cope better emotionally and to have fuller and more satisfying lives.
The CA is important to you in two ways: First, as a means of helping you to better understand yourself and to adapt to emotional issues with greater insight and more successful results. And second, as a fresh opportunity to understand how psychotherapy works and to distinguish the helpful from the harmful practices of psychotherapists the world over.
The CA has discovered that the conscious mind is naturally inclined to avoid, deny or falsify emotional truths. By studying these defenses and determining how they can be modified, the CA has developed methods through which we can undo these detrimental obliterating defenses, thereby revealing the true nature of our emotional issues and personal inclinations and putting ourselves in a position to cope better in daily life.
The CA has exposed many myths in psychoanalysis, each of which detracts from the development of sound insight, effective coping strategies, and growth. An clear and accurate picture of the deeper nature and sources of emotional issues and how we tend to deal with them is vital to emotional health. The CA is the only approach to the emotion-processing mind that offers such a constructive view of the world of emotions.
Personal Enhancement
Research by therapists using the CA has shown that an understanding of the evolution of the emotion-processing mind is essential to appreciating its present architecture. This is a critical effort because it has been shown that, by evolved design, the emotion-processing mind is a compromised structure with strong self-defeating features. Its conscious system is basically denial-prone and as such, unable to change, grow, and be ideally adaptive. Only evolutionary research can answer the question of why this part of the mind has evolved in such a compromised and self-defeating manner. Better emotion-related coping skills are best forged in light of such understanding.
Basically, the answer to this question can be found in human language development, which took place very recently by evolutionary time standards-some 150,000 years ago. Language is responsible for almost all of the unique and invaluable human capabilities and achievements that have unfolded over the centuries-- speech, science, writing, engineering, elaborate social structures and child rearing practices, and much more. Language acquisition also enabled humans to develop individual identities and a clear sense of self, an awareness of others as separate beings, the ability to anticipate and articulate expectations of the future, and with that, fatefully, an awareness of the inevitability of personal death and the death of significant others. Thus was born existential death anxiety with its awesome and intense emotional consequences, only a handful of them conscious and so many of them unconscious yet strongly influential.
For humans to survive, they had to find means of coping with the inevitability of death so that this realization would not render them excessively vulnerable to distraction and harm. The solution that has evolved in this brief period of time is the use of denial in a wide range of forms-blocking out entire experiences or the most disturbing meanings of traumatic events either at the moment they happen or immediately after; focusing on unimportant events and meanings in lieu of those that are critical and with significant consequences; breaking rules and violating laws so as to promote the unconscious believe that because you are able to break these rules, you also are powerful enough to violate or defy the rule that death follows life; and adherence to a wide range of supernatural and religious beliefs without foundation in reality. Existential death anxiety is the core universal dread, and denial of death the core adaptive response of the human emotion-processing mind in response to death-related traumas-and the root cause of emotional disturbances as well.
This kind of understanding can be derived only from the CA and it's decoding method of accessing deep unconscious anxieties, communications and experiences. The CA is important to you as the source of these new insights which enable you to know yourself a lot better, to appreciate how you cope both consciously and unconsciously (and well or poorly), and live a better life.
Psychotherapy
To appreciate what the CA has to offer in the realm of psychological therapies, let's look at a brief interlude in a psychotherapy that was reported by a psychoanalyst in a prestigious journal (it is modified and condensed here for the purposes of illustration, but is true to the spirit of the events described): The patient is a young female attorney. She comes to her session and says that she shouldn't be there-she's feeling quite ill. The analyst offers her his thermometer to the patient so she can take her temperature, but she refuses it. She goes on to speak of how incompetent she is in her work and then of a coworker who wanted to give her a pornographic magazine, which she refused to take. He reminded her of her father who, after her mother died, had tried to get physical with her-he was out of bounds.
The analyst interprets to the patient that she is having fantasies of seducing him as she had seduced her father in her childhood. The patient responds that the main problem with her father was that he never took responsibility for the things he did-he always blamed others. He was impossible to live with.
Now, it takes little in the way of psychological sensibility to realize that there is an unmistakably seductive quality to a therapist's offer of his personal thermometer to his patient. This is the trigger for the patient's associations that follow his offer-in light of a direct (conscious) response, she reacts indirectly (unconsciously) through encoded stories about her fellow-worker and father. These narratives reflect accurate unconscious perceptions of the seductive gesture made by the analyst-i.e., the allusions to the offer of the pornographic object and the father's getting physical with the patient.
The analyst's interpretation turns reality on its head-he has tried to seduce his patient, but he tells her that she wishes to seduce him. Her encoded response to this intervention says it all-the analyst (father) never takes responsibility for what he does; he blames others; he's impossible to live with.
A theory that takes reality and falsifies its essential meanings cannot produce genuine insight, can only blame and punish patients for therapists' own transgressions, cannot offer a viable picture of emotional life, and can only serve the masochistic (self-harming) needs of patients and others. It also cannot be the basis on which a true science of the emotion-processing mind can be forged. Patients and the general public alike are ill-served by such a theory.
The question, then, is why has this theory proliferated and been accepted by patients and the general public accept for such a long time? The answer lies with unconscious guilt and existential death anxiety-the two banes of human existence. Denial and falsifications by therapists serve to punish patients in ways that temporarily lessen their unconscious sense of guilt for harm done to others, real and imagined. These same denials, especially when they focus on sexual issues, also serve to avoid death-related anxieties-sex is used to deflect both parties to therapy away from violence, harm and death. Psychotherapy has been built as a punitive, death-denying approach to the emotional mind and all concerned accept these ill-gotten defenses regardless of their cost in human suffering. Here too we are dealing with insights available only through the CA-which shows again why the CA is important to you.
To sum up, the CA offers an enormous amount of previously unavailable, invaluable insight into human emotional life and the psychotherapeutic process. I intend to use this site to help you to build an understanding of the approach, to learn how to use trigger decoding, and to find the means of having a far better emotional life than you've had to this point in time.
Suggested Reading
1. Decoding Your Dreams. New York: Henry Holt, 1988.
2. Rating Your Psychotherapist: The Search for Effective Cure. New York: Henry Holt, 1989. (Also a Ballantine paperback)
3. Take Charge of Your Emotional Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1991.
4. Empowered Psychotherapy. London: Karnac Books, 1993.
5. The Dream Workbook. Brooklyn, NY: Alliance Publishing, 1994.
6. Clinical Practice and the Architecture of the Mind. London: Karnac Books, 1995.
7. The Daydream Workbook. Brooklyn, NY: Alliance Publishing, 1995.
8. The Evolution of the Emotion-processing Mind: With an Introduction to Mental Darwinism. London: Karnac Books, 1996. (Also International Universities Press)
9. Death Anxiety and Clinical Practice. London: Karnac Books. 1997.
10. Dreams and Emotional Adaptation. Zeig, Tucker, 1999.
11. Freud's Bird of Prey (A Play in Two Acts). Zeig, Tucker, 2000.
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