Clinical Workbook for Psychotherapists

Robert Langs, M.D., is well known as the author of many books on the subject of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, including 'The Technique of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy' (2 volumes), 'Psychotherapy: A Basic Text' , 'A Primer of Psychotherapy ' and 'Decoding Your Dreams'. He is currently Executive Director at the Program for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the Beth Israel Medical Center, New York; Clinical Professor with the Department of Psychiatry, Mt. Sinai Hospital and School of Medicine, New York; and Visiting Clinical Investigator at the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, New York.

In his preface to this volume, Dr Langs writes: "This book is a one-volume condensation of a previously published three-volume set of workbooks. I have preserved the workbook format and have tried to select the most cogent clinical vignettes available in the original books to convey the essence of clinical (communicative) listening, formulating, intervening and validating.This is a practice book in several senses; it stresses the details of sound clinical practice; it invites the reader to engage in exercises related to these practices as he or she goes through the volume; and it offers practice in techniques that are essential to sound psychotherapy. The hope is to make psychoanalytically orientated communicative technique real and accessible to the reader-practitioner in an active and immediately meaningful way".

• Preface -- Understanding Unconscious Communication -- Unconscious communication and madness -- How and why messages are encoded -- Decoding disguised messages -- Analysing the therapist’s interventions -- Decoding the material from patients -- Listening and Formulating -- The elements of listening -- Indicators -- Identifying the adaptive contexts -- Adaptive contexts: manifest representations -- Adaptive contexts: derivative representations -- Adaptive contexts: known implications -- Responses to interventions: encoded perceptions -- Responses to interventions: reactions to perceptions -- Some precepts of listening -- Intervening and Validating -- Some precepts of intervening: the nature of interventions -- Silence -- Interpretations and the play-back of selected derivatives -- Managing the ground rules of psychotherapy -- Common errors in intervening -- Appendix: The seven dimensions of the therapeutic interaction