ABSTRACT
Freud's basic model of symptom formation provides an excellent and relatively simple model for understanding why individuals automatically and unconsciously encode certain types of messages. This model, elaborated in terms of present-day communicative understanding, proposes that in addition to internal factors, madness is caused by trauma or danger situations. In substance, a danger situation is constituted by the apprehension of images and experiences that are highly charged and emotionally threatening to the individual; these may be termed raw images. Such experiences lead to an anxiety response in the person so confronted, usually in the form of signal anxiety. In terms of the communicative approach, anxiety-producing mental contents may be kept out of consciousness by totally obliterating them from any measure whatsoever of representation or active expression, but failing obliteration, they will emerge disguised by way of some communicative vehicle—symptom, affect, thought, fantasy, behaviour, and the like—in encoded form.
