ABSTRACT

Therapists have been involved in a variety of self-deceptions about the extent to which they gain access to and interpret the unconscious implications of material from their patients. The most common types of interventions decode manifest images as though their latent content existed in isolation from the ongoing therapeutic relationship, and as though it were enough for a therapist to understand universal symbolism, psychoanalytic theory, and aspects of the patient's inner mental world and intrapsychic conflicts. Interventions that fall under the rubric of isolated decoding are commonly believed to imply a therapist's understanding of a patient's unconscious messages, but they fail to achieve that goal. Adaptive-context decoding has shown that patients first disguise threatening perceptions of their therapists and only secondarily respond with encoded fantasies. Trigger decoding, then, captures the actual intended unconscious meanings contained in derivative form in the patient's manifest associations.