ABSTRACT
This chapter reiterates the principles necessary for decoding the material from the patient: identify a manifest theme, extracting it from the manifest contents, recognize the main implications of the trigger, and delineate all levels of meaning contained within the extracted theme. It presents a study of the essentials of the decoding process in psychotherapy. The patient's associations in a psychotherapy session move along at a rather fast pace. As a result, the therapist must move continuously back and forth between realizations related to the implications of the prevailing adaptive contexts and the manifest imagery of the patient. Each surface image is quickly lifted from its manifest context and placed into (transposed into) a context related to one or another implication of the intervention context. At bottom, then, this critical effort requires a considerable degree of self-knowledge and a comprehensive understanding of the nature and function of each intervention made by a psychotherapist.
