ABSTRACT
Robert Joseph Langs's approach to making sense of patients' behavior in psychotherapy was, in fact, inspired by Sigmund Freud's theory of dream formation. Langs found that the unconscious concerns of patients in psychotherapy virtually always center on the behavior of their therapists. In the field of psychotherapy very powerful unconscious motivations and defensive needs come into play. Psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic training functions, in large measure, to mould students into loyal, conformist, true believers who will unthinkingly close ranks against the critic or innovator. James Raney suggests that the uniquely exposing nature of communicative psychotherapy has greatly contributed to its irrationally defensive reception by the profession. Langs and his co-workers have created a method for scoring transcripts of sessions line by line in such a manner that over 50,000 data points can be generated from a single psychotherapeutic session.
