ABSTRACT
The manner in which a therapist addresses and responds to patients’ deep unconscious, secured-frame needs is fateful for the vicissitudes of patients’ emotional dysfunctions and their therapeutic resolution. When trigger decoding is utilized to determine patients’ deep unconscious responses to framing interventions, the picture of the ground rules of psychotherapy radically departs from manifest content-based views. Therapists and their patients are unconsciously motivated to find rationalizations to justify their pathological unconscious needs for frame modifications. The best that can be done under frame-modified conditions is to interpret properly the negative unconscious perceptions and symptomatic effects of the deviations involved and secure those deviations that prove to be unnecessary and correctable. As long as a therapist offers the most secured frame possible under the conditions under which a patient is being seen in therapy, viable therapeutic work is feasible. A deep appreciation of the impact of frames and framing interventions renders all forms of psychotherapy far more effective than otherwise.
