ABSTRACT
Indicators, or therapeutic contexts, are activated expressions of patient madness. Indicators are part of the patient's experience, even though they are stimulated by the interventions of the therapist. They are not adaptive contexts, although patients sometimes react to their own symptoms and resistances. Such reactions generally tend to be manifest or to contain virtually no derivative meaning. The unconscious meaning of an indicator is revealed only when the prior adaptive context that has evoked its presence can be identified. The therapist should gauge the relative strength of an indicator, because those that are quite intense will call for immediate intervention, even with a minimum amount of useful communicative material—a well-represented adaptive context and a varied and coalescing derivative complex. In the presence of mild indicators, there is less need in the patient and hence less pressure on the therapist for intervention at the moment, and the therapist should thus wait until the communicative material is quite clear before attempting interpretation.
