ABSTRACT
The interventions of the therapist are the fulcrum of the listening process. These contexts are the stimuli for the patient's pathological expressions—symptoms and resistances. They also serve to organize the patient's manifest and latent, direct and encoded behaviours and associations. Because of this, adaptive contexts occupy much of the therapist's thinking in the course of a session. The therapist consistently alternates between loose, unformed, empathic, and intuitive listening and momentary efforts at formulation and shaping. A well-represented adaptive context is the single most important signal to a therapist that an intervention is likely to be both feasible and advisable. In exploring the patient's material for the representations and implications of intervention contexts, four major operations are utilized. They are naming all known adaptive contexts; identifying all direct and manifest representations, portrayals, or allusions to adaptation-evoking contexts; identifying contexts which the patient portrays and represents in strong derivative form; and identifying all possible meanings and implications of known adaptive contexts.
