ABSTRACT
As a session begins, the therapist endeavours to remember those intervention contexts—frame-related and verbal-affective—that were active in the previous hours. The patient begins to free-associate. The therapist therefore responds by sorting out the patient's material for allusions to indicators, direct representations of adaptive contexts, and derivative themes. With the adaptive context and derivative complex, there are two patterns. One or more adaptive contexts are represented manifestly early in the session, and the remaining listening effort concentrates on decoding the derivative complex in light of these intervention contexts. The patient's initial material is largely derivative in form, with an occasional encoded representation of an adaptive context, but no manifest portrayal. The initial task of the therapist, therefore, is communicative, rather than concerned with dynamics, genetics, narcissism, or other similar implications of the patient's material. Before anything else, the therapist must be concerned with the clarity of the portrayal, the recognizability of the adaptive context in the patient's representations.
