ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the communicative approach, and its particular means of observing and formulating the transactions of the therapeutic interaction. It also presents the essentials of its methods as they pertain to the study of death and the anxieties it arouses. The vignette demonstrates how trigger-decoding illuminates the unconscious aspects of death anxiety. The theme of death appears in the patient's initial guided associations and is repeated in this last association. Communicative understanding adds two essential dimensions to our understanding of the appearance of these death themes in the patient's material. The death themes serve to encode the patient's unconscious perceptions of the destructive aspects of the therapist's frame modification and of the patient's wish to participate in the deviation. Given that both deaths occurred in a confined space, the stories also encode the patient's unconscious perception of her therapist's and her own secured-frame anxieties, which are always a deeply unconscious factor in the invocation of a frame modification.
