Langs was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York. His undergraduate education was at the
University of Pennsylvania (1945–1948), and his
graduate medical education at the
Chicago Medical School. He worked in various internships and residencies at the US Public Service Hospital in Staten Island, The
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, The Bronx Municipal Hospital Center, and The Research Center for Mental Health at
New York University (1953–1965). His psychoanalytic training was at the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, from 1959 to 1968, where he supervised with
Jacob Arlow. Langs has held numerous professional and academic positions. He was also an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling,
Regent's College, London, England. Langs has authored, co-authored or edited more than 175 scholarly articles and 47 books, ranging over many distinct genre. Among these genre are systematic psychoanalytic investigations, training texts, substantive transcripts from supervision sessions, popular books of applied psychoanalysis, plays, historical-analytical studies. His publications have been translated into the major Western European languages, as well as Russian and Japanese. Langs was also editor of the
International Journal for Psycho-Analysis from 1972 to 1983. Dr. Langs wrote and lectured all over the world on dreams, emotions, unconscious communication, and the science of the mind. His last speaking engagement was at the
Library of Congress. He was a visiting professor at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and an honorary visiting fellow with the School of Psychotherapy and Counseling, Regents College, London. Langs is best known for his rigorous emphasis on establishing and maintaining a secure frame for analysis, his development of the concept of the bi-personal field, and his extensive documentation of encoded transference derivatives in the analytic interaction. It is useful to divide Langs’ publishing career into four more or less distinct phases, based on the central themes of interest in each, though themes from earlier phases tend to re-emerge in new ways in the later periods of Langs' career. Since there is a major shift between the second and third phases, discussion of reactions to Langs' work will come after the second phase and again after the fourth phases below. Langs and his wife had a house on Bell Place in Amagansett. He and Ms. Raphael were married in 1990. They had lived in Plainview and Roslyn. he was already concerned at this date with the distinction between
intrapsychic fantasies and experiences of reality. This distinction, according to him, cuts across both conscious and
unconscious realms, thus permitting a careful look at unconscious
perceptions (as opposed to unconscious
fantasies).
Unconscious perceptions became crucial for Langs' psychoanalytic psychotherapy because, whereas most classical psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious mind suggest that unconscious contents are purely intrapsychic fantasies, Langs insisted that some unconscious experiences are unconscious perceptions of reality, a point with substantial implications for therapeutic practice. For example, if there are unconscious perceptions, one would expect the unconscious mind of a patient to communicate (among other things) the experience of erroneous interventions on the part of the therapist. In the latter case, the therapist could not assume that such experiences were mere fantasies on the part of the client. Rather, the therapist must assume that there could be some validity to the patient's unconscious perception and therefore that the patient may be perceiving the truth of the matter in experiencing therapist errors. From early on, Langs analyzed this connection between psychic experience and reality in terms of "adaptation," suggesting that psychic phenomena should be interpreted in terms of the goals of adaptation in the individual, an adaptive process which refers not only to the patient's life outside of the consulting room but also and especially to the patient's experiences within the consulting room. There are striking parallels here between Langs' and some of Carl Jung's earlier work, which also emphasized adaptation, though Langs appears to have come to this conclusion independently of any knowledge of Jung's ideas. Though some classical Jungian thinkers emphasize adaptation, Langs appears to put adaptation more at the center of his work than either Jung or most Jungians.
Second phase The focus on unconscious perception in the client led Langs to a focus on therapeutic technique, one of the salient characteristics of his second phase, extending from the mid-1970s through the 1980s. This phase is characterized by a number of supervision transcripts published in book form, where Langs develops a number of ideas that came to be essential to his approach. Langs' study of dreams led him to recognize analogies with his earlier clinical research, such that he could distinguish between two different kinds of dream interpretation: those interpretations which read dreams purely in terms of fantasy and thus in isolation from the patient's experience of reality versus those interpretations which read the dream as intimating something of the client's experience and adaptation to reality. Langs generalized this distinction to the
therapeutic relationship, where he focused on what he termed the "adaptive context," i.e. the motivating adaptive experiences which provoked or "triggered" certain types of dreams, fantasies, etc. Langs notes that this distinction allows for two different ways of interpreting a patient's experiences and communications: as products of purely intrapsychic fantasy or as products of a patient's attempt to adapt to (the experience of) reality. Clinically, Langs developed a complex and sophisticated understanding of so-called "derivative" or "disguised" or "
unconscious communication" (i.e., those communicative expressions which include implicit reference to unconscious experiences). Although awareness of derivative communication was not new to psychoanalytic clinical theory, he made listening for derivative communication a centerpiece of his theory of analytic practice. Langs differentiated "Type 1" derivatives, which refer solely to the client's internal experiences, from "Type 2" derivatives, which arise from the patient's attempts to adapt to reality, at times evoking psychic conflict. Over time, he would focus almost exclusively on "Type 2" derivatives, especially as they are discovered in the therapeutic relationship. In particular, Langs would use unconscious derivative communications from the patient as a way of validating or invalidating therapeutic interventions, an element of therapeutic practice he retains to this day. It is at this point that Langs began to call his approach the "communicative approach," highlighting thereby the specific way of listening to clients' unconscious communication, as experienced in the therapeutic field. At times he would also term the approach "adaptational-interactional," again focusing on (1) the adaptive character of psychic experiences and (2) the communication of the meaning of those experiences in therapy, via Type 2 derivatives, which are in part based on the interaction between patient and therapist. Over time, he would call the adaptive context a "trigger" and the interpretation of derivative communications—what Langs now typically calls "encoded communications"—in the light of adaptive triggers, "trigger decoding". Also during this phase, Langs not only had his own practice but was supervising other therapists. Langs began to notice frequent unconscious references to the breaking of therapeutic "ground rules"—a term which refers to the basic context or "frame" in which psychotherapy is practiced such as time, place, fee etc.. This highlighted for Langs the centrality of ground rules and framework for therapy, as well as the problems associated with modifying or, worse, violating the frame of therapy. Langs thus develops one of the hallmarks of his approach which has continued throughout his career, namely, an emphasis on the management of the ground rules and frame of psychotherapy and the many ways in which therapists appear to be unaware of the importance of the therapeutic frame for doing successful psychotherapy.
Discussion of the first two phases All in all, Langs' work in these first two phases is deeply rooted in and yet simultaneously critical of the psychoanalytic tradition. Langs' early work borrows heavily from leading classical psychoanalysts, above all from Freud, as well as from authors in the broader psychoanalytic tradition such as
Donald Winnicott,
Wilfred Bion,
Harold Searles,
Ralph Greenson,
Michael Balint, and Willy and Madeleine Baranger. From the Barangers, Langs derived the notion of the "therapeutic field", emphasizing that therapy is not only about the patient but also about the interaction between patient and therapist. This interaction, what Langs terms the "bi-personal field," includes many dimensions, which Langs analyzes in several supervision texts, drawing heavily from Winnicott and Balint. Among the characteristics of this field, according to Langs, is that the client's unconscious perceptions of failure on the part of the therapist can lead to the patient to try to heal the therapist, a point Langs draws from Searles. The impact of Langs' work on American psychoanalysis during this period would be difficult to overestimate. One indication of Langs' influence is the 1984 anthology
Listening and Interpreting. The Challenge of the Work of Robert Langs, edited by James Raney MD. As Raney put it in his introduction: The articles of this collection aim to "extend, criticize, and apply Langs's ideas in novel areas from their unique clinical perspectives". Several widely known psychotherapists, such as
Masud Khan,
Merton Gill and Patrick Casement, contributed to this volume. Also during this period, Langs initiated book-length clinical dialogues with prominent psychoanalysts, including Harold Searles as well as an extended discussion on transference and
countertransference with
Margaret Little. Langs' publications in this period produced many and varied reactions. Some reviewers considered Langs' work largely a rehashing of the classical psychoanalytic tradition without adding new insights though, as a rule, even those who asserted Langs' lack of originality were quick to point out that Langs always attributed credit to his sources. Some also objected to the tone of Langs' work, suggesting that Langs was more confident in his conclusions than his work merited. In other cases, Langs' work was considered a significant advance over previous psychoanalytic texts. In particular, his work
The Listening Process garnered high praise for articulating a proper listening and validating process for psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, based on listening to derivative communications, something assumed but not as fully developed in the tradition as in Langs' work. Concerning the lack of developed technique for listening to unconscious derivative communications, one reviewer said that Langs' "book attempts to rectify these problems and in doing so,[Langs] identifies every meaningful component of the listening process, explores its basic dimensions, analyzes the intricacies of manifest and latent content of both client and therapist, warns of the dangers of countertransference-based influences, and clearly elucidates the psychoanalytic basis of the listening process." A further area of controversy was Langs' insistence on the potential contribution of the therapist or analyst to defenses and/or resistances in patients. A common criticism of his work in this period was that his emphasis on an ideal frame and an ideal of technique was too constricting. For example, Patrick Casement acknowledged that he was influenced by Langs' work, yet later distanced himself from it saying of Langs that he ". . . thinks that there is only one right way of working analytically". Langs' impact in this period was not restricted to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic therapists but, even at this point, extended especially to Jungian analysts as well. A leading Jungian analyst and noted founder of the "developmental school" of Jungian analysis,
Michael Fordham, reviewed Langs' two-volume
The Therapeutic Interaction. Fordham describes Langs' book in glowing terms, noting how much more developed Langs' work in technique is compared to anything in the analytical (Jungian) psychology of the time. Parks considered this Fordham review the start of Langs' influence on Jungians. Among the Jungians most impacted by Langs was William Goodheart, who not only used his work in his own research, but defended the value of Langs' work in dialogue with Jungians critical of Langs, such as
James Hillman. Langs' continues to influence Jungian psychoanalysis, as for example in a recent book by Jungian psychoanalyst and author John R. White, entitled
Adaptation and Psychotherapy; Langs and Analytical Psychology, which develops a clinical approach to psychoanalysis uniting ideas from both Langs and Jung. The third phase in Langs' work, stretching roughly from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, was motivated by a new set of clinical puzzles. The immediate clinical issue for Langs was that, on the one hand, patients in secured-frame therapy settings—i.e. unconsciously validated therapy with an ideal set of ground rules—tended to encode images validating both the therapy and the frame. On the other hand, these same patients appeared to flee from secured-frame therapy and the boundaries it requires, often ending therapy abruptly and without warning. According to him, when the anxieties these patients unconsciously communicated were decoded, it appeared that existential death anxieties were at the root of the patients' reactions. These factors entailed a set of puzzles requiring some level of resolution, including why the mind would react against what it knows unconsciously to be healing? And why indeed is there such a discrepancy between consciousness and the unconscious, such that consciously one is fleeing therapy which unconsciously is perceived to be healing? Indeed, why is there any differentiation between conscious and unconscious at all? Langs found that the clinical literature did little to illuminate this set of problems. Langs' work in this period takes on a more straightforwardly biological cast than his previous work and the mind is understood in terms of natural, evolutionary processes. Among the developments in this phase of his work is a complex differentiation of distinct mental functions ("mental modules") which articulate the mind in terms of both conscious-unconscious and deep unconscious systems, along with other auxiliary mental modules. Langs' own model of the mind accommodates elements from each of Freud's models while articulating something new. Langs distinguishes between the "unconscious" (or "superficial unconscious") and the "deep unconscious". The "unconscious" or "superficial unconscious" mind—the descriptor "superficial" denoting a contrast with "deep," not a value judgment—is a part of a complex conscious mental system with its own laws of functioning and its own form of communication. The "deep unconscious system," in contrast, has a different set of functions and laws and also, a different form of communication. The latter, according to Langs, communicates in terms of encoded derivatives, in part because straightforward conscious communication about death-related traumas would be too difficult to bear. Hence the work of the adaptive therapist includes learning to hear the encoded derivative communications both to discover the sources of psychic conflict which arise from the diverse points of view the conscious and unconscious systems have on life events, with a specific focus on death anxiety and death-related traumas and, second, to obtain encoded validation of therapeutic interventions. A potential critique of classical psychoanalytic practice is contained in Langs' new model of the mind, namely, that standard psychoanalytic practice only touches on the unconscious or superficial unconscious, without ever getting to the deep unconscious, which can only be accessed through encoded derivative communications. During the period, Langs wrote a number of popular texts and books written for clients rather than for therapists. Among these are popular texts on dreams and on unconscious communication, a workbook designed to measure the value of one's psychotherapist, and a book on doing self-analysis. Langs also published a book on self-processing classes. He distinguishes three kinds of death anxiety: predatory, predator and existential. It had been noted earlier that Langs' emphasis on the frame suggested a closer link to Jung than Freud, and Langs appears to link up his latest work more explicitly with Jung. == The adaptive paradigm of psychotherapy ==