Robert Joseph Langs (June 30, 1928 – November 8, 2014) was a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychoanalyst. He was the author, co-author, or editor of more than forty books on psychotherapy and human psychology. Over the course of more than fifty years, Langs developed a revised version of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, currently known as the "adaptive paradigm". This is a distinctive model of the mind, and particularly of the mind's unconscious component, significantly different from other forms of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy.
Overview
Langs treated psychoanalysis as a biological science, subject to the laws of evolution and adaptation. As with any living species, coping with environmental threats—and the resultant stresses and psychological traumas– must lie at the heart of human life including human psychological life. Langs’ research led him to posit the existence of a mental module he termed the "emotion-processing mind," a psychic function which evolved to ensure the survival of the species. Langs contended that it had done so at the cost of adaptive failures and with devastating emotional consequences. He maintained that he had identified the assets and limitations of the emotion processing mind clinically and shown how the insights from this approach can help correct adaptive deficits, allowing more fulfilling lives, both individually and collectively. Langs therefore rejects the prevailing belief among psychoanalytic traditions that sexual or aggressive wishes and fantasies, the need for sound relationships with and affirmations from others, or self-actualization are the main issues in emotional life (see psychoanalysis). For Langs, the latter may be significant in any given clinical situation but precisely to the extent that they raise issues associated with emotional adaptation.
Langs revamped the psychoanalytic view of the unconscious mind, in accordance with his evolutionary approach. According to him, the unconscious mind operates on the basis of perceptions outside of awareness – subliminal or unconscious perceptions – much as the conscious mind operates on the basis of conscious perceptions, i.e. perceptions within awareness. The unconscious mind evolved, according to Langs, due to the development of language acquisition, which brought with it the uniquely human awareness of the future and, correspondingly, the sense of our own mortality and other death-related issues. This realization of mortality is often evoked by traumatic incidents and, thus, the anxiety-provoking ramifications of those experiences are barred from consciousness, though perceived unconsciously and then adaptively processed towards resolution. In contrast to classical psychoanalytic theory, which tends to view the unconscious mind as a chaotic mix of drives, needs, and wishes (see psychoanalysis), Langs sees the unconscious mind as an adaptive entity functioning outside of direct awareness.
Because the conscious mind finds death-related traumas and stresses unbearable, it tends to deny the anxiety-provoking meaning of traumatic events but thereby also loses the potential wisdom that the traumatic experience might confer. According to Langs, the conscious mind thereby adapts, by surviving the event that seemed unbearable, but simultaneously fails to adapt, by leaving unconscious what it might have gained from the experience. Thus an important goal of adaptive therapy is to access the wisdom of the unconscious mind, which is denied at the conscious level due to the pain and anxiety associated with the traumatic event.
According to Langs, the activities of unconscious processing reach the conscious mind solely through the encoded messages that are conveyed in narrative communications like dreams. He maintains that, as a rule, dreams are responses to current traumas and adaptive challenges and that their story lines characteristically convey two sets of meanings: the first expressed directly as the story qua story, while the second is expressed in code and implicitly, disguised in the story's images. We can tap into our unconscious wisdom by properly decoding our dreams, i.e. by linking the dream to the traumas that have evoked them—a process Langs calls “trigger decoding”. This process, according to Langs, is the essence of self-healing based on deep insight.