Ground Rules in Psychotherapy and Counselling

Robert Langs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429914348
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Robert Langs has long been one of the most individual and controversial psychoanalytic theorists. In this book, he concentrates on one of the most prominent areas of his thought: his insistence upon adherence to strict rules for boundaries (or "frames") in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.Starting from the statement that "Throughout the history of the universe, frames, contexts, rules, and boundaries have been vital aspects of the development and very existence of both physical structures and living organisms," Langs goes on to examine the profile of the issues of boundaries in psychoanalytic thought. He discusses Freud's technique papers on the subject, and goes on to elucidate his own approach, rooted in his thinking on evolutionary and adaptive processes which he has discussed in his previous work. Throughout the book, Langs gives both theoretical discussions and practical groundings of his ideas. As with his previous book, Doing Supervision and Being Supervised (1994), Robert Langs here brings his unique energy and viewpoint to bear on an important but little-examined topic.

PART ONE

THE UNIVERSAL ATTRIBUTES OF THERAPY FRAMES

CHAPTER ONE

Nature framing nature

Throughout the history of the universe, frames, contexts, rules, and boundaries have been vital aspects of the development and very existence of both physical structures and living organisms (deDuve, 1995; Langs, 1996).

On the material side, both large and infinitely small entities are bounded, defined contextually, and constrained by rules and regularities. The most basic set of rules take form as the laws of nature that give the universe its determinism and predictability, chaotic and otherwise. Even quantum-related events, which apply to the fundamental particles of nature and have an ultimate degree of uncertainty, are nevertheless lawful.

The consistencies and certainties defined by rules and laws are buttressed by the physical boundaries that define material conglomerates. Boundaries have also played a vital role in the evolution of the universe. It was, for example, the bounding of a chaotic mass of energy and matter that created the earth some 10 billion years ago. On all levels of physical organization, then, order is the essential grounding for disorder, development, evolution, creativity, and the emergence of new forms (Langs, Badalamenti, & Thomson, 1996; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984).

As for living organisms, contexts, frames, rules, and laws have governed their development, functions, activities, and adaptations from the first moment of their emergence. On the most fundamental level, organisms are governed by the physical laws of nature and, in addition, by regularities and patterns that are uniquely characteristic of biological processes. As organisms move up the evolutionary scale and become increasingly complex, instinctive and then consciously fashioned rules of behaviour and coping have been forged as supplements to the natural laws on which they are grounded. Here, too, contextual order is essential for both smooth functioning and organismic development.

In humans, rules and laws of behaviour and conduct, moral and otherwise, govern actions and interactions with others. Taking form both explicitly and implicitly, these rules are fashioned and reshaped under the influence of both conscious and unconscious needs and forces. Rules are essential to the creation of a relatively stable and predictable environment of a kind that sustains life, protects an individual from harm, and supports adaptive efforts—rules define and safeguard self, relationships with others, and interpersonal transactions. Every situation and relationship that an individual comes upon is affected by a contextual set of biologically, socially, and individually determined ground rules. Humans also have the capability of choosing, consciously and/or unconsciously, to adhere to or violate these rules, doing so under considerable unconscious influence.

With respect to boundaries, biological boundaries or borders define and afford separate identity to a vast panoply of microscopic and macroscopic organisms. Boundaries stand as vital lines of contact between whatever lies within an organism and whatever lies outside it. These defining edges exist within entities and delineate their components, as well as between entities and their environments, which include physical features and other living beings. The importance of boundaries is seen, for example, in the fact that the creation of the cell boundary was the essential emergent event that enabled life to materialize some 4 billion years ago from the unbounded chemical soup that was its matrix. Indeed, the preservation of this same boundary is a sine qua non for a cell’s survival.

In living beings, boundaries are by no means inert or passive: they are extremely active sites. They operate as highly selective and influential envelopes and membranes that are the locus of life-sustaining incorporative and excretory metabolic and other activities. In higher organisms, the proper management of boundary conditions and transactions is critical for successful adaptation and survival. Boundary conditions also affect the status and operations of the elements and entities within their confines. The properties of boundaries are of such great import that their measurement yields decisive information about the operations and state of the systems that they contain. In living organisms, boundaries define, regulate, and shape the activities that transpire within their territories.

Because they function as both borders and sites of critical metabolic processes, boundaries defy the usual distinctions between figure and ground, container and contained, defining structure and operational component. They are both the context for adaptation and adaptational entities themselves. In addition, they serve to keep an organism both separate from and merged with its environment. For humans, boundaries have both physical and psychological features—intrapsychic and interpersonal. The importance of boundaries for living entities cannot be overestimated.

Contexts, frames, and frameworks are terms that refer broadly to the conditions within and under which living organisms exist, function, relate, and adapt. Context is the broader term in that it refers to the physical and psychological circumstances of existing and interacting, including historical aspects, role definitions, rules, and other conditional features. Frames are contexts that can be altered and managed through framing activities and interventions.

Contexts and frames may be relatively fixed or in flux and changing, as seen when a couple moves from a friendship to an engagement to a marriage. As both physical settings and emotionally charged, psychological configurations, contexts and frames provide definitive, environmentally relevant background information and meaning—contextual or interactive meaning—to foreground thinking, behaving, and adapting. But framing activities also constitute adaptive actions that are rich in emotionally meaningful qualities of their own. These attributes are evident, for example, when a crime is committed—the rule violation serves to frame the relationship between the thief and the victim, while the theft itself is a framing action fraught with conscious and unconscious meanings—an active adaptation-evoking trigger that elicits further efforts at adaptation by both parties to the situation.

Contexts and frames activate and define organismic responses that cannot be properly understood without knowledge of these conditional factors. In substance, then, contexts and frames speak for the conditional and relative nature of all human experience.

Frames and frameworks are contexts that tend to be relatively well defined and stable, though subject to change as well. Frames mark off the spatial, temporal, interpersonal, and intrapsychic aspects of both physical and psychological structures, processes, and events. They include rules, laws, and contracts; the definition of roles and responsibilities; limits and constraints; expectations and acceptable behaviours and responses; settings; and the historical elements of a given relationship and interaction.

Framing activities or managing the setting and ground rules form a broad group of functions that are carried out by means of establishing a physical space and a set of rules and boundaries for a given relationship or interaction. While psychological and interpersonal frames may be rather stable and relatively unchanging, frames are rarely static but are usually in a state of flux. Framing creates conditions for human interactions not unlike dramatic stage settings that have both fixed and movable features, and which also may at times be the main issue for the action of the play.

Stable, secured frames tend to be safe and inherently supportive, while unstable, insecure frames tend to be disruptive and harmful. Insecure frames create states of disequilibrium and dysfunction to the point where they tend to become the primary concern of those who are under their influence. Because the frame is more fundamental and affecting than the actions it contextualizes, dealing with frame issues, usually by stabilizing the frame, is an adaptive task that takes precedence over dealing with other concerns that cannot be dealt with and resolved effectively without a secured frame.

For humans, a sound frame acts as a safe and supportive, highly stable backdrop and container for coping and surviving. Nevertheless, secured frames are also suffused with constraints and limitations that afford them entrapping qualities that create an unusual type of intensely disruptive anxiety—existential death anxiety. This sense of confinement is linked to the entrapping qualities of human existence itself—the gift of life that must end in death (Langs, 1997).

In contrast, unstable and insecure frames are damaging and unconsciously arouse another form of death anxiety—predatory death anxiety (Langs, 1997). This type of anxiety tends to be experienced unconsciously and greatly affects both behaviour and emotional state. However, modified and uncertain frames also offer maladaptive defences against the far more dreaded (yet invaluable) secured frame and the existential anxieties that it arouses. Thus, for humans, both secured and compromised frames and framing efforts have mixed effects, although in toto, a secured frame serves as a far more supportive and constructive context for human interactions and adaptations than does the far more costly and perilous modified frame.

Contexts for frames and framing

There are two additional perspectives that can help us to understand and appreciate the role of ground rules and boundaries in the psychotherapy process. The first involves the recognition of three major factors in human emotional adaptation.

1. The need for safety, care, and holding. Basic personal human resources such as a stable personality, a sound capacity for self-regulation, the ability to sustain emotional equilibrium, and the development of effective adaptive capabilities require stable and safe relationships and settings; proper care and support; stimulation for growth and development; and a variety of other positive experiences and affiliations. The necessity for this empathic and compassionate climate has been stressed by a wide range of interpersonally oriented theorists (Langs, 1988)—to the relative exclusion, however, of the other two factors that shape emotional life.

2. The experience of trauma. While support is essential for the development and use of adaptive resources, traumatic events are the ultimate test of these capabilities. In addition, traumatic experiences tend to reshape the configuration and operations of adaptive assets, enhancing some aspects while seriously, and at times, permanently damaging others. If we define traumas in terms of the adaptational load that they place on the emotional mind, these range from minor incidents to those experiences that overload the psychic apparatus and cause adaptational malfunctions.

Emotional overload has many sources, ranging from major catastrophes like the death of a loved one to the slow accumulation of less intense but disruptive impingements. By and large, overload prompts the automatic invocation of denial-based, obliterating defences, and in many cases they become an essential feature of an individual’s favoured mode of adaptation to emotionally charged events. All in all, the experience of trauma plays a significant role in the emotional life of all humans; dealing with trauma is the crucial test of emotionally related resources.

3. The nature of frames and framing activities. The final factor—and, of course, all three factors are interrelated—pertains to frames and framing activities that affect emotional adaptations in several ways. Frames are, as noted, the influential contexts for both development and adaptation. Secured frames support these processes, while modified frames impede them. Although it is conceivable that, for example, a parent could be fully supportive in a frame-modified home setting, the rule is that deviant frames, poor caring, and frequent traumas tend to go hand in hand. In addition, every major trauma involves some kind of frame violation, while every frame violation is a traumatic experience. Frames also contribute to the experienced meanings of traumas and to how an individual copes with them. Indeed, a person’s basic mode of adaptation is, at its core, either frame-securing (adhering to rules and boundaries) or frame-modifying (breaking rules and violating boundaries).

In all, then, frames take their place along with nurturance and trauma as the main determinants of the vicissitudes of emotional life.

The second perspective on frames and framing activities involves a clarification of the essences of emotional life itself. There has been, of late, a rush of effort to define more clearly the psychological and physical aspects of human emotions, with a concentration on acute emotional states (e.g. Goleman, 1995; LeDoux, 1996; Plutchik, 1993). Less explored and barely understood are the residuals of these intense emotional moments and their subsequent working over—the mental (and bodily) processing of emotionally charged impingements and the information and meaning that they embody. The distinction between acute emotional states and their subsequent processing is of some importance for the perspectives that I offer in this book.

Broadly defined, emotional states are affective responses to triggering events that activate issues related to both survival and inner well being. These states are mobilized by external (and, more rarely, internal) triggering events, and they are experienced both consciously and unconsciously. They have both psychological and physical features, and their physiological, biochemical, and brain substrates have been intensely investigated.

For our purposes, we may classify four types of basic emotional arousal: first, negative emotional states, such as fear, anxiety, and rage, which are affects that function as emergency signals and physical and mental mobilizing responses to predatory threat and physical and psychological danger; second, positive emotional states, such as love and happiness, which are activated in the service of needs for care, safety, relatedness, and reproductive success; third, depressive affective states, which are reactions to loss and experienced harm; and, fourth, moral emotional states, such as shame and guilt, which serve mainly to limit harmful actions against others—and the possibility of retribution. Each of these emotional states has a unique neurological substrate and set of physiological correlates, much of it centred in the limbic system and its linkages (LeDoux, 1996). In activating and enhancing emergency responses such as withdrawal, flight, or fight, emotions serve the interests of immediate survival and support an individual’s use of the adaptive resources needed for coping with acute emotionally charged situations.

The traumas that evoke emotional states may be acute or chronic, physical and/or psychological, and the experiences are both consciously and unconsciously mediated. Clinical study has shown that by and large, acute traumas and the emotional states that they evoke prompt adaptive processing by the conscious system of the emotional mind and its superficial unconscious subsystem. Deep unconscious processing is constricted in favour of the mobilization of adaptive resources that are largely accessible to awareness and available for immediate, direct coping responses.

The mental responses to the aftermath of an emotionally charged experience tends to be long-lasting and may persist throughout a lifetime. That is, the disequilibrium and damage caused by traumatic events create lasting mental (and brain) states that often operate dysfunctionally. It is therefore common to find individuals actively engaged in efforts to process and resolve a variety of post-traumatic states and their residuals, however mild or severe. In contrast to moments of sudden emotional charge, this long-term psychological processing effort takes place to only a limited extent consciously but is quite intense on the deep unconscious level. Thus, the conscious processing of the effects of an emotionally charged event tends to be constricted, limited, highly defensive, and perseverative, while the deep unconscious response is likely to be extensive, multifaceted, insightful, and constructive—though unavailable to awareness and to direct adaptive responsiveness.

We may think, then, of an emotion-producing mental module (a group of functions related to the development of acute emotional states) and a rather different emotion-processing mental module (a group of functions devoted to coping with the after-effects of an emotional state and the trauma or acute need that evoked the emotional response in the first place). Each module is composed of a distinctive set of adaptive functions and each has its own features and processing resources.

In psychotherapy, we are only rarely faced with a patient in the throes of an acute emotional reaction or state. This occurs most often when a patient enters a session in a condition of acute emotional upset such as an anxiety attack, or when a patient is acutely traumatized by his or her therapist. On the other hand, every patient seen in psychotherapy or counselling is actively engaged in processing a host of emotional traumas, as well as moments of joy and a variety of other strong and weak emotiona...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• PART ONE The universal attributes of therapy frames
• PART TWO The specific ground rules
• REFERENCES
• INDEX