The clinical training of a psychotherapist relies heavily on the process of supervision. In this paper I will offer some new approaches to supervision that have been developed on the basis of the communicative approach (Langs, 1982, 1992, 1993). My main focus will be on two aspects of the supervisory process: first, the influence of the conditions and ground rules of supervision on the education and experiences of the supervisee (Langs, 1994, 1998) , and second, the use of a new teaching-treating modality that combines supervision with psychotherapy, rather than keeping the two experiences separate (Langs, 1993).

The Communicative Approach

A supervisor's theory and practice of supervision is based on the position that he or she adopts regarding the nature of psychopathology and the process of psychotherapy, including how therapy heals. In brief the basic position of the communicative approach, which I have developed over the past three decades, has the following key features:

1. It is fundamentally adaptive in nature. That is, its basic proposition is that natural selection has evolved human minds with a specific mental module -- the emotion-processing mind -- that deals with and adapts, both consciously and unconsciously, to emotionally-charged stimuli and events. Thus the primary task of the emotion-processing mind is to adapt to environmental events and only secondarily to internal events like memories and fantasies, which are, in any case, activated by environmental impingements. These impingements include the physical settings, conditions, and ground rules of experiences, the words and actions of other humans, natural events, and the actions of other living organisms. In particular, the emotion-processing mind is designed primarily to respond to traumatic events, large and small. Favorable interactions provide nurturance for the resources needed for the effective operations of the emotion-processing mind, whose main function is to cope with stress and trauma.

2. Human adaptation is uniquely language-based and takes place on two levels. The first is conscious and directly recognized, and it is expressed in manifest or undisguised thoughts, realizations, insights, and communications. The second is unconscious and not available directly to awareness, and it is expressed solely through encoded or disguised narratives. While almost all of today's psychotherapy is conducted in terms of conscious adaptations, the effects of unconsciously mediated adaptations are far more powerful than those made consciously, and they are critical to the development of both psychopathology and its therapeutic amelioration -- and the supervisory process.

3. The emotion-processing mind is comprised of two systems which tend to operate relatively independently (Langs, 1995, 1996). The first is called the conscious system. It makes use of conscious perception and operates with a conscious intelligence. The system is linked directly to awareness, expressed through manifest communications and their implications, has a superficial and self-evident unconscious subsystem, is extremely defensive in that it is protected automatically and by design through strong denial-based and repressive defenses, and it therefore is inherently beset with knowledge reduction that impairs its understanding of, and responses to, emotionally-charged events or triggers. As a result, conscious system adaptive responses tend to be compromised, highly obliterating and defensive, and ineffective emotionally.
The second system of the emotion-processing mind is called the deep unconscious system. It makes use of unconscious or subliminal perception, has a deep unconscious intelligence which effectively processes incoming impingements, has no direct link to awareness which it reaches only through encoded stories, is relatively nondefensive, and makes sound adaptive choices that are well informed and highly effective. However, these choices are not available to awareness and conscious adaptive efforts; they can be discovered only through a process called trigger decoding -- the deciphering of the meanings of encoded narratives by using as the decoding key the triggering event that has evoked the disguised themes contained in these narrative images.
Emotional life and psychotherapy are, then, organized around external traumatic events and most importantly involve unconscious perceptions and processing, activities that are then reflected in trigger encoded stories that are available for trigger decoding. Issues of memory and fantasy are secondary in importance for emotional life, much as conscious experience and processing is secondary in importance to unconscious experience and processing.

4. Trigger decoding has produced many critical clinical findings that cannot be realized in therapies organized around manifest communications from patients and their surface meanings and unconscious implications -- i.e., conscious system forms of psychotherapy (Langs, 1997). It has been amply shown, for example, that the conscious system is relatively insensitive to ground rules, settings, and boundaries -- the framework for emotional life and the psychotherapy and supervisory experiences. This system also generally prefers, for reasons of defense, modified rather than secured frames -- however costly (see below).
In contrast, the deep unconscious system is exceedingly frame sensitive and patients' unconscious experiences are organized entirely around their therapists' managements of the ground rules of a therapy. On the deep unconscious level, there is a universal, ideal, health-giving set of ground rules that almost without exception obtain encoded or unconscious validation -- support through responsive confirmatory disguised narratives -- across patients and cultures (Langs, 1998). This ideal frame includes a set fee, time, length, frequency, and place for sessions; total privacy and confidentiality; the relative anonymity of the therapist, with no directives or deliberate self-revelations; the absence of physical contact between patient and therapist or contact outside of the assigned time and place for sessions; and the neutrality of the therapist assured through the exclusive use of interventions that obtain encoded validation -- these prove to be solely managing the ground rules toward their securement and the use of trigger decoded interpretations.

In psychotherapy (as in life and supervision), modified frames are experienced unconsciously as harmful, seductive, and persecutory. They are, however, preferred consciously by most patients and therapists because of their defensive effects, especially in respect to conscious and unconscious death anxieties, which are the fundamental anxieties in all humans (Langs, 1997). Modified frames -- therapies or single sessions in which any of the basic ground rules is altered or compromised -- create predatory death anxieties against which humans have defenses and ways of coping that offer a possibility of resolution or adaptive success. But in addition, modified frames offer denial-based defenses against the existential death anxieties evoked by secured frames (see below). It is mainly this defensive aspect that makes frame modifications so attractive to conscious minds, even though they involve denial, knowledge reduction, and harm to self and others.
Secured frames are inherently safe, holding, and healing, but they evoke entrapment, existential death anxieties against which ultimately there are no effective defenses. Denial in its various incarnations is how humans cope with this type of death anxiety, and denial is costly because, as noted, it entails knowledge reduction, and actions that harm self and others. The most common form of denial-based action is that of modifying ground rules and frames.

The Framework of Supervision

In a form that is in keeping with the nature of a given relationship and interaction, the ideal ground rules -- the secured frame -- create the best possible conditions for coping, learning, and growing. Modified frames impair these processes, and offer models and create forces, that are destructive to their recipients.
This brings us to the supervisory situation and to some major unrecognized factors that affect how and what a supervisee learns from his or her supervisor. The ground rules and framework of supervision have far more power and influence on a supervisee than do the verbal aspects of the teaching done by a supervisor -- the main effects of a supervisor's efforts reside more what he or she does with the ground rules than with what is taught although both, of course, must be sound and unconsciously validated.
In principle, it has been found that the most optimal approach to training psychotherapists involves the creation of a secured-frame supervisory situation, in which the communicative principles of technique and frame-management are used for the supervisory situation itself and for the teaching of the supervisee. This is the only approach to teaching psychotherapy in which encoded validation of a supervisor's teaching efforts can be and is sought in patients' subsequent material -- communicative supervision is considered valid only in the presence of this type of confirmation.

Especially important to a supervisee's education as a psychotherapist, regardless of the contents of a supervisor's teachings, is, then, how the supervisor manages the ground rules of the supervision. Here too there is an ideal frame that includes a set fee, time, day, frequency, and length of sessions; total privacy and confidentiality; the use of case material presented sequentially from memory by the supervisee without written notes; the relative anonymity of the supervisor, with no comments that are extraneous to the teaching efforts and the securement of the ground rules; the absence of physical contact or any other type of relationship between the supervisor and supervisee, whether social or professional, outside of the supervision; and the use of validatable and validated comments by the supervisor -- that is, the use of sound formulations and recommended interventions that are unconsciously validated by the subsequent material from the supervised patient and at times, the supervised therapist.
Frame modifications consciously and especially unconsciously harm the supervisee and encourage his or her use of harmful frame deviations with his or her own patients -- and in his or her life. Secured frames inherently support the sound functioning and adaptations of supervisees and effective psychotherapeutic work on their part. Properly managing the ground rules of the supervision of psychotherapy is perhaps the single most important and yet neglected dimension of that experience.

Combining Supervision and Personal Therapy

As I have been emphasizing, the communicative approach has shown that on the critical deep unconscious level of experience, the supervisee responds most strongly to how his or her supervisor manages the ground rules of the supervisory experience. It is this unconscious experience -- a crucial environmental impingement -- that most strongly affects how the supervisee conducts therapy. Indeed, the supervisee will select case and make extraneous comments to the supervisor in order to encode the student's unconscious experience of what the supervisor is saying and doing frame-wise.
The evolved design of the emotion-processing mind is such that humans react unconsciously almost entirely to the ground-rule-related actions of the person with whom they are interacting at the moment. That is, the emotion-processing mind is designed to respond deep unconsciously solely to the here-and-now.
This means that in supervision, the supervisee's encoded, unconscious communications and adaptations pertain to how the supervisor is managing the ground rules of their work together. Similarly, if the supervisee is in psychotherapy with someone other than his or her supervisor, the supervisee's encoded messages will be about how the therapist is managing the ground rules of that therapy. These encoded messages will not, and cannot by evolved design, unconsciously be about the supervisory frame even when the supervisee speaks about his or her supervision. Thus, the supervisee can explore his or her conscious reactions to a supervisor with another therapist, but cannot explore his or her deep unconscious reactions to the supervisory work. This entails a great loss of unconscious insight for the supervisee and interferes greatly with the supervisory process because the unconscious influence on learning is so critical.

The only known solution to this problem is for the supervisee to do his or her supervision and therapy in the same session with the same supervisor-therapist. This approach and framework is consistently validated unconsciously by supervisee's encoded narratives and it offers a viable means of working with a supervisee's conscious and unconscious experiences in both doing and being in psychotherapy.
In brief, this work is carried out by means of therapy-supervisory sessions that are constituted as what is termed self-processing or empowered psychotherapy (Langs, 1993). The first forty minutes of each session, which lasts an hour-and-a-half, are turned over to the supervisee-patient without comment from the supervisor-therapist. The supervisee-patient engages in the pursuit of his or her own unconscious experiences using a method that is defined by the ground rules of the process. Thus, the supervisee begins each session with a dream or made-up story, associates to the dream, identifies the triggers constituted by the supervisor-therapist's management of the ground rules, and then attempts to trigger decode the encoded meanings of the disguised themes expressed in the dream-associational network in light of the active frame-related triggers.
After forty minutes, the supervisor-therapist intervenes to help the supervisee-patient to dispose of his or her inevitable communicative and psychological defenses (Langs, 1998) in order to reach pertinent trigger decoded insights. These insights are then used to illuminate the unconscious sources of the supervisee's valid and erroneous interventions in his work with the supervised patient. The situation is unique in being able to identify, process, and insightfully modify as needed the deep unconscious factors in a supervisee's therapeutic work.
Formal supervision is conducted during the last twenty minutes of the session, which is devoted to the supervisee's presentation of case material as described above. Focus tends to be concentrated on the supervisee's erroneous interventions and the errors and frame modifications of the supervisor-therapist that account for the unconscious perceptions that have fueled the student's erroneous work. This access to active unconscious perceptions and their influence on the supervisee is invaluable as a means of insuring the best possible learning experience and constructive inner change for the supervisee.

Concluding Comments

The ideas offered in this paper are likely to sound strange to a therapist who has not engaged in trigger decoding and gained access to deep unconscious experience and meaning. In all humans, conscious and deep unconscious experience are discontinuous and world's apart. It is necessary to trigger decode patients' material to gain access to the remarkable and incisive world of deep unconscious experience. Doing so is not only a wondrous revelation, it is a way of opening the door to highly effective psychotherapy and supervision.

References

Langs, R. (1982) Psychotherapy: A Basic Text. New York: Aronson.
Langs, R. (1992) A Clinical Workbook for Psychotherapists. London: Karnac Books.
Langs, R. (1993) Empowered psychotherapy. London: Karnac Books.
Langs, R. (1994) Doing Supervision and Being Supervised. London: Karnac Books.
Langs, R. (1995) Clinical Practice and the Architecture of the Mind. London: Karnac Books.
Langs, R. (1996) The Evolution of the Emotion Processing Mind, With an Introduction to Mental Darwinism. London: Karnac Books.
Langs, R. (1997) Death Anxiety and Clinical Practice. London: Karnac Books.
Langs, R. (1998) Ground Rules in Psychotherapy and Counseling. London: Karnac Books.