Not every form of communication on the part of a patient is productive of the unconscious encoded perceptions a Langsian therapist might seek. Langs' work in communication science draws the conclusion that narratives are the only source of such encoded derivative communication.Langs 1996; Langs 1997; Langs 2004 Narratives have the advantage of being a form of two-fold communication, having both a conscious manifest level and an unconscious latent level. When the patient recounts a dream or makes up a narrative, therefore, both levels can in principle be discerned and the unconscious communications can be decoded. For this reason, Langs retains the analytic practice of emphasizing the use of dreams and what he terms "guided associations" related to the elements and themes of the dreams, since dreams typically take the form of narratives and thus communicate unconscious encoded material. In any given case, the therapist may use spontaneously formulated narratives on the part of the client – "origination narratives"—in the same way as a dream, since the key issue is whether the client offers narrative communications of any kind which can be decoded in terms of adaptive triggers. The client relates guided free associations to the themes of the narrative communication, producing a pool of themes which, in turn, illuminate unconscious conflicts. This practice too highlights a difference between Langs and mainstream psychoanalytic, Jungian and other depth-oriented approaches to therapy and analysis, in that traditional approaches tend to focus on the dream and use associations to elucidate the dream whereas Langs inverts the order of importance, considering the value of dreams to be that they attract associations from which the therapist can extract broader pools of themes for interpretation.Langs 1991; Langs 1993. Some non-adaptive psychoanalytic psychotherapists also treat dreams primarily as a source for associations. See e.g. Levy 1985
