While serious considerations of the unconscious communication between patient and analyst had its origins at the turn of the century (Freud 1900), there are many who believe that its full elaboration still lies ahead of us. It seems likely now that it will require a full century of struggle before psychoanalysts have borne the ripest fruits of this level of understanding. Derived from Freud’s (1900) model of the relationship between the day residue and the dream, basically a stimulus and response paradigm, the ramifications of investigations of the spiraling conscious and, especially, unconscious communicative interaction between patient and therapist or analyst (the two will be used interchangeably in this paper) are surprisingly extensive. This presentation describes the basic components of the communicative approach, details critical aspects of its most recent thinking as a means of bridging the present and the future, and concludes by indicating fresh problems that have been crystalized through these endeavors and whose solutions lie ahead of us.
