[4] The "frame" is an image meant to express the set of agreed upon boundaries or ground rules of therapy.
[6] Langs maintains this idea on the grounds that, in general, the emotional disturbances which bring patients to therapy arise from difficulties associated with adaptation.
[7] Further, Langs suggests that the failure to have a clearly developed and articulated therapeutic frame is often the product of unconscious anxiety on the part of the therapist.
[13] The Swedish psychoanalyst Claes Davidson, who thoroughly studied Langs, has taken the frames of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy even further and concludes that most of today's clients' primary problems are not found in the deep unconscious domain, but in the conscious and/or the preconscious ones.
[14] These (pre-)conscious conflicts, as Davidson names them, will manifest themselves in the clients' frame deviations, where they for resolution have to be addressed by the active therapist.