It is traditional, safe, and leads to minimal change. The patient lies in a comfortable, structured room and because of this body position starts to be freed from the conscious daytime, defensive external self. The therapist usually sits up in a comfortable chair. The all-important shift at this level is towards the dismantling of daytime logic which is replaced with the use of free association, a technique developed by Freud. In allowing thoughts to come to us, rather than consciously manipulating them, we enter the world of non-logical experience which allows deeper material to come up into consciousness with more ease and fluidity.
Connections now occur more freely by association instead of logic.
We become for the first time, at Level Two, receivers of information more directly from the deeper levels of the mind. Patient conversation becomes more obedient to the imperative that unfinished material within us must seek expression. Powerful material, when it arrives in our awareness, is still however being converted to linear verbal expression and feeling is still being channelled into logical conversation. This ensures that Level Two psychotherapy will not go deeper and tip over into Level Three. It also ensures considerable limitations around the experiencing of deeper pain.