Response

Dear Sir,

I very much appreciated Dr Holmes's intelligent commentary on the Guest Editorial and I am very pleased that it appeared to be broadly consistent with the point of view he has espoused for some years and for which I have a deep respect.

He extends the argument in three ways. First, building on the synergies between declarative and implicit memory systems, he emphasises how the therapeutic listener preconsciously

evaluates explicit recollections in the light of information implicitly supplied through the transference. This is undoubtedly what happens and the claims made for therapeutic intuitions about the veracity of recovered memories (e.g. Person & Klar, 1994) must be founded on this kind of process.

His second point is consistent with that of Migone (Migone & Liotti, 1998), and by implication that of Franz Alexander. The re-emergence of memories is not intrinsically linked to the undoing of repression, but can occur because of a reorganisation of the representation of self-object relationships. While Migone's emphasis is on changes brought about by alterations in emotional relationship configurations, Holmes's emphasis is on self-in-relation-to-other representational structures. I believe both points of view refer to the same process, albeit at different levels of analysis. I think both these contributors would agree that affective experience arises as a consequence of the activation of specific relationship schemas. Perhaps the best current psychoanalytic model to integrate these points of view is that of Otto Kernberg (1988). He postulates the existence of basic mental units that combine relationship representation with predominant affective states (self-other-affect triads).

Dr Holmes and I have a slight disagreement concerning his third point, although this is more likely to be a matter of emphasis than a difference in principle. He suggests that successful therapy is marked by openness and honesty with self and others, which is based on an improved c