Response

Dear Sir,

I very much appreciate Dr Migone's reminder that there is ‘little that is genuinely new under the sun’. He also appropriately, if gently, chides the author of the Guest Editorial for not acknowledging fully that in their important paper Migone and Liotti (1998) had advanced a comprehensive model of therapeutic action which included constructs quite similar to the ones suggested in the Editorial. I cannot even claim ignorance of the paper since, as Acting Internet Editor for the Journal, I was responsible for selecting their article for an exceptionally stimulating internet discussion.

In my defence, I would like to state that the aim of the Editorial was to spell out the implication of transference-oriented techniques (such as that recommended by Betty Joseph and her colleagues—see Joseph, 1985) for our model of the role of memory in therapeutic action. Thus connections between the model proposed in the Guest Editorial and similar models advanced by authors building on general systems theory-based approaches appeared to be less critical than establishing links between more traditional psychoanalytic approaches and recent research on memory. I can only add that, like Franz Alexander, I am Hungarian by birth, thus the possibility remains that the notion of recovered memories as consequences of therapeutic action rather than their cause was itself the recovery of a forgotten racial memory on my part.

Yours faithfully

February 2000