Memory and therapeutic action

Dear Sir,

It is good of Dr Fonagy to respond to my letter in the spirit of debating a controversy, and I hope he and others continue to see it in that sense.

Fonagy begins by wondering why I claim procedural memory to play no part in autobiographical memory. I gave the reference to that in my earlier letter and I explained that autobiographical memory is composed of episodic memory, which is defined as information remembered within a particular temporal or spatial context (Tulving, 1983). Indeed, procedural memory is quite different from both episodic and semantic memory (Hendel et al., 1993). Fonagy supports his position (1999b) by reference to Kandel, but that author's paper has to do with declarative and procedural memory and, of course, is not responsive to what I claimed is relevant to autobiographical memory (Nelson, 1996). But it is perhaps most important to recognise that Kandel's position, which Fonagy claims to represent, is really of no support whatsoever to what Fonagy appeared to say in his editorial (1999a) about the importance of the recognition and independence of procedural memory. Indeed others, such as Muller & Overton say: ‘in fact, the notions of procedural and declarative knowledge do not appear to be very useful for differentiating between knowledge levels’ (1998, p. 79) and ‘Recent developments in attentional theory cast doubt on the possibility of any strict distinction between procedural and declarative knowledge’ (p. 78).

Likewise the attribution of one's acquisition of moral rules to this category of memory is best credited to Immanuel Kant (1787 [1961]) rather than presented as a new finding. Once Fonagy agrees in his reply that these categories of memory have ‘nothing to do with psychoanalytic treatment’, one can move beyond the question of just why they were brought up in the first place to what he claims as the essential point or points of his editorial. The first, that the recovery of memories is not curative was long ago clearly laid o