Response

Dear Sir,

I very much appreciate Dr Goldberg's continued interest in the editorial on memory and his clarification of our points of disagreement.

It seems to me axiomatic that memory is an interactive set of systems. My memory of myself (encoded episodically into the explicit, declarative system of autobiographical memory) will inevitably include memories of how I acted in a particular situation (behaviour which was strongly influenced by my procedural memory system), and therefore the interaction of memory systems as part of normal everyday function cannot be doubted. I am, however, clearer now why Dr Goldberg questioned this. I think he was concerned with interaction at the level of units or modules in the brain. However, whether these two memory systems do or do not interact at the neural level isn't the point. The two systems must inevitably interact when the mind is conceived of as a functional unit and not as separate processing systems. The issue is not whether one memory system influences the other at the neural level, but rather if one system provides material for the other via behaviour. Of course, there may also be interactions between the two at the level of brain function but that is a more complex question and not at issue here.

Dr Goldberg is absolutely correct that similar ideas concerning the role of memory in therapeutic change have been advanced previously. As Paolo Migone also pointed out in his letter to the Editor (2000), Franz Alexander was eloquent on this issue. Do these ideas need pointing out again? Judging purely from the response an earlier version of my paper received when I presented it at a special meeting on recovered memories at the British Psycho-Analytical Society, I think they do. Several senior colleagues expressed strong disagreement with my position, claiming great importance for the recovery of episodic memories in analysis. In the editorial I tried to express my belief that these memories emerge as a consequence of the activati