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Bringing experience to awareness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for therapeutic work. The patient needs to enter the networks of memory and knowledge, access relevant experience, and bring it into a form that can be communicated verbally. According to multiple code theory, the particular difficulties of this process reflect the diverse nature of human mental functions, which include nonsymbolic, as well as symbolic forms. The difficulties of connecting these forms of representation apply to many areas of knowledge, not emotional experience only; the difficulties are far greater and of a different nature for the type of painful experience that brings patients to treatment. The neural mechanisms of response to painful and threatening experience interfere with the process of memory retrieval and reorganization; this sets the challenge for therapeutic work. The multiple code theory, with its associated concepts of the emotion schemas and the referential process, provides a theoretical framework for this process that is compatible with current theory and research in cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and related fields. Computerized measures of the therapeutic discourse, including nonverbal as well as verbal components, are available for psychotherapy research and for direct application in clinical work.