The Psychotherapeutic Encounter" Do you hear what I hear?"

I believe that inference and implications contained in what a therapist says to a client, has an emotional power about which the client makes a judgment. Carl Rogers. (1958,) argued that change and spontaneity develop out of trust and acceptance. Both child and adult seek and need non possessive warmth and unconditional positive regard, which has to be communicated by the therapist and experienced by the client through how they are treated. Rogers aims to keep the creative space between the client and the therapist uncontaminated by the inappropriate words and deeds of the
therapist, by encouraging and empowering the client to take charge of the therapy and to create more than the therapist.
Even in this situation however, both the therapist and the client are in suggestible frames of mind. Both are looking for clues about the other, based upon direct information, but more likely on that which can be inferred, from tones of voice, facial expressions, body language, and that which can be inferred from what the therapist says. Fundamentally each would ask 'do I trust this person not to harm me? ' Freud’s work gave us the fundamental insight that we construct an emotional and cognitive template of interaction from an early age, He went on to show how we are predisposed to repeat this behaviour in a compulsive way and how we construct our defences to protect ourselves from situations of danger. We also seek to preserve this basic attitude and reinforce our developed sense of object relatedness which we perceive as serving our survival and erotic needs. It follows that in any therapeutic encounter both therapist and client constantly assess how one or other of these needs is likely to be satisfied or threatened by the other. Some argue for therapy to work this emotional template, present in both therapist and the client, has to be monitored and their repetitive behaviour recognized and challenged. This is done by the therapist giving the client an experience of an adult who can explore their own defensive behaviours when challenged, by using a non defensive response. The aim of this response is to describe the process of the interaction between the client and the therapist, and to explain how this emotional template was stimulated into use by either the therapist or the client. This non defensive response by the therapist will help the client explore his or her perceptions of past and present experiences evoked by the therapeutic encounter. The therapeutic encounter itself is subject to the actions of the client's emotional template, which, like a series of light filters, senses the emotional 'heat' of each communication radiating from the therapist. If we are to understand how a talking cure works we must look closely at how we use language and how we manage its use in the therapeutic context. Haley, (1991) describes how messages passed between us can take the form of analogic communication or digital communication. Digital, means wherestatement is a specific response to a specific stimulus. Each message is about one thing, and contains no covert message. This kind of language is appropriate in instruction manuals for example, however, when people communicate emotionally loaded messages, there is usually a manifest and a latent content. A husband and wife’s argument about his not picking up his socks from the floor, has the potential to be either a digital communication or a analogous one, depending on the context in which this communication takes place. An analogic communication has multiple references, and can be seen as containing both manifest and latent meaning. It cannot be categorised without looking at the context in which this message occurs in relation to the pattern of other messages already communicated. Much of how we hear a message depends upon our internal frame of reference, and our way of evaluating the meaning contained within it.
The conscious and unconscious ways in which our mind processes the data we receive can be compared in the language of computing to both bit stream processors which are concerned with logical thinking and data correlation, and those which are digital to analogue converters, creating our sensory emotional world. Our emotional processor does more than simply convert data received. Often the information it receives is incomplete or perhaps in a language it is unfamiliar with ,and so to satisfy our desire to not feel anxious, it creates emotional and sensory data to fill in gaps. It does this by sampling our own data base of emotions and thoughts to generate images and emotional responses itself, rather like completing a gestalt, and we, in experiencing them, add this meaning to the moment.
. If we transmit a message to our client which is perceived as dangerous, for whatever reason, or if they do the same to us, it is the equivalent of an incoming hostile missile to a country. Here the country is our mind/ body system and our brain will steer the system to take action. Essentially the system is focused on survival in the here and now, which can be divided into gains which are short and long term. Time is an important element in a survival scenario, as is the strength of the threat. Ledoux (1994) explains the function of those centres of the brain that deal with the processing of such emotionally charged information concerning threat to the organism both physically and emotionally. A client who perceives such a threat in therapy would first respond to the therapist with an immediate learned response aimed at preserving his or her mental system. The second message that the clients brain would send would be feedback to itself on the action taken and an evaluation of what they now would need to do to survive in this therapeutic space. However ,the immediate response has bought time for the knowledge part of the brain to provide a more considered response in the form of metaphorical or analogous communication which contains both an assessment of the trigger or stimulus and an evaluation of it. This information supplied to the client in the form of images thoughts and memories from a secondary processing centre in the brain, may also contain some assessment of the possibilities of this scenario should it continue,using previous experience as its data base. Ledoux's research shows that emotional processing occurs first where fear is experienced due to an attack being perceived.
This finding supports the insights of communicative psychotherapy( Langs 1992) .Communicative psychotherapy is a systems approach to psychoanalysis, which, through its attention to the frame and triggers, takes specific note of the context of therapeutic interactions. It also argues that we have a self organising capacity which in communicative theory is called the deep wisdom system, which balances our genetic codes with our other desires for the self, which we could call our social and psychological codes, like ethics, preservation, recognition, values, morality, self-appraisal, self-esteem and self-love. It is this, our moment to moment evaluations of our state of being in whatever context or situation we find ourselves, that influences our ability to respond in the here and now.
Robert Langs (1992) outlines his topography of the mind and proposes this process by which a client deals with an emotionally charged communication.
1 The experience of an emotionally significant trigger
situation.
2. Limited conscious response, profound subliminal registration
in the form of unconscious raw, undefended images, selected
Unconscious perceptions.
3. Arousal of unconscious memories and fantasies on the one
hand, and the intelligent unconscious processing of these
perceptions of self and others, towards insight and response.
4. The reporting out of the results of these processes through
images that encode these perceptions by means of transformed messages using displacement, disguise, and condensation.
Let me try to put the Ledoux and Langs versions of events into a clinical scenario.
A client has only two sessions left of a twenty week contract in a counselling service. In the penultimate session after ten minutes of silence the therapist says
T. " I get a sense of isolation here today in this silence, I'm wondering if there are issues about endings around for you?"
The client was actually thinking how nice it was to be here this week. After all this time he could just relax on the couch and 'be' . He thought that this showed he had come a long way since those frantic early sessions when all he did was talk. Now he is confronted with a demand, or is it a statement, what is the meaning of what his therapist has said. He feels that this intervention is an impingement, it broke his revery, and now he feels invaded with the therapists presumptions. This is the ‘incoming Missile ' .
Here we have an emotionally significant trigger. Does the therapist feel isolated and is projecting his feelings onto the client who at the same time can feel guilty because he has not looked after the therapist, and has not focused on ending issues. Does the therapist feel that he is in denial and that he ought to have these feelings now. If he hasn 't maybe he needs more therapy because he thought he worked well with this therapist , and so it must be him. There are many inferences and implications that the client could muster.
Many of these emotional responses may be registered subliminally, and some of the more profound implications of this intervention will take slightly longer to sink in. However the client gives a conscious response.
C. " Not really, but now that you mention it I do feel sad perhaps I'm not ready to think about it, but I feel I've come a long way."
T. "You've come a long way, and it’s sad when things have to end Have you felt like this before ?"
The therapist has aroused memories and fantasies about past endings and separations including those of people who hung on to the client and invoked anger guilt and fear to remain in control of the clients life. Also there were those who genuinely loved the client and feared losing his special devotion. Which of these images belonged to the therapist?
C. " When I left my wife ,or more to the point when she left me I felt numb for a while and I couldn't cry .I felt odd because of that and I wondered what people thought of me. I thought that perhaps I never loved her and that perhaps it was all a con .It was on the first anniversary afterwards that I cried. No one saw me. By that time she was with her new partner, not counting the one she saw while we were together. Is that what you mean?
Here we have the reporting of the client’s verdict on how he deals with a separation from someone who left him and was unfaithful to him. It also contains a more considered verdict on the personality and behaviour of the therapist. The message is transformed and displaced. The initial attack by the therapist which may have contacted primal fears of abandonment and psychosis is processed and disguised into a message that contains emotions anger and understanding of the therapist confusion. The fact of the fixed term contract set by the institution causes the therapist to leave the client and not the other way round puts part of the responsibility for the clients reaction onto the therapist. The client imagines that the therapist may feel that all the therapy was a waste of time," all a con". The therapist expects him to perform, and be acting out his feelings of leaving the therapist to show that they had a relationship, thus overcoming any doubt or disappointment in the mind of the therapist. Also the client acknowledges that the therapist has other clients, and asks in a sense why the therapist denies his emotions and attentions are divided ,perhaps wanting a response that is disproportionate to the perceived reality.
It is this working out of the interplay between the context of therapy, the frame, interactional triggers, and disguised derivative communications that make Communicative therapy unique. In terms of the supervision of clinical practice it is ideally placed to observe the power of fear in the messages sent by both therapist and client .

NEURO SCIENCE AND THERAPEUTIC COMMUNICATION.

Experiments on rats or monkeys which examine the way the brain receives and processes emotional material. stimulate or sever the neural pathways from the eyes or the ears to the mid brain, thalamus, or cortex. I began researching the brain and its biophysics
after the 1994 Conference of the European Society for Communicative Psychotherapy at Regents College when David Smith presented his paper 'Free Associations and Honey Bee Dancers', which took biological research on bees to argue that our free associations may well be adaptive, reflexive processes drawing upon a formed map of intentional icons, which, through our need to survive, we reproduce and consume in response to interactional triggers. I also responded to the work of Norman Dixon, Emeritus Professor in Experimental Psychology at the University of London,who presented a paper called, 'Evidence of Preconscious Processing' .. He talked about how the brain supplies the mind with information when the appropriate part of it is stimulated and it is upon this information that the mind's intelligence works. He also proposed that certain kinds of information can be stored in different parts of the brain and that different triggers or stimuli cause different information to become available for the intelligence of the mind to work on, and to give order and meaning. The inputs we receive through our sound and sight have a potentiality which determine our level of reaction, and our brain's processing capacity has to prioritise each stimuli into those which are threatening, self serving for the sender, altruistic, or which imply threat to the organism.
Implied threat is in fact more difficult for the brain to decode because it has to draw upon like fit, information to complete a gestalt.
In this paper I argue that ambivalent communications have an inherent dynamic, which creates a tension in our social interactions; in order to sort them out we have to draw upon our internalised map of intentional icons, our emotional template, to interpret them. In situations where we need to react quickly, because we feel vulnerable, we do not have the luxury of contemplation and so to relieve our suspense we ask the brain to supply a story line that we can identify with, thus enabling us to respond accordingly. I argue that triggers loaded with implication for example, self serving emotionally charged statements made as interventions by therapists, conjure up stories from clients encapsulating themes of power and attack as a response.
Professor Dixon said that we give away in the words we use most things that worry us, and quoted the work of Spence who recorded the words used in interview by women who were having smear tests. He marked all emotionally negative words, even if they were used humorously, like 'tickled to death', and discovered that this predicted 75% of those women who were found to have an abnormal result. The fear of death, or of an expected abnormal result, did not appear literally but through metaphor and simile. True fears seemed to be communicated through the process of displacement. In other experiments carried out by Dixon he comes to the conclusion that emotional words take longer for the brain to process, producing associated words from the subject's memory which were sometimes symbolic, with layered meaning; the recall of threatening stimuli introduced in a non threatening space in an aware or hypnotised state was converted into a less threatening, associative context, when retrieved from memory.
The brain is not a simple filing cabinet of pure information; it stores each with an encrypted access code, and it would seem that this code contains an emotional valency, which, when activated, stimulates an electrical impulse of a certain charge
which, through the synapses, or channels in the brain, activates simultaneously the information retrieval centre, the emotional retrieval centre, and the creative imaging centre, producing a reflexive response to the perceived stimulus. Evidence of brain and temporal lobe function shows that it is possible to reproduce emotional states, image creation, and the mind's search for meaning, i e. fitting a template to the stimulus, without an interaction.
Dr Persinger a neuroscientist at the Laurentian University of Sudbury ,Ontario featured in two television documentaries broadcast on the B.B.C.in November and December 1994.and written up by Susan Blackmore (1994) His research suggested that 'near death' and 'out of the body' experiences were a function of brain activity similar to that found when patients are in sleep paralysis, prior and during REM sleep. Using
computers to map the activity of the limbic system during temporal lobe stimulation, he can recreate and induce brain wave patterns which mimic those associated with fear, rest, and sleep paralysis. He does this by asking his subjects to wear a helmet with electrical solenoids which generate an electromagnetic field stimulating the limbic system to create feelings and perceptions in the subject, who reports verbally her mind's
activity. This stimulation causes the mind to retrieve meanings, to make sense of the feelings, auditory and visual creations that are manifested. The use of this process of the generation of electromagnetism to extinguish fears thus rewiring the neural synapses so that a positive feeling overlays a negative one, seems to be a distinct possibility.
It follows that therapy in the future may consist of a client wearing a helmet to
regulate their emotional responses, by regulating the electromagnetic
field,of their brain which has been mapped by computer during its aroused state. Wilhelm Reich began this research in 1934 with his orgone box. His life and research is documented by one of his collaborators Sharaf (1984) who gives details of the discovery of orgone energy and it's application between 1940 and 1948. Einstein was given an orgone accumulator to test in the 1930s, but after an initial interest he rejected Reich’s claims.
In his paper 'Emotion, Memory and the Brain' (1994), Joseph Ledoux, Professor of neural science and psychology at New York University, summarises research into the formation of memories about primitive emotional experiences, such as fear. I will try
to summarise his findings, based on experiments on rats and monkeys, to see how they may apply to humans. It seems that once a fearful reaction is established it is relatively permanent. However it can be reduced if the expectation of hurt associated with the stimulus is contradicted by experience. Ledoux suggests, however, that the brain is
controlling the fear response rather than eliminating the memory of the emotion. Repetition of the unconfirmed expectation reduces the level of response; this is called extinction. The research used accoustic and visual stimuli, as these are the
predominant clues used by humans to map their world, and there is extensive knowledge of the neural pathways involved. Induced trauma modifies the way in which critical neurons in sight and sound pathways link to elicit the learned response. The anatomy of emotion involves several regions of the brain: the amygdala, the thalamus, and parts of the cortex, which interact to create memories about fearful experiences associated with sound stimulus. Neural connections between parts of the thalamus and the amygdala in rats are similar to those in humans.
Experiments confirmed the importance of the amygdala whose central nucleus connects with areas in the brain stem that control heart rate, respiration and vasodilation, which are connected to the autonomic system. When researchers cut connections from this area to other areas, fear responses were removed. The lateral nucleus of the amygdala gets information directly from the sensory system, while the central nucleus is the interface with the systems that control responses. The amygdala also controls the assessment of the environment in which a stimulus occurs, whereas lesions made in the hippocampus, a region of the brain involved in declarative memory (that is, spatial memory) and conscious information processing, showed only an interference with information relevant to situation, not tone, and prevented a response to the surroundings. Emotional potency of a stimulus and its contextual significance is transmitted to the lateral nucleus which is connected to the central nucleus via the basal nucleus, and then transmitted to the brain stem which brings about physiological changes.
It now becomes important in which contexts emotional processing predates cognition. This would mean that the sensory receptors which have a direct route to the amygdala through auditory and visual pathways arouse an emotional state which then initiates areas of cognition and declarative memory in the brain to fill in the picture, perhaps modifying the primary response or enhancing it. This takes place simultaneously and, depending upon the time allowed for a response, that is, on the urgency of the threat, and on the speed of processing by the thalamus, hippocampus, and cortex which can retrieve more sophisticated information, a competing amount of information will be sent to the amygdala which will quell or increase the fear response.
The cortex is asked to interpret a complex stimulus and its emotional significance, and in the process neurons in the cortex undergo physiological change. This is accomplished by the production of an amino acid transmitter called glutamate, which is implicated in memory formation, and is present in the neural pathways and synapses.
I now have to introduce two new terms: .LTP (long term potentiation),and NMDA receptors (postsynaptic excitatory amino acids). LTP involves a change in the strength of the transmission along a neural pathway once this has taken place. This effect was discovered as having taken place in the link between the thalamus and the amygdala.
Fear responses can be blocked by interfering with the NMDA receptors in the amygdala.
Research has also shown that the amygdala can ignore auditory stimulus once it is familiar; however its sensitivity increases if there is an increase in perceived threat in the context in which it is received. The brain is tuned in to receiving a stimulus within a context and at a certain frequency changes in the context excite and heighten the activity in the neural pathways; if the changes are prolonged, they cause transmission of glutamate to the NMDA receptors causing LTP. Once LTP is established the same neural signals produce larger responses. This suggests to me two things: firstly, that once we have experienced a situational trauma LTP means that any trigger seen as resembling this will cause us to act with a heightened response and we will feel it somatically before we process it cognitively; secondly, that once this pathway is established it is difficult to change or extinguish but has to be overwritten by an active process. This second observation is based on the fact that emotional information continues to travel quicker to the amygdala than cognitive information from the thalamus, cortex and the hippocampus. The time delay in the two routes cortical and subcortical is a survival mechanism, because failing to respond to danger is more costly than responding inappropriately.
Declarative memory is mediated by the hippocampus and the cortex but the removal of the hippocampus does not stop fear. Emotional learning about self preservation is mediated by a different system which seems to operate independently of our conscious awareness. Our declarative memory stores the information of fear and its circumstances as facts, details and screen plays, but the amygdalic system has the emotional memory, and this may be recalled as tension, anxiety and depression, which are the consequences of the initial event but available to be overlaid on to a new event. It is a resource which when combined with new declarative memory forms new experience. It is hypothesized that because the system developed before the source of cognition and declarative memory, early trauma may affect our behaviour in later life but remain inaccessible to consciousness. Only when the organism has an advanced neural mechanism does conscious fear accompany bodily response, and becomes a subjective emotional state. The subjective experiences we can feel, according to Ledoux, are not the primary business of the system that generates them. Emotional responses are the result of adaptions to triggers which we perceive as serving us or others.
French neurologists studying the requirements for behavioural change have confirmed that the sending wire of one brain cell does not touch the receiving wire of another [ref?]. A message has to jump a gap called the synapse at a speed of 500 to 1000 times a second depending on the energy of the input . The sending wire of the cell ends in protein vesicles called 'boutons', buttons which produce chemicals to squirt the message across, and when this is repeated, or the duration of the message is prolonged, these boutons increase in size and number, thus shortening the gap that the message has to jump. The more boutons, the less energy needed for action to occur, and this, they argue, is how habits are formed. As many as 80,000 boutons have been estimated at the edge of a single neuron. Established pathways, or chains of neurons, which are our memory, have been called 'engrams', and they replay the same pictures or movement with stimulation or association. Thus the soft wiring of our emotional and cognitive pathways at birth become hard wired and the emotional current they carry travels faster , and with priority to our somatic ,and then our conscious awareness. These pathways are our behavioural, emotional, and thinking templates. With our learned behaviour from the past so firmly encoded in this verifiable system of physiological reality, how can we change it when it functions against us?
For therapy to work it must do something to this system. The encouraging discovery is that although we cannot destroy the old boutons, as yet, we can grow new ones, and build neural pathways around the old ones. The most important element in building new pathways seems to be energy rather than time, although the research into LTP would suggest that it would be a function of duration, frequency, and intensity. (Perhaps, the gardening analogy used by Rogers (1958) is an apt one, and therapists can advertise their services in the market place like the gardener: 'Grow your new boutons here!') The effectiveness of a therapeutic approach could be validated by its ability to build boutons in a context that would encourage the modification of old pathways that cause responses identified by the client as maladaptive into those that carry energy to pathways and templates which have new potential for adaptation.
APPLICATION TO THE THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP.
When we talk or look in therapy we are excitingneuro transmitters, we are generating emotions, an electromagnetic field that excites both conscious and unconcious responses from the different processing organs in the brain. Rather than create afresh we seem predisposed to fit every stimulus into what we know, calling upon pre-existing templates , a map of intentional, or reflexive icons, as suggested earlier. The brain is no longer seen in a modular way but as a holistic system simultaneously processing inputs from our sensors and redirecting information to different processing centres, some responding faster than others, and some having an initial response, followed by a more informed one, having, in a sense, gone through a process of correlation and data retrieval with another centre. Survival in certain circumstances requires a quick response, and as some data is hard to compute we use pre-sets to buy us time.
This, I perceive is the function of defences, as they rely on a preset response when something in the data, its context or tone, is perceived by our fear processing centre as a threat. I argue that words of inference or association, of ambivalent charge, are examples of data which invoke two responses to be argued out by our brain's processing centres, one monitoring the emotion and one the cognition. The emotion is engaged first, i. e. the amygdala responds most quickly, and its messages affect our limbic system; through the lateral cortex, the emotion influences adrenalin, heart rate, sweating our physical fear response.
The second , through the thalamus to our hippocampus, looks for declarative memory: facts from the cortex to confirm or deny the probability of the template response. The manifest response to a trigger is the survival response demanded by the situation, which may be passed by the time the creative response is ready for transmission . The one that is perceived on reflection, is communicated , according to Freud and communicative theory, in the form of a displaced narrative, or derivative. The client goes through the process of searching back through their stored memories and mental representations to find the reference experience from which a current behavioural response was derived. We know threat before we give it meaning. The job of giving it meaning falls to our memories, which we call up and then have to fit to the current situation to explain our perception of it.. Could it be that the response from client to therapist takes the form of manifest response, then narrative response, because of the time delay in the way the brain at first responds to, and then processes dual meaning’s or contradictory information? Our knowing memory, our sense of being, predates our declarative memory, based in information stored and thought about, or reflected upon, therefore emotional awareness precedes cognitive awareness.
A sentence or a word from a therapist in the context of the therapy, which produces a heightened stimulus in clients' associative pathways, will, because of its quality of inference, produce in the client a response based on inference. They will either shut down their receptors, or they will provide associative metaphorical, displaced, adaptive responses. Metaphors have creative potential in therapy because they allow time to live in suspension, an, as if space, which, like a hypothesis, waits to be confirmed in reality. It gives us a clue to the existing template, the existing pathway in the synapses with heightened potentiality, to which our communication will be filed, unless it is acknowledged and contradicted, hence changing the memory by making new boutons, new connections, new memories. At this point the client is in a heightened state of arousal; energy is flowing because of the tension involved, and a new emotional memory can be created to confound the old one and to compete for any energy directed its way. If this process is repeated consistently then the old memory and association may be extinguished.
This description of the formation of new templates, or the modification of intentional icons, may explain the process of the transference. Transference based on remembering is less likely to create change than that which is based on re experiencing, in the relationship with the therapist. If I understand why I relate to my therapist in a certain way because I retrieve a memory that they behave as if they were my father, or my boss, it is less helpful to the creation of energy, new boutons and pathways, than re experiencing this behaviour in the here and now due to non transference behaviour enacted by my therapist, which is then worked through in a different, more altruistic way.
It seems that the client needs to locate themselves within a known universe regardless of the cost in terms of growth. However this playing of an old script can prevent us experiencing the world spontaneously, and can cause us to take on other people's worlds including those of our analyst at the cost of our own self actualisation and creative potential. It is important to remember that we are creatures of inference and evaluation derived from the treatment we experience and register at an emotional level. Every intervention made in the heightened reality of the counselling room is scanned by the client for its inference, and an evaluation will then be made which carries emotional impact, influencing our chemical transmitters and nerve pathways. The therapist can change the outcome of this interaction by identifying the intervention which caused the reliance on old imagery and interfered with the client's spontaneous creations in the here and now. The machine code of our brain's processing units have a spontaneous function to create an experiencing world for us that has the imprint of our own internal logic. This can stop us experiencing the world as it is because all our perceptions are shaped by the application of old templates to new experiences; this comforts us on the one hand but on the other contributes to resistance, denial and repetition, thus cutting us of from hope of something new.
Ambivalent emotionally charged data whose meaning is incomplete is the essence of existential anxiety; it touches our genetic memory of what it is like for us to be 'in the dark', with the desire to illuminate at any cost. Using a known template, a regressive defence, a remembered scenario, is better than the pain of not knowing. The fear of nothingness and our need to appease this fear may create a further difficulty in the consulting room as it makes us vulnerable to suggestion from our therapist. The new template we adopt may be that of our therapist. This may be beneficial to us in the same way that we can adopt fashions to join a culture at times of transition in life such as in teenage years. However as we imitate or are influenced by our therapist we could find ourselves being susceptible to his madness, and his theoretical template. Conditions in therapy need to foster the confusion of the old pathways, and the hardwired responses to interactions thus, encouraging the construction of different emotional memories and reflective responses in in the client. As therapists we need to be aware of the manipulative power of our communication skills as well as their power to facilitate openness in our clients. The language we use and how we use it in the presence of our clients is central to what we are perceived as communicating and to the evaluations and inferences made. Loose talk costs lives.
Both client and therapist can benefit from a relationship which struggles to be free of coercion and where the client can offer a free narrative, with a minimum regard to the adaptive context in which it takes place. Each can be encouraged to look for corroboration for their perceptions of reality which is not based on magical thinking, accepted wisdom, or theoretical preference. In sharing a hunch or an interpretation of material with a client it would follow this approach if the therapist shared with the client their own logic, based on the material presented and common to both of them, which gave rise to their intervention. The ultimate usefulness of any of these insights can only be tested by the clients' action in their context outside the therapy room, even though it may be rehearsed inside.

REFERENCES

LANGS R 1992 Science Systems and Psychoanalysis. London;
Karnac Books.

LEDOUX J. 1994 'Emotion Memory and the Brain' June.
Scientific American.

SMITH D 1994 'Free Associations and Honey Bee Dancers'
unpublished.

BERTALANFY 1967 Robots, Men and Minds. New York; Braziller.

WATZLAWICK P 1978 The Language of Change. Norton Press.