The Quality of the Therapeutic Relationship as a Factor in Helping to Change the Client's Protocol or Implicit Memory

Abstract

This article describes how, from birth, the infant is active and creative in constructing a relational self. Archaic relational experiences are held as unconscious emotional, perceptual, and somatosensorial memories that strongly influence the development of protocol in the first 2 years of life. They also affect the successive development of script. Distinctions, in the cognitive neurosciences, between implicit and explicit memory systems, require a reconceptualization of script. The implicit system links with the unconscious protocol, and the explicit system links with the script proper. The author describes how a “real therapeutic relationship” makes possible changes at the level of the protocol and how “creative emotional communication” is based on the uniqueness, empathy, and reflection of the therapist and on the uniqueness of the client's emotional, perceptual, and somatosensorial unconscious responses.