ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the types of memory that therapists develop in order to serve a healing function for their patients. It focuses on the processing that occurs in the here-and-now between therapist and patient—the short-term perception, rehearsal, and encoding of what the other party communicates. In the initial description by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch, working memory consisted of two domain-specific buffers that were later termed slave systems. An important reason for the close connection between episodic memory and executive functions is their location neuroanatomically. General clinical memory is assisted by a certain type of implicit and procedural memory that therapists develop as part of practising. Since episodic memory is primarily cued contextually, when the externals such as time and space are repeated, therapists’ executive functions are often geared toward what they retrieve nonverbally. Cueing of episodic memory may initially be of secondary importance.
