ABSTRACT
The author explores how the interpersonal therapist's own life experience inhabits and defines his or her theoretical and clinical understandings. In the process of thinking about this issue, an iconic memory popped into his mind. Iconic memories are those highly stylized and persistent accounts people have of their lives, memories that loom like monoliths through the mists of the past. Their tangibility is deceptive, however, inasmuch as they seem very clear to us until they are stressed, and then they fracture and deconstruct in very odd ways. The ancient Greek skeptics were defined by their belief that the truth of all knowledge must always be in question, and that true inquiry was a process of doubting. There is no absolute truth, and inquiry into the premises of belief is more fruitful than belief itself. Therapy is a series of lapses and corrections.
