ABSTRACT
This chapter develops representations of the therapeutic dialogue as the intrapsychic equivalents or analogues of the types of verbal and nonverbal exchanges patients have with their therapists. The narratives patients tell about the interpersonal aspects of their experiences in therapy offer a valid basis upon which to make inferences about the forms in which representations of their therapeutic dialogue enter awareness. In the ideal randomized clinical trial, only patients who meet the criteria for a specific diagnosis are included and they are randomly assigned to manualized, fixed duration treatments or to control groups. Empirical investigations of how representations of the therapeutic relationship originate and exert a regulatory influence on patients' experiential states and behaviours between sessions and after termination are, in fact, few in number. A particularly suggestive finding is that the lengthier a therapy, the more likely a patient is to evoke representations that take the form of imagined conversations with the therapist to serve adaptive and reparative functions.
