Working Models in Communication Processes and in Psychoanalytic Therapy

In the previous chapter I described working models as dynamic systems based on memory, emerging from learning and experience, and updated or reorganized in turn by new learning and experience. I emphasized that working models are present and activated in every experience and all activities. In this chapter I focus on working models—“knowledge of the world” as they are often called in cognitive psychology and in artificial intelligence—in connection with communication processes and psychoanalytic therapy. Psychoanalytic therapy is also a communication process, albeit a unique one, and we can therefore expect it to share characteristics of communication processes in general.