TAJ April 2008 Abstracts

What Do You Say If You Don't Say "Unconscious"?: Dilemmas Created for Transactional Analysts by Berne's Shift Away from the Language of Unconscious Experience
William F. Cornell
pp. 93-100

The author contacted members of the original San Francisco Social Psychiatry Seminars asking for their recollections of and opinions about Eric Berne's shift from the language of the unconscious. Their comments are excerpted here. The author examines the consequences for transactional analysis theory of Berne's change in language, arguing for a reconceptualization of unconscious experience within transactional analysis.

The Quality of the Therapeutic Relationship as a Factor in Helping to Change the Client's Protocol or Implicit Memory
Raffaella Leone Guglielmotti
pp. 101-109

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.

Has the Unconscious Moved House?
Alessandra Pierini
pp. 110-118

This article discusses the concept of the unconscious in transactional analysis and the risk of adopting the classical psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious without integrating it into transactional analysis theory in a way that is consistent with its epistemological preconditions. The author suggests that nonconscious processes be viewed as both implicit processes and as processes that are outside of awareness, recalling in particular Berne's concepts of protocol and intuition. Finally, a link is suggested between nonconscious processes and the psychic organs as defined in the apparatuses of the mind.

The Many Faces of the Unconscious: A New Unconscious for a Phenomenological Transactional Analysis
Maria Teresa Tosi
pp. 119-127

This article reviews recent developments in the understanding of unconscious processes and considers the phenomenological perspective of transactional analysis as it is intertwined with these findings. The author's objective is to contribute to the enrichment of the transactional analysis model by suggesting a theory of the unconscious that is compatible with the theoretical underpinnings of TA. Some of the consequences of the "natural scientific" objectifying perspective that influenced Freud and, to some extent, Berne, are highlighted. The notion of the repressed unconscious is discussed and confronted with modern views of unconscious processes.

Psychotherapy of Unconscious Experience
Richard G. Erskine
pp. 128-138

Freud defined the unconscious as a result of repression. However, recent findings in neurology and developmental psychology indicate that unconscious experience may be composed of presymbolic, subsymbolic, implicit, and procedural forms of memory, as well as being the result of trauma. In this article, preverbal, never-verbalized, unacknowledged, nonmemory, and avoided verbalization are categories of unconscious experience used to describe two psychotherapy cases. Five prereflective patterns-attachment style, self-regulation, relational needs, script beliefs, and introjection-are suggested as a way to organize treatment planning. A relational and in-depth integrative psychotherapy is described for the treatment of unconscious experience.

Time, Space, Attention, and the Awakening of a Fundamentally New Experience: Addressing Unconscious Processes in Transactional Analysis
Edward T. Novak
pp. 139-150

This article explores the author's struggle to expand his transactional analysis-based psychotherapeutic approach to include unconscious processes. In his earlier work, a primary focus on content (scripts, games, and injunctions) colluded with his clients' resistance in such a way that unconscious phenomena were avoided. Presented autobiographically, the author describes ways he began to understand and experience unconscious processes as therapist, client, and analysand.

Facing the Fear of Death
Margaret M. Bowater
pp. 151-154

Berne (1947) wrote a chapter on "Dreams and the Unconscious" in his first book, preserved that chapter through two revisions spanning 20 years, and was still mentioning dreams in his final book, especially as a source of insight into script patterns. The author describes a memorable example of working with a 94-year-old man whose script apparently denied death and shows how the dreams and nightmares from his unconscious mind brought the underlying issues to attention and eventually provided resolution of the impasse.

Dreams, Symptoms, and Fantasies: Access to the Unconscious in the Psychotherapy of Adolescents with Eating Disorders
Valentina Terlato
pp. 155-163

This article examines some of the dynamics of eating disorders in adolescence and some relevant aspects of treatment. In particular, with the aid of some clinical vignettes, the author analyzes strategies that can help patient and therapist to access the unconscious dimensions of experience, building a sense for what was originally experienced as mechanical and repetitive nonsense.

Working with Unconscious Processes in a Short-term Transactional Analysis Group
Cristina Caizzi and Rosanna Giacometto
pp. 164-170

This article describes short-term therapy in an experiential transactional analysis group based on applications of classical transactional analysis concepts. Using a case example, the authors demonstrate how this approach can be used to address both intrapsychic and interpersonal processes. They also propose a connection between the Freudian concept of "faulty acts" and impasse theory. Moreover, links are elaborated between intrapsychic and interpersonal processes in transactional analysis using the concepts of impasses, games, and transactions. The connections between psychoanalysis and transactional analysis concepts are described followed by diagnosis of the client's relational and unconscious dynamics so as to integrate the case material with the theory.

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