Transactional Analysis
Journal
July 2006 Abstract
Volume 36, Number 3
Myth and Measurement
Theodore B. Novey
pp. 180-185
In this article, the author, in acknowledging the honor of
receiving the 2006 Eric Berne Memorial Award, describes his life in the field
of science-based consensual reality extending from his early career as a
nuclear physicist to his current career in the field of human relations and his
award-winning research on the effectiveness of transactional analysis.
Script, Psychological Life Plans, and the Learning
Cycle
Trudi Newton
pp. 186-195
An experiential learning
model, the learning cycle (the basic human adaptive process of reflecting on
experience then generating and testing hypotheses), provides a model for
understanding both script formation in childhood and the updating and changing
of script throughout life from a constructivist/cocreative perspective. Changes
in the theory of script are reviewed together with recent studies on children's
natural learning through experience, language acquisition, meaning making, and
experimentation. Script development is considered as a normal, resourceful
process of human psychological growth in which story making plays an important
role.
Impasse and Intimacy: Applying Berne's Concept of Script
Protocol
William F. Cornell & N. Michel Landaiche, III
pp. 196-213
The concept of impasse was first conceptualized in the
transactional literature as an intrapsychic process that inhibited or blocked
internal communication among states of the ego. The authors present an
understanding of impasse as an interpersonal process that disrupts the work of
the professional dyad in promoting self-understanding and development. As the
working relationship deepens, it develops an unavoidable intimacy or closeness,
with many of the same pleasures and problems that attend any close
relationship. In this often turbulent interpersonal field, points of impasse
result from the mutual evocation of each person's unconscious relational
patterns, which Berne called protocols. The character of any impasse is,
therefore, unique to each therapeutic couple and operates principally at an
unworded, body level. Once an impasse has developed, resuming productive work
depends on realizing what each person does, what each avoids, and how each
becomes stuck when addressing the vulnerabilities and intimacies of this work.
These concepts are illustrated with material from a clinical case.
The Existential Phenomenology of Transactional
Analysis
John Nuttall
pp. 214-227
Berne (1961/1987)
described transactional analysis as a systematic phenomenology that
incorporates the values of existentialism. Although there are few overt
references to the existential school in Berne's popular writings, it is evident
from a number of passages in his books that he embraced a profoundly
existential-phenomenological attitude in his approach to psychotherapy. This
article discusses the development and major tenets of existential
phenomenology, their impact on psychotherapy, and how they can be readily
integrated and recognized within the key concepts of transactional analysis.
For example, transactions constitute intersubjectivity, ego states and life
positions represent Being-in-the-world, games manifest inauthentic Being or bad
faith, and script denotes the existential project and
possibilities-for-Being-in-the-world. A clinical vignette helps to synthesize
the two approaches and highlights how each conceptualizes the therapeutic
relationship. The article concludes that transactional analysis is a system
that describes human existence at both the ontic and ontological levels and
that it can be readily construed as embracing the existential perspective. This
may be an attribute of all major systems of psychotherapy, and, therefore,
psychotherapy integration might be better achieved by the use of an expanded
and enriched language taken from a range of such systems.
Applying Transactional Analysis to the Understanding of
Narcissism
Ann Heathcote
pp. 228-234
This article draws on
the transactional analysis literature to describe narcissism and to discuss its
developmental origins, structure, and relationship to shame,
self-righteousness, and transference. These discussions are then linked to
treatment considerations.
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