In These Dark Times: Exploring Our Values as Transactional Analysts

Abstract

This essay addresses personal and professional values underlying (but not necessarily consciously articulated) how we practice and what we define as healthy outcomes for our efforts as transactional analysts. It is an invitation to consider the importance of a professional culture of curiosity and respect, one that can welcome and make use of difference and conflict, stressing the need for the elaboration of theories and values that actively attend to social and political forces that shape beliefs and behaviors. Central to this essay is a critique of the incorporation of “I’m OK, You’re OK” as a central value of transactional analysis.

Keywords:

• OKness
• core values
• revision
• Eric Berne
• transactional analysis history
• cultural determinants
• critical analysis

The following short sections are an attempt to show people how psychiatrists can help them think more clearly about political events. … Psychiatrists, even more than physicists, should and must concern themselves with political affairs. (Berne, 1947, p. 292)

The epigraph that opens this essay is taken from a closing chapter in Eric Berne’s (1947) first book, The Mind in Action. It was written at the close of the Second World War and offered his personal and professional reflections on the conditions that promote hatred and war. Berne’s words came back to me as I prepared this essay, which I am writing in the midst of two vicious, mindless wars in Europe and the Middle East. We are in the midst of social and political worlds that have become increasingly motivated by men and women who appeal to fervent, compelling nationalistic and pseudoreligious motivations to depersonalize those who differ from themselves. The ultimate outcome of establishing a “belonging” and identity through the demonization and depersonalization is violence.

Our professional associations provide their members with codes of ethics that define rules and limits with regard to the treatment of clients and one another as professional colleagues. Ethical codes provide essential guidelines for the protection of professionals and clients alike. Our codes of ethics are based on social and professional values. The ethics standards of the European Association for Transactional Analysis (2007/2011) and the International Transactional Analysis Association (2014, 2020) seek to codify such humanistic values as respect, mutuality, empowerment, dignity, and responsibility. Ethical codes are not fixed, but as we see through the myriad of articles addressing ethical concerns and values in the Transactional Analysis Journal (TAJ), they are constantly evolving (Campos, 2011; Cornell & Eusden, 2011; Drego, 2009; Eusden, 2011, 2023; Monin, 2011; Newton, 2011; Tosi, 2018).

This essay seeks to articulate a somewhat different perspective from that of professional ethics, addressing personal and professional values underlying (but not necessarily articulated) how we practice and what we define as healthy outcomes for our efforts as mental health professionals. I seek to explore both our personal/professional values and beliefs as well as the social/political forces that shape and motivate our individual and community approaches as transactional analysts.

What are the beliefs, values, and hopes that we hold most precious in our work as transactional analysts? There are, I suspect, some values that we hold in common because transactional analysis (TA) is the model to which each of us has been drawn and has committed huge amounts of our time. And yet, even as there are likely things we hold in common, within what is common there will be differences. Each of us has a unique history—some more troubled than others—our own family of origin, a family that has a history of its own, nurtured (or harmed) in a neighborhood, a culture, an environment perhaps of hope, or of despair, or violence and chaos. How do our personal histories inform, motivate, and limit the vision and values we bring to our work? How has the history (some known, much unspoken) of the primal leaders in transactional analysis come to shape and limit our values and practice? Our values and beliefs—spoken and unspoken, conscious and unconscious—are the foundations of what we see as a life worth living and work worth doing.

Eric Berne’s Personal History and Its Impact on TA Values

To have a truly informed discussion of our values in TA, we must begin with Eric Berne. Berne’s early life and adulthood were not easy. His family was Jewish in predominantly Catholic Montreal, his paternal grandparents fleeing Poland to Canada to escape the pogroms and possible conscription into the military. The Bernstein family (Eric’s given last name) lived on Ste. Famille Street. Only as an adult, having left Montreal, did Berne (2010) write, “It occurred to me with some astonishment that ‘Ste. Famille’ meant ‘Holy Family,’ and that I had spent my childhood on Holy Family Street” (p. 42). He did, however, know the heat and hatred of anti-Semitism, as he wrote, “O Woe, Woe to a Jewish boy from the ghetto who crossed St. Denis Street” (p. 40). His father was a physician crusading against the causes of tuberculosis, which at the time was devastating Montreal. His articles defining the source of the disease (unpasteurized milk, he said) were ignored, apparently dismissed because he was Jewish. He stayed engaged with his patients, contracting tuberculosis himself and dying at 38, leaving Berne, age 10, with his sister and widowed mother. When he emigrated to the United States, Eric Leonard Bernstein changed his name to Eric Berne and became an American citizen (Jorgensen & Jorgensen, 1984, pp. 34–36).

Berne’s (1977) exploration of intuition, forged while an Army psychiatrist drafted in 1943, are well known to transactional analysts. Much less known to most were Berne’s postwar efforts on behalf of veterans, which include writing articles about postwar trauma and emotional adjustments faced by returning soldiers. In an article for the ITAA newsletter, The Script, Berne’s son Terry (Berne & Cornell, 2004) wrote:

Thus, the problems and psychic responses of soldiers—either those who had yet to experience the trauma of war or those returning from battle with various degrees and typologies of mental distress—unquestionably marked the evolution of my father’s thinking about human psychology. (p. 7)

Berne had a long-standing interest in how psychiatry was practiced in other countries and cultures beginning before the outbreak of the war (Bernstein, 1939) and intensifying afterward (Berne, 1956, 1959a, 1959b, 1961). Berne paid for all of those trips himself.

Following the First World War, Freud made his own blunt and rather chilling observations about the complicity of ordinary citizens with the violence of evil leadership:

And now turn your eyes away from individuals and consider the Great War [WW I] which is still laying Europe waste. Think of the vast amounts of brutality, cruelty, and lies which are able to spread all over the civilized world. Do you really believe that a handful of ambitious and deluding men without conscience could have succeeded in unleashing all of those evil spirits if their millions of followers did not share their guilt? (Freud, 1916-1917/1963, p. 146)

Freud’s blunt question is chilling. He challenged his community to examine the consistency of their stated values with their actual behavior. We are living in times now that call for thoughtful, perhaps wrenching, reflections on the relevance of our personal and professional values during these times of violence and polarization.

Berne’s first book, The Mind in Action, published in 1947, included a section titled “Man as a Political Animal.” In a subsection, “How Does an Evil Leader Hold His Followers?” Berne argued:

Life is complicated, and the evil leader holds his followers by making it appear simple. … It is not for his followers to seek the dark causes of war and poverty, or the complicated reasons for their own unfortunate position [in life]. … He gives them a simple answer for all to say aloud confidently. Who causes war? The Aztecs! Who causes poverty? The Aztecs! Who causes them to lose their pitiful jobs? The Aztecs! … He puts on demonstrations to show his followers that he is absolutely right in case there is any doubt left in their minds. (pp. 297–298)

In the early 1950s, Berne’s personal curiosity and political courage were brought down by “evil” American politicians: Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn (who later became Donald Trump’s mentor). It was a trip to Bulgaria that ultimately incurred the suspicion and wrath of the U.S. government during the post-war fever to wipe out all Communists and perceived Communist “sympathizers.” In 2004 I interviewed Terry Berne for an article in The Script in which he discussed the impact of the government’s investigation of his father:

Among his papers I found a file related to him being investigated by the House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Un-American Activities, which began in the late 1940s and were the precursor to the McCarthy investigations. My dad lost his job with the government—he was a psychiatric consultant to the US Army—because he was considered a security risk. … He was interrogated over a period of years and even had his passport rescinded. … He also signed a petition circulated by prominent scientists calling for the US government to stop politicizing scientific research. At the time the government was pressuring private research foundations that were financially supporting scientists that the government deemed too liberal. … The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) even requested a list of all the maps in his possession. (Berne & Cornell, 2004, p. 6)

When The Mind in Action was republished in 1957 as A Layman’s Guide to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, the section on man as a political animal was deleted. Berne (1968), now famous through TA, noted in the preface reprinted in the third edition, “As to changes in the present edition, the section ‘Man as a Political Animal’ has been deleted, and this topic will be treated in a separate volume. In its place, a section on the new ‘wonder drugs’ of psychiatry has been inserted” (p. 13). That separate volume was not to come, although a careful reading of the section “The Group Authority” in The Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups (Berne, 1963) can be seen as an informed and carefully stated commentary on political forces. However, it sadly lacks the force and directness of his comments in the original 1947 reflections, which have now been fully reprinted (Berne, 1974/2020) in Psychotherapy and Politics International.

There remained an undertone of pain, despair, and distrust within much of Berne’s writings. He famously wrote that we are all born princes and princesses but our parents turn us into frogs. Clever, but terribly simplistic and rather sinister. The script matrix is a fundamental concept and image for transactional analysis. It focuses our attention on messages from parents within the nuclear family, a focus of attention I want to reconsider here. Using Berne himself as an example, it might be better said for Berne’s own life that he was born a prince (he was a cherished son), but it was tragedy and life itself that turned him into a frog. If we are to bring a more explicit social and political perspective into TA, it seems that we need to refashion our thinking about scripts to actively address and delineate social, economic, and political factors that shape and limit the vitality of the family and parental system (Sedgwick, 2021).

By the time Berne was developing transactional analysis, he declared TA to be apolitical (Steiner, 2010). His declaration, however, was not accompanied by an explanation based on his personal history and trauma. His declaration became a kind of transgenerational transmission of a prohibition against the development of overtly political expressions by his professional “children.”

Politics and Transactional Analysis

Berne’s personal/political trauma cast a strange shadow over the formative years of transactional analysis. TA was, at its heart, grounded in humanistic traditions, and many of those first drawn to the San Francisco Social Psychiatry Seminars were professional outliers of one sort or another. How was this rather motley crew to set aside political interests in their practices as transactional analysts? Framing “social” rather than overtly “political” discussion was one way forward, thereby stepping around Berne’s injunction. Jongeward and Scott (1973) brought feminist theory into TA, and the earliest political voices came from feminist perspectives (Boulton, 1976; J. James, 1983; M. James, 1973; Levin, 1977; Schiff, 1975; Wyckoff, 1970, 1971, 1977). Massey (2007) provided a rich discussion of Berne’s conceptualization of social psychiatry, interweaving individual psychotherapy with groups, families, systems, and cultures. Through much of the history of the ITAA, there have been social action committees and conference themes, but rarely, for many years, anything overtly political.

Claude Steiner was the first of Berne’s closest students to stake out an overtly political position as central to a therapeutic model. Deeply influenced by the work of Wilhelm Reich (Issues in Radical Therapy Collective, 1973–1974, 1974), Steiner and his colleagues at the Radical Psychiatry Center (Steiner et al., 1975) positioned a “radical” psychiatry in a challenge to Berne’s “social” psychiatry, publishing largely outside of the pages of the Transactional Analysis Journal.

There was an unofficial but compelling reluctance to publish overtly political articles in the Transactional Analysis Journal, although political concerns did sometimes find their way into it. Batts’s (1982, 1983) articles on racism were prime examples. The avoidance of explicitly political articles was directly challenged by Jacobs (1987, 1990, 1991), resulting in his being awarded the Eric Berne Memorial Award for “Transactional Analysis and Social Applications” in 1997 (Jacobs, 1997). Take note of “social” applications, even though Jacobs’s work was indelibly political. There has been a marked shift in the pages of the TAJ as witnessed by recent theme issues addressing “Social Responsibility in a Vengeful World” (Cornell & Monin, 2018), “Normativity, Marginality, and Deviance” (Deaconu & Rowland, 2021), and “Systemic Oppression: What Part Do We Play?” (Minikin & Rowland, 2022). It is beyond the scope of this essay to adequately cover these political writings within transactional analysis. Interested readers can find a comprehensive account in Tudor (2020). A special issue of Psychotherapy and Politics International (Tudor & Cornell, 2020) was devoted to the exploration of political thinking by transactional analysts.

Political and social forces inform our personal and professional values. These same forces may also warp, distort, or silence the expression of our values.

OKness

If I were to ask most transactional analysts around the world what the primary value of TA is, I am quite sure I would hear something about “I’m OK, You’re OK,” that is, OKness. I invite us to think about the problems of OKness as a primary value for transactional analysis and to explore a broader range of values and principles that I think we do, in fact, exhibit and enact in our work as transactional analysts.

Berne (1962) wrote little about life positions or “I’m OK, You’re OK.” The first time was one page in the Transactional Analysis Bulletin describing life positions as “I’m OK, You’re OK” (I+/Y+), constructive; “I’m OK, You’re not OK” (I+/Y-), paranoid; “I’m not OK, You’re OK” (I-/Y+), depressive; and “I’m not OK, You’re not OK” (I-/Y-), futile and probably leading to schizophrenia (p. 23). He was speculating that perhaps existential life positions were the underlying structure of all games, arguing that although the life positions were fluid, each individual likely had one position as their dominant frame of reference. He did not elaborate these ideas in Games People Play (Berne, 1964).

It was not until What Do You Say After You Say Hello? that Berne (1972) returned to a discussion of life positions, observing:

Whatever the [life] decision is, it can be justified by taking a position based on the now deeply ingrained convictions, a position which involves a view of the whole world and all the people in it, who are either friends or enemies. (p. 85)

Berne introduced the concept of three-handed positions, adding “They” to “I” and “You.” Here, at least indirectly, he touched on the social and political, as when he illustrated I + You + They + as the position of a democratic community in contrast to I + You + They- as the position of a demagogue (p. 90). Although his elaboration of these ideas was rather brief (using Nazis and Communists to illustrate), one gets the impression that Berne was well aware of and sensitive to social/political forces. He emphasized how difficult it is to change the fundamental beliefs of one’s life position, which he described as underlying core elements of one’s script.

Zivkovic (2023) emphasized the defensive functions of life positions (including I+/You+), bringing a fresh clinical perspective to a theory too often rendered banal. He situated Berne’s theory of life positions squarely within the object relations traditions of Klein and Fairbairn (pp. 289–292), seeing the life positions as “an interpersonal manifestation of the intrapsychic dyad represented by the internalized object representation” (p. 291) and placing the emphasis on the parent/infant dyad in keeping with the original structure and focus of the script matrix. Here I want to bring attention to the implications of Berne’s introduction of three positions, which includes the social, the world at large, as the third. The developing child and their family live and form in relation to economic, cultural, and political forces. Aspects of one’s basic, existential life position may be “defensive” as seen through clinical eyes, or realistic and functional seen through more socially focused eyes (Sedgwick, 2021).

Unfortunately, Berne, in Hello, resorted to his clever language, suggesting that I+/Y + is the “winner” position, and the others are for “losers.” In this, I think he may have laid the ground for the idealization and simplification of an underdeveloped idea that could have had much farther reaching implications. Of course, then the book I’m OK—You’re OK (Harris, 1967), like Games People Play, became a bestseller, seeming to fuse transactional analysis with the concept of life positions in the popular (and often professional) impressions of TA.

On the one hand, Berne acknowledged that we all likely move among these life positions all through the day, but in his pairing I+/Y + with success (“winning”) and the not-OK positions with losing, he rendered potentially rich ideas banal. What if we consider I-/Y-, rather than being the position of “losing,” to be an outcome and reflection of tragic loss, despair, collapse of hope, and the potential for violence as we see so often today? What if we consider I+/Y- as an expression of anxiety, marginalization, a fear of rejection, or assault in the face of wishing to belong? What if we consider I-/Y + as a place of shame, as well as potential depression, found to be a “failure” and marginalization in the eyes of others or society in general? I think we need to deepen our theory of the life positions, not just turn them into slogans. Comfort and niceness, which has often inhabited the idealization of “OKness,” can be dangerous. How do we create a professional climate that acknowledges and respects despair, difference, and conflict—room for the inevitability of “not-OKness”?

Claude Steiner (2017) wrote an important article about “OKness” in TA, arguing:

OK/OK has been adopted around the world as an important transactional analysis symbol that signifies equality, cooperation, democracy, and freedom fueled by positive strokes. It appears that the concept has morphed from being a fundamental aspect of games, and no more in Berne’s original conceptualization, to an iconic catch phrase that characterizes transactional analysis. … The OK concept and its antithesis, the not-OK concept, have become a transactional analysis banner and a part of the social behavioral narrative of the TA community. … It has become a shallow behavioral fetish that allows for no critical comments … creating a social [I would add professional] situation in which the importance of Adult critique is undermined. (p. 297)

Zivkovic (2023) suggested that the evolution of life positions into “a philosophical category that today involves moral and social OKness” (p. 287) represents “the TA community’s reenactments of Berne’s internal conflicts, which became an integral part of the community’s large group dynamics and its collective identity” (p. 287). He speculated, “It seems that TA, for him, perhaps unconsciously, represented an ideological belief system and a vehicle of disavowal of not-OKness, which was further stimulated by his failure to qualify as a psychoanalyst” (p. 297). Although Zivkovic’s focus on the enactment of intrapsychic conflict seemed to strip away any acknowledgment of the possible impact of social and political forces—as with the war—on Berne, he raised a significant challenge to the idealization of OKness:

As such, the post-Bernean transformation of OKness into moral and social constructs and the institutionalization of OKness can also be seen from the perspective of a disavowal of the less comfortable, negative, aggressive parts of our individual and collective psyche and the shadow they form within the modern TA community. (p. 297)

If we engage thoughtfully with our current social/political realities, we need to confront and think about the forces of paranoia, the profound anxieties, and the impact of poverty, displacement, and homelessness as world events and tragedies invade and overwhelm our lives and psyches. The picture becomes much more complex and “not-OK” attitudes more comprehensible when we take the time and care to look at the lived realities—and devastated histories—of those we may find comfort in turning away from if they do not embrace “OKness.” Perhaps we can modify the idealization of “OKness” with some version of “your idea is not-quite-OK-with me-but-interesting-to consider.” Or perhaps, “Your way of thinking really upsets (threatens?) me, but I’ll see if I can understand it even if I think differently.” And further, a compassionate regard for the tragedies and the chronic environmental dysfunctions that may underlie an “I’m not-OK/You’re not-OK” position is essential. How do we engage with these life experiences as therapists, educators, and consultants?

In 1947, Berne was arguing that a good leader provides the tools for people to consider the darker aspects of human nature—the places of pain, despair, hatred, the turning against life. This, for me as a TA therapist, supervisor, and trainer, is a fundamental value.

In a recent book, The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, Jacqueline Rose (2023) took up a series of reflections on the meanings and impact of the pandemic and Putin’s assault on Ukraine. Over the years, as I have read many books, there are a few that take up residence in my mind, and sometimes my heart. This book has inhabited me at the moment. Rose, a feminist writer and scholar on Freud, addressed the essential need for freedom of thought. She observed that (in the U.S. at least) this freedom is frequently equated with the freedom to say whatever we please without fear of censure. Although this is a value that I suspect most of us share, there are so many places in the world right now where people have lost that freedom. But Rose makes another statement about the freedom to think that is fundamental for me:

But there is another meaning, no less important, which is the ability to track by means of thought the more hidden, painful and scandalous aspects of human life in a world which has turned—or so it has seemed repeatedly over these past few years—even more dangerous and cruel than it was before. (p. 17)

In TA, we are typically taught to think of the Adult ego state as holding the capacity to see and know “reality.” But this is, in fact, a rather impoverished notion of the Adult and of the meaning of “thinking.” Rose redirects our thinking to its capacity for self-examination, for looking at the things we would rather avoid. To my mind, the development of the capacity for self-examination of our societies, our profession, and ourselves is a primary value.

Cultural Embeddedness

As transactional analysis has become a truly international community, how do our theories need to be informed and challenged by this wider world and its myriad of differing peoples? The Adult ego state, as conceived by Berne, is not, in fact, an objective observer of “reality.” It is embedded in social, cultural, and historical forces (Dajani, 2022; Minikin, 2023; Sedgwick, 2021). We carry the stories of historical victories and tragedies passed on verbally within our Parent ego states. We carry compelling cultural codes—consciously and unconsciously—within our Child ego states, as so compellingly described by Dajani (2022):

Cultures are breathed into us from the very beginning, and they structure the deepest layer of our unconscious while lying in plain sight.

Cultural systems/practices are essential ingredients in infant development. Infants are imagined, held, handled, fed, clothed, instructed, guided, and constrained by the cultures that suffuse them, their family and community. (p. 243)

One of the most compelling concepts in TA is that of scripts, with the script matrix a central image of how we think of the psychological forces that shape a human being—something shared by the classical, redecision, and reparenting schools that laid our foundation. Whatever their differences were in treatment approaches (which were substantial), they all shared an understanding of the nuclear family as the crucible of psychological wishes and defenses. The walls and vision of that formative crucible can expand to embrace generational, economic, social, political, and cultural influences. These days it is fashionable to embrace “uncertainty” as a therapeutic skill and attitude, but I would argue that in these dark times it has become even more essential that we face personal and professional discomfort, disorganization, and disturbance in service of a vital and vitalizing capacity in the service of those with whom we work and the troubled communities in which we live. There is an ethical and moral demand that we not turn away from those whose lives, values, and disturbance challenge—perhaps even frighten, overwhelm, or disgust—us.

I began writing this essay after Putin’s assault on Ukraine, after conversations, profound disagreements, and feelings of betrayal and despair among my Ukrainian and Russian colleagues. As I struggle to bring these reflections to a close, the tragic, mutual slaughter between some factions of the Palestinians and the Israelis is unfolding. It has become difficult to conclude this essay without descending into despair, collapse, and/or polarizing blame. The hope I find now is fragile. There can be so much more comfort in fury and blame, as Freud observed over a century ago and Berne did more than half a century ago.

I crave the days of the 1960s and 1970s when we went to the streets in constructive protest, when we refused to accept the posturing of government leaders. We thought for ourselves. We did not believe that governmental violence led to any lasting peace and respect for one another. We stood up together for the moral good, as we have witnessed in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which have restored some hope to the pained and furious demands of demonized communities.

To deprive fellow human beings of security and a future of their own, even if beliefs and values seem diametrically opposed to one’s own, is a fundamental and—tragically—increasingly difficult demand on our communities. There is certainly something in the idealization of “OKness” that strives in that direction. But reality demands that we have the capacity to face the deeply untrusting, destructive aspects of being human. We need to have values and theories that facilitate our capacities to face the complexities of being one human among others, many of whom are very different from what we might consider to be comprehensible and acceptable.

This essay is a personal and professional invitation to consider the values that shape our practices as individuals and as transactional analysts. When we consider our values and beliefs, I am on the alert for those that inhibit our freedom of thought. In coming to a close, I would like to list a number of the values, hopes, aspirations, and wishes that we may hold as transactional analysts in our varied fields of endeavor as we work with our clients, students, colleagues, and others who open themselves to us as partners in reflections and allies for personal and professional growth:

• To engage in an ongoing commitment to a process of self-examination

• To recognize and respect the ways in which the “scripts” or “defenses” of clients and students have perhaps been fostered, even demanded, by their social or political environments

• To create an environment in which we feel respected enough to learn to think freely and engage in more open and challenging relationships

• To be able to tolerate painful and unwanted states of mind/body sensations and impulses as aspects of who we are and what it means to be alive

• To bring our capacities to love and hate closer together

• To increase the capacity for mentalization—that is, the capacity to experience the Other as having a separate and interesting mind, one worthy of interest and respect

• To grieve and mourn, facing the possibilities of irreversible loss

• To become more accepting of disowned or shamed aspects of ourselves

• To learn from reality—even when it is painful or disorganizing—rather than limiting it, distorting it, or withdrawing from it

• To accept self-doubt as essential in learning

• To embrace the right and capacity to challenge social and cultural norms and to express them, even when these are outside the norm

Acknowledgments

This essay is an expansion of a keynote speech, “A Living CREDO for Transactional Analysis,” presented at the 16th National Congress of Transactional Analysis, 7 October 2023, in Catania, Sicily. It was given on the day of the outbreak of the war between Hamas and Israel. The author thanks Anna Emanuela Tangolo and Francesca Vignozzi for their invitation to deliver this keynote to a rich and stimulating congress and to the TAJ editorial reviewers for their thoughtful comments on the submitted draft, which resulted in important revisions.

Disclosure statement

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Additional information

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes on contributors

William F. Cornell

William F. Cornell, MA, is a Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst (psychotherapy) who maintains an independent private practice of therapy, consultation, and training in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as well as leading frequent training groups in Europe. He is the consulting editor of the Transactional Analysis Journal, the editor of the Routledge book series Innovations in Transactional Analysis, and the author of numerous articles and books. Bill is also Founding Faculty of the Western Pennsylvania Community for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies. He can be reached at 145 44th St., Pittsburgh, PA 15201-3038, USA; email: [email protected].