The 2018 issue of the Transactional Analysis Journal, the first with our new publisher, Routledge, steps into territories that call on us to consider and reconsider our ways of thinking and practice. Written from educational, counseling, research, and psychotherapeutic perspectives, the articles in this issue challenge familiar frames of reference and carry us into some of the most demanding and complex practice issues we face as transactional analysts.
The lead article, “A Body of Knowledge: Somatic and Environmental Impacts in the Educational Encounter” by Giles Barrow, invites us to consider our bodies as well as our minds in the process and experience of learning. Barrow takes us into his own classroom as a 6-year-old boy, the classrooms of his adult trainees, and the “classrooms” of nature outside of walls, desks, and books. Both evocative and provocative, his essay invites us to consider and experience the embodiment of learning—the somatic as well as the cognitive processes of engaging in novel knowledge. The article is replete with vivid examples from his own student experiences as well as his teaching in classrooms and out of doors.
Although Barrow acknowledges that the somatic and experiential focus he advocates remains at the outskirts of education and training processes, he brings his challenge directly into TA training and certification practices, arguing for a broader range of styles of presentation in training and in examination procedures themselves so as to bring more focus to the somatic and environmental facets of teaching and learning. Long experienced as both a teacher and a trainer of teachers, he asks that we consider the structures of our educational means and encounters and how they may facilitate, promote, encourage, deaden, or prohibit learning.
Edward Novak’s article, “A Model of Informed Physical Contact in Psychotherapy,” offers a direct, articulate challenge to the common prohibition against touch between clients and their counselors or psychotherapists. Certified as both a mental health counselor and a psychoanalyst, Novak had encountered this prohibition in both arenas, and yet with particular clients, he found himself questioning the therapeutic legitimacy of this customary position. Novak argues for the informed use of physical contact with some clients and at some points during the treatment process, especially when bodily trauma has fostered a severe cleavage between cognitive functioning and bodily knowing.
In “The Importance of Research in Transactional Analysis for Transactional Analysts,” Mark Widdowson challenges his colleagues across the spectrum of transactional analytic theories and practice to engage in more systematic research, arguing that TA has been massively understudied from empirical points of view. His article was originally delivered as his acceptance speech for the first ever ITAA Research Award, which he was given for his persistent—and sometimes almost solitary—efforts to establish research as fundamental in TA practice, training, and evaluation. In his typically bold and often humorous manner, Widdowson raises essential questions for his TA colleagues and examines the importance of research from ethical, practical, scientific, economic, and political perspectives. He makes an articulate argument for in-depth, single-case research and acknowledges that many who have been drawn to transactional analysis have been professional outsiders and, as he says, a bit “weird.” He also notes that most transactional analysis training occurs through private institutes and mentoring relationships outside of traditional academic settings where research is an essential element in the academic efforts to create, evaluate, and disseminate knowledge.
In their article entitled “Games Abstainers Play,” Dmitri Shustov, Olga Tuchina, and Tatiana Agibalova bring two decades of research in alcohol and drug addiction into the treatment room. Although they have carried out their research and practice in Russia, I could not help but think of the opiate addictions currently sweeping the United States and killing thousands of people. When we think of the various tasks faced by counselors, educators, and therapists, few are more challenging than the treatment of alcoholism and drug addiction. These authors argue convincingly that with its easily accessible central concepts, transactional analysis is an ideal model for the treatment of alcoholism. They offer a history and critique of the TA-based writings on alcoholism and contrast Eric Berne’s emphasis on “cure” with the notions of “recovery” that are common in addictions treatment models. Discussions of addiction and alcoholism within the TA literature have often been framed within game and script theories. Shustov, Tuchina, and Agibalova return to these fundamental concepts and offer detailed accounts of the structure and dynamics of scripts and games as lived out in alcoholism and addiction and how they ward off recovery or cure and contribute to the frequency of recidivism. The authors delineate choices of treatment interventions linked to stages of therapy and differentiate patterns of incomplete recovery corresponding to a transference cure and more fundamental recoveries generated through intrapsychic and interpersonal change at the level of script, illustrating their ideas with useful clinical examples.
Tony White draws further on script theory in his article “The Seven Suicide Decisions: Reassessing the Gouldings’ Work to Include Suicidal Ambivalence and the Homicide/Suicide Dimension.” Again we are drawn into therapeutic challenges that are daunting, if not frightening, for practitioners. Therapeutic approaches to addressing suicide and treating suicidal ideation has had a long, quite controversial history in transactional analysis. White has been a leading TA theorist in this area, and he begins his article by describing the historical context of redecision theory. He then goes on to offer a significant reframing of the original conceptualizations of suicidal script decisions. White examines the links between suicide and homicide, identifying aspects of early script decisions that are more likely to foster either a wish to murder the self or to murder another. Coincidentally, he draws on research by Shustov, Tuchina, and their colleagues in addressing the intertwining of suicide and homicide. White goes on to discuss suicidal ambivalence, which he illustrates with a vivid case example. He provides thoroughly delineated descriptions of early childhood experiences and decisions that underlie seven different forms of suicidal expression.
We continue this issue with two book reviews. The first is of Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach by Patricia A. DeYoung, which I review, and the second is of Unrepressed Unconscious, Implicit Memory, and Clinical Work edited by Giuseppe Craparo and Clara Mucci, which is reviewed by Edward T. Novak. Although the reviews offer significant critiques of these books, overall both are recommended as useful reading for transactional analysts.
We end this issue with a letter from Fanita English about her responses to the October 2017 TAJ theme issue on “Gender, Sexuality, and Identity.” At 101 years old, she continues to inspire with her eagerness to learn and her wealth of wisdom and experience. We appreciate her feedback immensely.
This issue of the Transactional Analysis Journal represents the breadth of transactional analysis practice and theory, the vitality of which is sustained by the willingness of practitioners to engage in the critical and creative thinking that is contained in each of these articles. Here are teachers, researchers, and clinicians willing to think outside the box while demonstrating a healthy respect for the original boxes that first informed and guided their work.
Additional information
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 one of the coeditors of the Transactional Analysis Journal and the author of numerous articles and books. He can be reached at 145 44th St., Pittsburgh, PA 15201, USA: email: [email protected].