Falling Apart and Getting It Together

Abstract

This article views script as a dynamic process of attributing meaning to experience throughout life. It proposes that script change occurs through a dialectical tension between destabilization and integration within the psyche. Breakdown is seen as essential to growth. This process of “story-making and story-breaking” (Holmes, 2001, p. 87) ultimately generates an awareness of the self as author of one’s reality. Two client vignettes describe the author’s experience with a gradual and more sudden experience of script breakdown. These accounts illustrate how a relational approach to psychotherapy can facilitate the disintegration of a static script through an encounter with a separate subject. This process involves client and therapist in an intimate process: falling apart and getting it together. The discussion navigates a broader theme of script and intimacy, which lies at the heart of transactional analysis theory.

• breakdown
• development
• continuity
• disintegration
• integration
• intimacy
• Klein
• relational psychotherapy
• self-development
• script
• script change

Notes

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

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jo Stuthridge

Author Biography

Jo Stuthridge, MSc, NZAP, is a Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst (psychotherapy) and a registered psychotherapist in New Zealand. She maintains a private psychotherapy practice in Dunedin and is director of the Physis Institute, which offers training in transactional analysis. Jo is a teaching and research associate with the Department of Psychotherapy and Counselling at Auckland University of Technology and a current coeditor for the Transactional Analysis Journal. She can be reached at 85 Cliffs Rd., Dunedin 9012, New Zealand; email: [email protected].