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.
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.
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Notes on contributors
Jo Stuthridge
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].