Therapeutic Relatedness in Transactional Analysis: The Truth of Love or the Love of Truth

Abstract

Berne was quite critical and skeptical of those forms of therapy that encouraged feeling over thinking, referring to “Greenhouse” games (Berne, 1964/1967, pp. 141–143) in which clients escalate feelings and often idealize feeling over thinking. For the past decade, however, transactional analysis seems to be developing in a different sort of “Greenhouse,” one of enforced warmth, idealized relationships, and attachment/empathy-based clinical strategies. When the authors were originally trained in the 1970s, transactional analysis therapists were supposed to confront people into health. Now it seems they are to attach, attune, and empathize clients into health. Yet Berne's treatment group was not an empathic holding environment; it was an interpersonal study matrix. This article offers a critical review of clinical applications within transactional analysis of theories of attachment, attunement, and empathy. It critiques the clinical models of therapeutic relatedness and presents a clinical model of therapeutic space, which provides client and therapist with the room and opportunity for curiosity, uncertainty, and conflict.

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Notes on contributors

William F. Cornell

William F. Cornell, M.A., is a Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst (clinical) who maintains a private practice in psychotherapy, supervision, and consultation near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., and runs an ongoing training group in Geneva, Switzerland. He is the author of numerous articles and a frequent speaker at conferences relating to transactional analysis, bodywork, and psychoanalysis.

Frances Bonds-White

Frances Bonds-White, Ed.D., is a Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst (clinical), a Fellow of the American Group Psychotherapy Association, and a Certified Group Psychotherapist. She served as ITAA Vice-President for Training and Certification from 1992–1996 and is currently on the boards of the American Group Psychotherapy Association and the International Association for Group Psychotherapy. Dr. Bonds has taught group psychotherapy around the world and is the author of numerous articles as well as a chapter in a book on men and group psychotherapy. She is a full member of the Group Analytic Society (London). In addition to her work as a therapist and teacher of group psychotherapy, she conducts team building and strategic planning training in business, industry, and nonprofit corporations.