Acceptance Speech on Receiving the 2005 Eric Berne Memorial Award: Transgressions

Abstract

This article comprises the author's speech accepting the 2005 Eric Berne Memorial Award, with elaborations, including an excerpt from his study of the circularity of theory, psychotherapy, and psychopathology, for which he won the award, and a discussion of five questions expanding on these ideas. Transactional analysis was the case for the author's study. Alcoholism, homosexuality, and schizophrenia were studied as examples of how transactional analysis theory brought about its own psychopathology. The argument is that there is no psychopathology until a psychotherapy is invented to generate it. Every theory-centered psychotherapy names its own psychopathologies, which define their own worlds of psychotherapy. This study, which is of the place of theory in psychotherapy, is a theory of theory (of psychotherapy) and thus a critique. The circular logic of cybernetics was utilized for this reflexive study of psychotherapy.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Graham Barnes

Graham Barnes, Ph.D., CGP, TSTA, FRSA, is a psychotherapist, independent scholar, and writer. Fulfilling the destiny of a psychotherapist, he has been doing imaginative things: creating programs for racial justice and personal development, consulting with corporate and public leaders, setting up institutes to teach innovative psychotherapy (in Chapel Hill, NC, and in Zagreb, Croatia), and emigrating to Europe and settling in Stockholm where he lives with his partner of 23 years. He studied at Abilene Christian University (M.A.), Harvard Divinity School (B.D.), and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Ph.D.). His dissertation was a cybernetic study of theory in psychotherapy. He became a Teaching Member in 1972 and was a member of the ITAA Board of Trustees during most of the 1970s and for three years in the 1980s, including a term as vice president. Graham is on the advisory board of the Tällberg Foundation in Sweden, which sponsors an annual forum on “How on Earth Can We Live Together?” He is also an adviser to a Croatian think tank promoting democracy in Croatia. He edited Transactional Analysis After Eric Berne (1977), and is the author of Justice, Love and Wisdom (1994). He has completed his first novel, about the life of a family in the American South in the middle of the last century.