Rebels and Sweethearts

Abstract

This article was written in 1991 by the late Emily Hunter Ruppert. Although the ideas in it have never been published before, they have been taught and embraced by many in the transactional analysis community and in the wider world of psychotherapy. Martin Wells submitted this article on behalf of and with the permission of Ruppert’s estate and wrote a complementary article in this journal. Wells was a member of one of two transactional analysis training groups of professionals that Emily led in Europe biannually over many years (from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s). She made this article available to group members and trainees in Europe and the United States, where she lived and worked as a Teaching Member of the International Transactional Analysis Association.

• Rebel
• Sweetheart
• Spirit
• Free Child
• Adapted Child
• defense
• humiliation
• humility
• shame
• boundaries

Acknowledgments

The basis for these ideas came from Eric Berne’s model of the personality and relationships. Bob Drye’s (1974) article on the Rebellious Child began my foray into using the structural model as a way to describe process. Natalie and Morris Haimowitz taught me how to be my own version of a transactional analyst. My teachers of the Spirit have been those clients who have been willing to take me up and down the mountain with them. I appreciate the sweat and tears and laughter we have shared while learning together how to do therapy. Additional important influences on me have been John Bowlby, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Anne Sexton, and all actors, artists, writers, and creative spirits who open the windows to truth and joy.

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

Emily Hunter Ruppert

Author Biography

Emily Hunter Ruppert, MSW, ITAA Teaching Member (clinical), worked in private practice doing group and individual psychotherapy and consultation to hospitals, universities, and other organizations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and later in Brookline, Massachusetts. She also trained intermediate and advanced clinicians in group psychotherapy using transactional analysis as a primary theoretical foundation. Earlier, Emily was associate director of the Foster Community Project through the Missouri Institute of Psychiatry in St. Louis, Missouri, where she was responsible for the development and implementation of a new model for the treatment and rehabilitation of chronic schizophrenics using the community as both the setting and the system for treatment. Emily died in July 2012 after treatment for ovarian cancer. Fern Ganley, the executor of Emily’s estate, has given permission for the publication of this article posthumously. Fern can be reached at 115 Wason Street, Medford, Massachusetts, USA; email: [email protected].