After the previous theme issue of the Transactional Analysis Journal (TAJ) on neurodiversity and neurodivergence, this April issue contains general articles, although there is a somewhat common theme among several of them that I will comment on shortly. Since I joined the TAJ team in 2021 as a coeditor, especially for research, I have enjoyed reviewing research articles from all over the world, written by dedicated professionals who sometimes did their work under difficult circumstances. The intense deliberations with these authors, sometimes in person through Zoom and otherwise by email, often included a lengthy process of back and forth, and this was always stimulating and instructive for everyone involved. This process resulted in five accepted research articles in the last 2 years written by authors from Turkey, Iran, Italy, the Philippines, Iran, and in this issue, India.
Returning to this April issue, as I said, a common theme arises in four of the five articles. In different ways, they all deal with questions such as: What is the influence of the sociopolitical domain on the individual script? How do we make the translation from the individual intrapsychic world into our attitude and behavior in the larger world? How do we make ethical choices from a broader, more inclusive, collective perspective? And how can we expand Berne’s ideas of individual agency and autonomy into a broader vision that includes connectedness and sociopolitical context?
We start with a moving essay written by Bill Cornell as an expansion of the keynote speech he gave in October 2023 at a TA conference in Catania, Sicily, Italy. In his article entitled “In These Dark Times: Exploring Our Values as Transactional Analysts,” he pleads for a reevaluation of one of the central values of transactional analysis: the concept of “I’m OK, You’re OK.” Cornell relates how Berne became politically less outspoken during his career, perhaps because he was considered a security risk by the American government. Unnoticed, the word “political” in TA was replaced by the word “social,” although Steiner challenged this with his development of radical psychiatry. In the decades that followed, articles with a political stance were still published in TAJ, sometimes reluctantly, until in recent years when several TAJ theme issues and relevant articles appeared on subjects such as social responsibility and oppression. And now, with two violent conflicts in the world, one starting on the day of Cornell’s keynote speech, it is even more important to take a stance. And this means, in Cornell’s opinion, no easy, impoverished notions of good and bad, plus and minus, but rather a position of self-reflection, tolerance of discomfort, and acceptance of disowned or shamed aspects of ourselves as well as reaching out to others, discussing instead of depersonalizing and demonizing all those different from ourselves. This is a moving and challenging article based on personal reflections and a vast knowledge of TA and other literature.
Karen Minikin’s article “The Personal and the Political” fits in seamlessly with Cornell’s essay. It is an edit of her keynote speech from the TA Cumbrian conference in 2023. In the article, Minikin explores in a personal account her ideas on the relatedness between the human, political, and physical environments of people. She shares her personal history, specifically from her father, born in colonial India in 1932, a story of intergenerational trauma, of love and hate. Starting with World War II and the partition of India in 1947, she reveals the history of White supremacist ideology in Britain in the 1960s, racism toward herself as a toddler in daycare, and the slipping hope in her father for the future of Pakistan. She was disturbed and moved when she discovered that her father had been engaged with the same theme as she was: alienation as the cause of social and psychological distress. Knowing this helped her to understand at a deeper level how intergenerational trauma is transmitted through the body. This article offers a beautiful, layered story about the complex interactions between the personal, the social, and the political.
The third article deals with ethics from the question: What does it mean to really respect cultural differences in a forum like the ITAA Ethics Committee? In his article “From Assessing to Exploring: Less Parent, More Adult in Ethical Reasoning?” Anne de Graaf offers a personal account of his experiences on the ITAA Ethics Committee, where in the last years a shift was been made from a personalized judgmental attitude toward ethical complaints to a broader, more systemic view. In his article, a range of issues is reviewed: the shift from a Western, individualized, and materialistic attitude toward a more inclusive, collective way of thinking and behavior with respect for others and nature; postmodern thinking; dialectics; autonomy versus homonomy; and moral ambition. He refers to the Dutch-Australian professor and author Sidney Dekker, who advocated for a just culture, where the point is not to reveal the truth or to bring forward an objective judgment of what has gone wrong. A just culture implies exploring together questions of accountability, liability, and responsibility. De Graaf expresses the wish that this “new school ethics” will be the attitude in the Ethics Committee and also in the International Board of Certification (IBOC) regarding issues around training and the responsible for the quality of the work of a trainee. This is an interesting, challenging, and thought-provoking article.
Aruna Gopakumar and Aparna Viadik make a nice shift from the broad perspectives of the previous three articles toward a more focused view when they discuss the TA concept of the drama triangle. In their article “Recognizing Invisible Oppression With the Drama Pyramid: Adding the Bystander Role and the Cultural Parent to the Drama Triangle,” they propose considering the role of the bystander as an integral part of the drama triangle. They convert the two-dimensional drama triangle into a three-dimensional drama pyramid. Their article starts with a rather horrifying mythical Indian story in which a student first is dismissed by a teacher, later is accepted, and then offers a glorious sacrifice to honor his teacher. Seen through the lens of the Cultural Parent, this story can be viewed as a metaphor to preserve the cohesion of social order. By adding the Cultural Parent and the role of the bystander to the drama triangle, and with their examples of how to use the functional fluency model, the authors promote contextual awareness and offer a model for stepping out of game roles. This is a bright, useful article about the role of individuals in larger groups.
The fifth article in this issue, which is a research article from Seema Pradhan, examines the effect of long-term TA training on satisfaction with life and psychological well-being scores of TA trainees in India. In “Satisfaction with Life and Psychological Well-Being in TA Trainees,” Pradhan presents data collected from 200 TA students at different levels and found that senior trainees in their third year of training scored higher in well-being and satisfaction with life than first-year trainees and also higher than non-TA students. These results suggest that TA training offers more than just knowledge of concepts but also leads to a personal development. This is one of the articles that can contribute to our thinking about the effects of TA training in a wider perspective.
Finally, I reviewed the recent book from Vann Joines entitled The Six Personality Types That Hold the Key to Success in Your Life and Relationships. In my opinion, Joines succeeded in translating personality adaptations theory into a very readable book with appealing examples for the greater public.
I hope you will enjoy this issue of the TAJ as food for thought and further discussion in response to the different voices and perspectives from all over the world in these articles.