Contextual Transactional Analysis

The Inseparability of Self and World

James M. Sedgwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429513701
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Contextual Transactional Analysis: The Inseparability of Self and World offers a novel and comprehensive reworking of key concepts in transactional analysis, offering insight into the causes of psychological distress and closing the gap between training and clinical practice. By providing a bigger picture – as much sociological as psychological – of what it means to be human, the book makes an essential contribution to current debates about how best to account for and work with the social and cultural dimensions of client experience.

James M. Sedgwick captures the ongoing importance of what happens around us and the distinctive kinds of psychological distress that arise from persistent and pervasive environmental disadvantage. Beginning with a view of people as always situated and socialised, the book highlights the many ways that the world always and everywhere constrains or enables thought and action. Ranging through ideas about the kinds of contextual conditions which might make psychological distress more likely and illuminating the complex relationship between socialisation and autonomy, the book suggests what the implications of these conclusions might be for clinical understanding and practice. Sedgwick's insightful and compassionate work revises the theoretical framework, fills a current gap in the clinical literature and points the way to greater practitioner efficacy.

Contextual Transactional Analysis will be an insightful addition to the literature for transactional analysts in practice and in training, for professionals interested in the theory and practice of transactional analysis and anyone seeking to understand the contribution of context to psychological distress.

See the below link for an interview about the book with Mark Head:

https://vimeo.com/488738427

Part I

CONTEXT INTRODUCED

INTRODUCTION

Making a place for the contextual

This book offers a new way to understand some types of suffering that our clients experience. In doing so, it questions assumptions shared by both clients and therapists¹ about the nature and origin of that suffering and about how we understand people to be. These new ways of thinking became necessary as I struggled to close the gap between the transactional analysis in which I was trained and the novel demands of the clinical situation. I suspect this feeling that our theories don’t fully explain some of our client’s stories is a familiar one to many experienced, committed and open-minded clinicians. What I had not anticipated is how far down the revisions of transactional analysis theory needed to go before the answers I sought began to take form.

The ideas I settled on are sufficiently unorthodox within the field to require an extended retracing of the chain of reconsiderations by which they were reached. Those coming to the book seeking a compendium of road-tested technical adjustments or modest polishings of sturdy conclusions are less likely to find answers to existing questions than they are a call to substitute their old questions for new ones. Eric Berne memorably and provocatively stated that therapists should write only about how to cure patients (Berne, 1971). I accept Berne’s challenge to be optimistic whilst adding a cautionary note: before we think we about ‘curing’ people we have to understand what it is we think we are curing them of. This is by no means as simple a question as it might initially appear. Psychological distress can be seen and felt without announcing its origin or revealing its workings. Some problems become fully visible only when we have gained the means to see them.

The particular kind of suffering I propose to describe arises under circumstances of persistent and pervasive environmental disadvantage. Not all aspects of this specific kind of distress have been fully recognised either within transactional analysis or within the wider therapy world. If the existence of such a distinct kind of problem is acceptable to my readers then I take it that the reworking of established ways of thinking volunteered here will necessarily follow.

Since this book offers solutions to theoretical blindspots that transactional analysts (and sympathetic fellow travellers) may not yet know they have, it is incumbent on me to disclose what I think we have collectively failed to see. It may seem peculiar to suggest that the external sources of distress are not immediately apparent when we are confronted with lives blighted by political and social oppression, poverty, worklessness, crime, violence in the home and on the street, widespread drug and alcohol misuse, poor living conditions and commonplace health difficulties. Many outside our profession might conclude that the unhappiness associated with existing in such circumstances is so readily comprehensible that a psychological theory of such misery will be little more than professionalised common sense. Those who feel that psychological theories add something crucial and additional to our understanding of people’s responses to difficult circumstances will adopt the view that there will be something in the way the person thinks, feels or act in the situation which magnifies their misery. It is this purported individual response which is thought ripe for psychological exploration and change, even if the explanation offered varies according to the therapist’s theoretical orientation: so far, so uncontentious.

Initially this was my view too. When I began my work as a therapist over a decade ago in socially and economically deprived areas of post-industrial cities, I took myself to be merely stating the obvious when I identified my clients’ circumstances as the primary source of their unhappiness. I hoped, in line with my training but often without dramatic success, that I could find something within them which might not have quite surrendered to the brute realities of their predicament. I became and remain convinced that for many of my clients, a change in circumstance would offer a fuller relief than therapy can grant them.

However, the more people I met, the more I began to notice common features of each story which both went beyond the understandable impact of their unhappy circumstances and yet lacked the bright flashes of a unique, resourceful subjectivity which therapy often seeks out. I was struck again and again by the fact that my clients seemed to have only a limited awareness that life could be different in a way that seemed quite distinct from both stoic acceptance or weary resignation. I often noticed myself experiencing an outrage at the routine casting aside of human hope and dignity which my clients did not share. If I disclosed my view it felt like crass imposition on the process, if I stayed silent it felt like a betrayal.

Transactional analysis theory is likely to guide us to certain answers to the questions posed here. Script theory would place responsibility for suffering at the feet of a complex mingling of defence and deficit. We might imagine we could find a hidden, vibrant Child ego-state kicking and screaming to be released from the historic chains of an early decision. Attention to the transference might uncover early feelings and needs, barely formed and never yet met but still reaching forth, craving a recognition which would allow them to rejoin and nourish a stronger more integrated self.

As useful as such ideas can be, they didn’t seem to be the right answers here. Rarely did I find a Child ego-state up to the task of change. And whilst clients responded positively to empathic attunement it often felt as though they could take in the warmth of my responses whilst the meaning I hoped to communicate passed right through them bringing neither vitality nor enlightenment. Sometimes I felt as though there was no gap between self and circumstance, as though the world around them had gone right down to their roots taking with it all hope of things being different. From my vantage point outside their situation I took myself to be perceiving a gap in their understanding and identity that I didn’t quite understand how to name or respond to.

From conversations with colleagues, I suspect most therapists feel similarly adrift when confronted with clients raised in such disadvantage. Although we acknowledge this too rarely, therapy was not pioneered and developed in places where these life experiences were common. Whilst state and charitable provision of therapy sometimes extends its reach into different communities, a disproportionate amount of our clinical literature continues to be based on the sliver of individuals who have the means and willingness to pay privately for open-ended therapy. Few have seriously contemplated the possibility that theories based on work with affluent, educated, psychologically-minded, cultural-majority clients doesn’t automatically generalise outwards to provide either a universal understanding of human experience or treatment practices that will help everyone uniformly (notable exceptions are, Kearney, 1996; Minuchin et al., 1967).

Without the opportunity to regularly contend with clients born and raised in collective struggle, we are left with a pool of clients who swim with life’s tide more often than not, who rarely want for opportunity and have a sense of agency that naturally accompanies this. Their suffering is atypical amidst their general good fortune. Confronted with such difficulties, our learned tendency as therapists is to look ‘inside’ the person to find what sets them apart and holds them back. By way of explanation we are likely to turn to the overlooked details of their minds, the legacy of their early family history, their particular, individual tendencies to respond to things in unhelpful ways. We need only change the person and then return them to their relatively benign circumstances.

The frequent success of these ideas notwithstanding, they presume that a highly individual pathway into suffering must be traced. The question which asserted itself repeatedly to me is what happens when suffering is not ours alone, when whole communities, everyone you know, has been pulled down in the same way? Should we approach client work in the same way when misery and hopelessness congeal into a collective way of life? Distress would no longer be something that separated you from the world, but something which joined you with others. The problem would no longer be just inside us but also around us, a common rather than individual predicament handed down from parent to child and shared with your community.

Alongside the obvious injuries and indignities of circumstance, I sensed a secondary wound becoming visible. If a whole collective experience become problematic in this way, the possibility of dreaming of a better tomorrow might begin to disappear. The terrible would simply be the normal, horrifying life events wouldn’t be an abrupt and shocking departure from routine existence, they would be a continuation of it. People might collectively lose a sense of what they could have been if the world had been different. Deprived of a voice and the power to make it count, a collective mood of powerlessness and apathy might descend. Their horizons limited to coping with today, people might never learn social and political dimensions of being necessary for efficacy and optimism. They weren’t and never had been the people they could have become if life had been different and therefore couldn’t fully grasp what was missing.

Initially my improvised ideas for responding took it as a given that whilst these problems I was encountering might be different, the transactional analysis picture of human functioning that I used to formulate my response would remain largely unchanged. Whatever their circumstances, people are still people. Old tools can be used to complete new jobs. Moreover, as a self-proclaimed ‘social psychiatry’ (Berne, 1961, p. 12), transactional analysis seemed well placed to account for contextual difficulties. It talked about the interdependence between what happened between people and what happened inside them (Berne, 1961; Clarkson, 1992) which held out at least the promise of enhancing my understanding and guiding my work in the right direction.

Unfortunately, as I am by no means the first to suggest, some parts of transactional analysis theory look rather better at a distance than up close. I had initially hoped that a modest revision of the theory of the Parent ego-state was all that would be necessary since this is the part of ego-state structure which lets the outside world in. Yet my clients rarely manifested distinctly observable parts of themselves which self-prohibited or instructed in the way that Berne proposed (Berne, 1961). They did, however, often talk in ways which carried the clear imprint of place and people sometimes to the point where taking positions outside their cultural beliefs appeared only fleetingly. Using our customary theory, it was hard to tell where the Parent ended and the Adult began. If your theory of change tells you that unlocking and integrating different parts of the mind will bring forth new meanings and strengths then this is something of a problem. If your theory also tells you that Adult reality testing can overthrow inherited limitation then you are equally stumped if no counterpoint position presents itself.

I wondered what the distinction between Parent and Adult ego-states was supposed to look like in a place where viewpoints converged without serious challenge. Things just were as they were so there is no need for the Parent to suppress dissenting opinion. The distinction between ‘I’ and ‘Us’, a collective and individual viewpoint, also didn’t seem to exist in the same way. In communities where circumstances are static and belief is handed down as tradition, adulthood is achieved precisely by becoming like those who have come before you not by differing from them. It felt unhelpful to think in terms of parents sending their children discrete ‘messages’ about the world which were then internalised. A more plausible story is that those children had been inducted wholesale into a worldview which now constituted the unbreachable horizon of their understanding. As a concept the Parent Ego-state was a starting point but one which would require considerable reform to address these questions.

Having cut and reshaped the Parent ego-state to make it fit for purpose in a way I describe in Chapter 3, I then found the concept couldn’t be slotted back into its usual place in the theory. Having tugged at a loose theoretical thread, it then felt as though I had accidentally unravelled the whole transactional analysis sweater. Further key parts of the theory including ego-states, games, frame of reference, scripts, autonomy and transactions had to be similarly unbolted, stripped down and, in some cases, put back together in an effort to make them compatible with my burgeoning sense of the irreducible primacy of the social. This book is the product of that rethinking process.

This final reassembling of newly modified theoretical components, comprehensive enough to warrant a new designation – contextual transactional analysis – rests on two significant challenges to familiar ways of thinking. The first is an inversion of usual priorities between the psychological and the social so that what happens ‘inside’ us is understood primarily in terms of what happens ‘between’ us and others. The second, related challenge is a suggestion that sometimes we need to prioritise the Parent and Adult ego-states over the Child in our efforts to understand and help people.

It’s not unprecedented within transactional analysis to place greater emphasis upon the social (Kreyenberg, 2005; Massey, 1985, 1989, 1996), but this book goes further than previous authors in subjecting our core concepts of ego-states, games, scripts and frame of reference to penetrating revision in the light of sociological ideas. Since these concepts have had something to say about the social, we have too often presumed that by using them we have said enough about it and that revisions to our theory are not necessary.

Not only do I believe there are crucial aspects of collective social functioning that our current theories are unable to capture, we also need to acknowledge that psychotherapy and sociology produce knowledge that may sometimes coincide but will begin from quite different starting assumptions about how best to understand people. They cannot be completely merged without loss and inconsistency. We do not yet know how to see people both individually and collectively from the same starting point. Depending on what kinds of things we are trying to comprehend we have to jump to one side of the line or the other. This book allows us to make that jump as required though it does not deny that sometimes we will need to jump back and re-embrace psychological explanation.

Transactional analysis has always started from psychological inwardness and tries to work outwards to the social. Even at its most socially aware, it always eventually loops back either to ground explanation in the things people think and feel or to consider the social purely in terms of its impact on thought and feeling. It treats the social as a kind of secondary byproduct which we can explain as the cumulative meshing of the thoughts, feelings and actions of the individuals who comprise it. The social itself, the aggregate product of our interactions which transcends specific interactions, isn’t thought to require a separate kind of explanation. By contrast, sociology will tend to see the influence working the other way. Starting from the recurring, large-scale structures or patterns of interactions which comprise the social, it works inwards from the collective to show how our individual thoughts, feelings and actions are shaped and rendered possible by the collective. Contextual transactional analysis is an outside-in theory: it starts with the social and works back to the individual – with all the conceptual gains and inevitable sacrifices this entails.

Our theory has strained to reach this point because our basic unit of the social remains either two people in mutual interaction or else the contracted therapy group. Transactions and transference constrain our sense of the social to parent and child, therapist and client. As the number of people increase beyond two, we are forced to amalgamate p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Sries Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Context introduced
• Introduction: making a place for the contextual
• 1 Self-and-world and horizontal problems
• 2 The good enough world
• 3 The Parent ego-state rediscovered
• Part II Theoretical contexts
• 4 Competitor theories and a pragmatic alternative
• 5 Language, pragmatism and dialogue
• Part III The individual in context
• 6 Frame of reference
• 7 Games along the horizontal axis
• 8 Contextual transactional analysis in practice
• Part IV Our present and future
• 9 The inseparability of therapy and world
• Glossary
• Index