Explorations in Transactional Analysis: At the Interface of Transactional Analysis and Psychoanalysis

by William F. Cornell

This book seeks to convey the complexity and vitality of contemporary, analytically grounded psychotherapy and counselling. The papers selected here emphasize the ways in which the models of transactional analysis and psychoanalysis can better inform and enrich one another.The tasks faced by therapists and clients alike during the course of such a deeply personal and interpersonal enterprise of psychodynamically-based psychotherapy and counselling are both daunting and deeply gratifying. This book explores common themes that challenge and enliven the psychotherapeutic endeavour: imagination, risk, uncertainty, play, conflict, intimacy, defence, loss, grief, hope, the body, sexuality, freedom, and failure. Conflict and Community seeks to address the historical, political, and cultural factors that are often powerful, unconscious influences in the therapeutic project. Furthermore, papers collected here take up the dynamic tension of these working relationships that are simultaneously professional and deeply personal. The book is grounded in the approaches of contemporary transactional analysis and psychoanalysis, using detailed case discussions to convey the flesh of these professional, and yet all too human, working relationships. Particular attention is paid to the force and richness of the transferential and counter-transferential tensions that pervade and potentially enliven the therapeutic process. Unconscious processes are seen as fundamentally creative and life-seeking, with the vital functions of fantasy, imagination and play brought into the foreground.In this era of short-term, cognitive-behavioural, solution-focused, and "evidence" based models of counselling and psychotherapy, the papers gathered here demonstrate the power and creativity of longer termed, dynamically oriented work.

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Published November 10, 2017