Therapeutic Relatedness in Transactional Analysis: The Truth of Love or the Love of Truth

Abstract

Berne was quite critical and skeptical of those forms of therapy that encouraged feeling over thinking, referring to “Greenhouse” games (Berne, 1964/1967, pp. 141–143) in which clients escalate feelings and often idealize feeling over thinking. For the past decade, however, transactional analysis seems to be developing in a different sort of “Greenhouse,” one of enforced warmth, idealized relationships, and attachment/empathy-based clinical strategies. When the authors were originally trained in the 1970s, transactional analysis therapists were supposed to confront people into health. Now it seems they are to attach, attune, and empathize clients into health. Yet Berne's treatment group was not an empathic holding environment; it was an interpersonal study matrix. This article offers a critical review of clinical applications within transactional analysis of theories of attachment, attunement, and empathy. It critiques the clinical models of therapeutic relatedness and presents a clinical model of therapeutic space, which provides client and therapist with the room and opportunity for curiosity, uncertainty, and conflict.