Explorations in Transactional Analysis

"William Cornell is among our most brilliant and creative contributors to the theory of psychotherapy integration and to clinical practice. In this new book, he provides a collection of essays that bring to bear a dazzling range of therapeutic and analytic schools of thought. He builds a richly imaginative yet critical integration, infused with his own deeply personal idiom, so that the reader is drawn into an intimate engagement with Cornell's mind. We see how these complex ideas and systems are filtered through one's own unique subjectivity and character and how they may be utilized to benefit the growth and healing of our patients."-Lewis Aron, Ph.D., Director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis, USA

"William Cornell claims Transactional Analysis as his "home team" and what a privilege it is to have him playing for us. He has long been a key TA theoretician and practitioner but also critic and challenger. His dual role has been, first to ensure that TA did not become parochial, to keep it lively, and secondly, to let people outside our community know that "TA is still very much alive".

This collection charts the process of how he has consistently challenged even the key tenets of TA theory such as ego states and script, both in terms of the inherent contradictions within TA, and by introducing TA to the broader context of modern psychoanalytic thinking, neuroscience and body work. This has been enriching for our own community and allowed people from other disciplines to begin to hear and appreciate TA in a language that is familiar to them. Cornell is not only a good communicator but also a superb translator.

However, I think it is in his accounts of his clinical work that Cornell gives of his best. He clearly enjoys his work and his deep love and respect for even the most challenging client is palpable. He never ceases to examine his own thinking and practice and is constantly seeking and learning. We are the fortunate recipients of this journey with his clients. Although many TA therapists may work differently from him they will, I think, readily identify with his commitment to what drew many of us to TA…Berne’s radical, egalitarian and practical view that people are ultimately in charge of their own process of change and have what it takes to make that change. It is up to us to find how we can be useful (or in Cornell’s terms) used in that process."-Diane Salters, ITAA President

In the complex, intense, sometimes murky world of the psychotherapy session, at moments when theory and training prove insufficient, Bill Cornell offers an alternate, powerful source of guidance, within the therapist’s own self. His new book connects his theoretical roots in transactional analysis, neo-Reichian body therapy, and psychoanalysis, with his evolving focus on the therapist’s use of one’s self as a source of understanding of the patient and an instrument of therapeutic change. The theoretical ideas are presented as they play out in the session; as his readers already know, Bill has the gift of story-telling. The case descriptions, including the many ways that impasses can occur, are transparent; the reader can see and feel into the room and inside of Bill himself. As in Freud’s stories of Anna O., Frau Emmy von N., Fraulein Elisabeth von R., and Dora, the reader can experience the worlds of Alessia, Kurt, Simone, Ben, Charlie and Abby, the tripartite interaction with Lara and Emily, and the painful failure in the treatment of Samantha. The stories also go beyond most case reports in incorporating the struggles of each participant in the treatment and the growth in each of them.

Bill’s stories and his explorations provide a rich source of ideas and observations, not only for clinicians but also for psychotherapy researchers who are seeking to understand the therapeutic process in new ways. In several papers, Bill finds and explores conceptual connections among the script theory of transactional analysis, the psychoanalytic ideas of Bollas , and the theory of multiple coding and the referential process. From my perspective, these connections help to build a new general theory of therapeutic change, incorporating subsymbolic bodily and emotional experience along with symbolic forms, and applicable across treatment types.

A major take-away for me from this collection of papers is the idea of a ‘vital base’ rather than a secure one, arising from Bill’s acute recognition of the difficulty for all of us – the person in the role of client, the person in the role of mental health professional, the citizens of our country and our world today – to accept the destructive forces, the feelings of hatred, terror, loss and shame that we share. Bill writes about the effects of these feelings, and the damage done by avoiding them, in the context of ideas concerning group psychology and social responsibility that emerged in the writings and work of Freud following WWI, and Berne in the 1960s. It seems necessary to think about these broader ideas and let ourselves confront such feelings as we struggle, in our varying roles and states, with the events of our times."-Wilma Bucci, Ph.D.