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Articles

A Psychiatrist Reflects on the Meaning of Social Responsibility

Pages 80-86
Published online: 28 Dec 2017
 
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The author recounts some of her experiences during 4 months of her medical training working in a hospital in Tanzania, during which she discovered how cultural differences influenced her frame of reference. This led her to decide to become a psychiatrist who focused on the broader context of health and sickness and on the power of people to create satisfactory lives for themselves. This article considers the development of her ideas around cultural and genetic differences and the usefulness of transactional analysis in psychiatric diagnoses and psychotherapy, especially with regard to issues of inequality. The “I’m OK, You’re OK” paradigm so central to transactional analysis (Berne, 1966; Steiner, 1974) implies a social responsibility to make ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us as healthy as possible.

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Author information

Moniek Thunnissen

Author Biography
Moniek Thunnissen, MD, PhD, Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst (psychotherapy), works as a psychiatrist in private practice in Bergen op Zoom, the Netherlands, and is the trainer responsible for the transactional analysis psychotherapy program in the TA Academy in Soesterberg, the Netherlands. Together with Anne de Graaf, she wrote and edited Leerboek Transactionele Analyse, a comprehensive textbook on TA that will be translated and published in English in 2015. She was ITAA Vice President of Research and Innovation and is currently a member of the Eric Berne Memorial Award committee and the editorial board of the Transactional Analysis Journal. She can be reached at A. Cuypstraat 32, 4625 AM Bergen op Zoom, the Netherlands; email: .