This article comprises the author's speech accepting the 2005 Eric Berne Memorial Award, with elaborations, including an excerpt from his study of the circularity of theory, psychotherapy, and psychopathology, for which he won the award, and a discussion of five questions expanding on these ideas. Transactional analysis was the case for the author's study. Alcoholism, homosexuality, and schizophrenia were studied as examples of how transactional analysis theory brought about its own psychopathology. The argument is that there is no psychopathology until a psychotherapy is invented to generate it. Every theory-centered psychotherapy names its own psychopathologies, which define their own worlds of psychotherapy. This study, which is of the place of theory in psychotherapy, is a theory of theory (of psychotherapy) and thus a critique. The circular logic of cybernetics was utilized for this reflexive study of psychotherapy.

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Article
Acceptance Speech on Receiving the 2005 Eric Berne Memorial Award: Transgressions
Pages 221-239
Published online: 28 Dec 2017