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Article

Homosexuality in the First Three Decades of Transactional Analysis: A Study of Theory in the Practice of Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy

Pages 126-155
Published online: 28 Dec 2017
 
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Eric Berne, in the 1950s and 1960s, constructed a theory that brought about its own psychopathology of homosexuality, leading to the virtual disappearance from the transactional analysis literature of the concepts of the homosexual and homosexuality. Berne's colleagues (and others) continued developing his ideas using life script theory to explain homosexuality as a psychopathology caused by a script. However, in the 1970s there were some gay contributors who began the work of removing homosexuality as a transactional analytic psychopathology and increasing visibility in the vicinity of the transactional analysis closet, although they left unchanged the mesh of theoretically intertwined but consistent concepts that produced the psychopathology. This essay describes how the psychotherapy of the homosexual patient generates theory, the theory creates the psychopathology of homosexuality, and, in turn, the psychopathology of homosexuality produces new theory. Also discussed are Berne's writings on homosexuality, which demonstrate that theory comes before the psychotherapy and the psychotherapy precedes the psychopathology.

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Graham Barnes

Graham Barnes, Ph.D., CGP, TSTA, FRSA, is a psychotherapist licensed by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare. He is best known within transactional analysis for his study describing the emergence, after Berne's death, of three schools of TA. He documented their theoretical and social patterns and brought their major proponents together in Transactional Analysis After Eric Berne (Barnes, 1977). He became a Teaching Member in 1972 and was a member of the ITAA Board of Trustees during most of the 1970s, including a term as vice president. Graham also brought the ITAA into his work on racial equality and used script theory in his work on white racism. At the Southeast Institute, which he founded, he devised an experimental graduate program in psychotherapy and an education program for counselors in historically African-American colleges that included transactional analysis. He is guest lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Zagreb, where he founded the School for the Cybernetics of Psychotherapy. He also is adviser to Foundation 2020, a Croatian think tank promoting democracy in Croatia.