Transactional Analysis Journal

This article provides a personal account of loss, survival, and professional learning following a client’s suicide. The therapist’s own narrative is woven in with research about the construct of clinician-as-suicide-survivor. Aspects of supervision and training are discussed, in particular the importance of teaching an appreciation of danger and the demystification of psychotherapy through sharing stories of failure and loss.

This article was written in 1991 by the late Emily Hunter Ruppert. Although the ideas in it have never been published before, they have been taught and embraced by many in the transactional analysis community and in the wider world of psychotherapy. Martin Wells submitted this article on behalf of and with the permission of Ruppert’s estate and wrote a complementary article in this journal. Wells was a member of one of two transactional analysis training groups of professionals that Emily led in Europe biannually over many years (from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s). She made this article available to group members and trainees in Europe and the United States, where she lived and worked as a Teaching Member of the International Transactional Analysis Association.

This article offers an exploration and expansion of Emily Ruppert’s (2017) article “Rebels and Sweethearts,” which appears in this issue of the Transactional Analysis Journal. The author describes some examples from his own personal and professional experiences of this theory in practice. He also explores more fully what Ruppert described as the Spirit with a focus on the different challenges that Rebels and Sweethearts face in expressing freedom of the Spirit.

Transactional analysis is uniquely positioned to follow Berne’s (1972) encouragement to use “ancient religious stories” (p. 438) in “understanding…spirituality and its complex interfaces with religiosity and religious psychopathology” (Mellacqua, 2016, p. 149). Although there have been some attempts to integrate transactional analysis with religion (e.g., James, 1981), TA still lacks an easy-to-use model that can be employed by all psychotherapists, regardless of their religious persuasion. Almost everyone has been influenced by religion, so it is important that therapists are confident venturing into this area. The author discusses the ancient Greek concept of knowing consisting of logoi (knowing through logic and science) and mythoi (knowing through religious stories) and then presents what he calls the pilgrim model, which is based on classical transactional analysis. This model can be used to work with people of all faiths and could provide a basis for further development of religious or spiritual transactional analysis.