Three Methods Describing a Transactional Analysis Group Therapy

The overall aim of the present thesis was to enhance and revive the practical understanding of the active ingredients in Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy (TA) and to define and lay down elements of TA, which makes it a distinct and replicable method of treatment. The thesis includes three empirical studies of a videotaped one-year long TA Group Therapy with 10 clients. Three different key areas of Transactional Analysis have been investigated with support of three different approaches. These are: Diagnosis/ Client assessment with TA ́s Script Analysis made as a reliability study (Study I), Identification of different components in TA ́s psychotherapy method with the use of Discourse Analysis (Study II) and the Therapeutic Alliance studied with a psychodynamic approach, using the CCRT method (Luborsky, 1990, 1998) and the Plan – Diagnosis method (Weiss and Sampson, 1986) (Study III). The average result in Study I shows a ”moderate” reliability in analysing central conflict motives (the overall Script) in the client’s life situation. More specific Script components were given a “fair” reliability, like “primary injunction from father”, “racket feeling”, “escape-hatch”, “driver from father” and “driver from mother”. Conflictual motives with fixed alternatives showed higher reliability than those formulated freely by the assessors. There was no clear stability over time. The results in Study II indicate that with ”certain” reliability the studied therapy contains the categories that have been identified as parts of TA psychotherapy. In ranking the seven main categories you can find “moderate” reliability for the two categories “feeling contact” and “contract”. Six of the 42 sub-categories gave similar result where the techniques “talk to the parent projection” and “active use of TA terminology” has the highest value. The other four were “making feeling statements”, “mutual negotiation”, “refer to contract” and “discrepancy in body language”. One intervention, “mutual negotiation”, with moderate reliability could be identified as “TA typical” The result in Study III showed, both through quantitative and qualitative analysis that the affective dimension was given larger space than you can expect from what the TA method prescribes, where contract and other rational techniques and attitudes are stressed.