Jo Stuthridge

This article views script as a dynamic process of attributing meaning to experience throughout life. It proposes that script change occurs through a dialectical tension between destabilization and integration within the psyche. Breakdown is seen as essential to growth. This process of “story-making and story-breaking” (Holmes, 2001, p. 87) ultimate...

This article focuses on how games unfold as transferential dramas in the consulting room theater. The author explores how the therapist’s countertransference can become an avenue for understanding the client’s unspoken communication. Eric Berne’s idea that games can be played in three degrees of intensity is suggested as a framework for thinking ab...

Western – and Northern – psychology and psychotherapy stand accused of an over emphasis on the individual, ego, and self (“the Self”), autonomy, and self-development. These criticisms have been made from other intellectual, cultural, social, spiritual and wisdom traditions, but may also be found in critical and radical traditions within Western tho...

The 2012 New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists (NZAP) Conference in Wellington included a panel discussion which addressed the topic: “How culture creates other: Traversing difference or fractured divide”. The panellists were Tess Moeke-Maxwell, Donna Orange, Wiremu Woodard, and Jeremy Younger. Their speeches are presented in this article alo...

This paper was originally presented as a short speech to the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists’ Annual Conference in Dunedin 2011. In it, I sketch three broad conclusions from developmental research and consider the implications for a relational approach to psychotherapy practice, from a transactional analyst’s perspective. I use my exper...

Trauma can shatter the mind, creating rifts in consciousness or fault lines in the psyche. Continuity within the self becomes fractured. This article explores links between trauma, dissociation, and enactment. When dissociation forms a primary response to trauma, the mind cuts off unbearable elements of experience from the subjective “I.” Later the...

The European Association for Transactional Analysis (EATA) Conference in Prague, the Czech Republic, included a roundtable on “Life Scripts” presented on 9 July 2010. The roundtable was preceded by introductory speeches given by Richard G. Erskine (convener), Maria Teresa (Resi) Tosi, Marye O'Reilly-Knapp, and Jo Stuthridge. The roundtable discussi...

This article presents a transactional analysis model of trauma located within a relational paradigm. It proposes that the Adult ego state enables us to form a narrative self or coherent sense of identity. Trauma interferes with this integrative capacity, creating excluded ego states and a disorganized self. The child's experience of abusive caregiv...