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

Abstract

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.