Therapeutic Journey: Practice and Life

This is a collection of papers by two well-known transactional analysts, mental health practitioners, and educators, Jim and Barbara Allen, who spent 40 years integrating mental health principles into their public and private lives and their teaching of medical students, family practice and psychiatry residents, and a variety of other mental health professionals. The topics they write about in this book range widely and include what to do after meeting the patient, types of treatment, trauma, social constructivism, working with children and adolescents, the biological underpinnings of transactional analysis and mental health interventions, family therapy, transference, redecision therapy, and social issues related to drug use, American Indian adolescents, the Oklahoma City bombing, war, and the Tulsa race riots of the 1920s. While neither solely a textbook nor a memoir, these papers can be used by beginning practitioners to understand better their interactions with patients and by more experienced practitioners as an invitation to reexamine their practices and their lives.