The team behind the project

To know more about our project, “Conversations in TA”, please click here.

Diana Deaconu
Diana is a psychotherapist, certified in transactional analysis (CTA-P), working in private practice in Bucharest, Romania. She is also a co-editor for the Transactional Analysis Journal. Her life-long interests in literature and the creative discourse have motivated her to become part of this project and explore theoretical ideas as forms of individual or social creativity.

Marina Vasile
Marina Vasile is a psychotherapist working in private practice in Bucharest, Romania. She specializes in working with adults in individual, couple and group psychotherapy. She also works as a reviewer for the Transactional Analysis Journal .
Marina worked as a counselor at an international school with clients coming from very diverse cultural backgrounds. This led to an increased interest in multiculturalism and intercultural communication.

Traian Bossenmayer
Traian is an organizational development specialist, with experience in training and leadership development initiatives. He is passionate about learning organizations and facilitating change within teams.
He is currently working for a multinational gaming company, part of the HR team and also as a freelance consultant and executive coach. He passed his CTA(O) exam in Rome, 2015 and has been a PTSTA(O) since November 2016.

The project

Transactional Analysis theory has been enriched by so many talented practitioners since Eric Berne’s writing became appreciated around the world! We are delighted to meet some of them and record video interviews… with a twist.

Conversations in TA is a project that aims to offer insight about the people behind the theory. We are looking to find out how their writing makes sense in the context of their personal and professional journey. We also want to see some of them discuss their ideas with a practitioner from a different approach.

Our motto is “Vitalising the Theory One Conversation at a Time”.

/// Who commissioned this project?

We are developing this project, Conversations in TA, from our own initiative. We love doing the interviews. And another beautiful, unseen part of our work is preparing the interview.

Our work is self-funded. We do this because we enjoy working together and we believe we can bring some value to our TA community through this work.

If you’d like to support this project, please click here to see different ways in which you could help.

/// How do you prepare the interview?

This is very much an example of group work. We all look at what our interviewee has written.

We then get together for a good coffee and an interesting conversation. We discuss what we’ve read and we share our personal reactions to it. This is when we get enthusiastic regarding things we would like to know more about. We write down whatever questions come up.

In the end, we organise the interview around certain themes that we noticed emerging.

/// What are your questions about?

While we may want to know more about certain theoretical concepts, in the individual interviews we concentrate more on the personal and professional experiences that contributed to the way our interviewee understands TA theory now. We want to understand how he/she came to see things in a certain way.

We hope this will put theoretical concepts into context and will enliven them.

We also hope to moderate discussions between authors and practitioners from different TA schools as well as from other approaches.

We thus aim to get a more complex, dynamic view of particular concepts/issues.

In other words, our aim is to vitalise the theory, one conversation at a time.

/// Who does the interviews?

We all do interviews. For each of them, we work in teams of two:

The interviewer: The interviews are meant to be Conversations in TA. While we have certain themes and questions prepared, the interviewer will also let his curiosity and enthusiasm kick in.

The co-interviewer: His main role is to observe the process. He may also make suggestions, when needed, to help keep the conversation fluent. The co-interviewer also keeps track of time and manages the technical part of the interview.

The video editing is done by Bogdan Petrascu.

We hope you will enjoy the conversations as much as we’ve enjoyed them!

Please feel free to offer strokes and constructive feedback. We are extremely interested in how our work is received by people within out community and outside of it.

If you’d like to support the project, click here.

You can also check out some ‘behind the scene’ moments of us preparing the interviews. As you can see, Starbucks is a good friend of ours!