FOREVER LEARNING AND GROWING: THINKING ALONGSIDE JULIE HAY

Interviewer: Traian Bossenmayer
March, 2016

BIO

Julie has been involved with TA for over 40 years, after she was lent some TA books in 1974 and experienced a deconfusion as she read them.  She is now a TSTA (Organisational, Psychotherapy, Educational), having gone back into training as a psychotherapist in recent years as a way of ensuring that her brain stays active – and she is now in contracted training in the counselling field.

She is the Academic Dean of an MSc in Professional Studies that is based on developmental transactional analysis, which is the term she introduced some years ago to distinguish the approach from TA psychotherapy. Alongside Trudy Newton and Anita Mountain, she founded the UK-based but internationally focused Institute of Developmental Transactional Analysis (IDTA), which in January 2017 became the second Partnership Organisation with ITAA.

Julie is the author of many articles, books and questionnaires, including comprehensive workbooks that accompany the workshops and webinars that she runs,  and her work appears in English, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, Italian, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, and Turkish, with Japanese and Korean in progress.

Julie is a past president of both EATA and ITAA, the inaugural and current Editor of the International Journal of Transactional Analysis Research (www.ijtar.org – free access to all), project manages the TA Dictionaries and the TA Proficiency Awards, and in 2012 she was awarded the EATA Gold Medal for long and outstanding services.

VIDEO 1: An Incessant Journey Towards Learning and Self-Development

• A two-fold nature of writing, residing both in academic rigour and a vigorous pull to action.
• “The whole TA community is my mentor”: Fellow professionals as potential sources of inspiration and new learning.
• Self-disclosure as a form of normalizing the client’s experience.
• Drawing bounderies between TA psychotherapy and developmental TA.

VIDEO 2: Meandring Through Some of the Darker Areas of TA Theory and Application

• The troubling inheritance of sexism, racism, homophobia carried by TA game theory.
• A lucid analysis of the TA certification
• Alternative views on the examination process for Certified Transactional Analysts (CTAs) and Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analysts (TSTAs).
• More on the distinction between fields of application: is this constructive or potentially destructive?

VIDEO 3: Thinking In the Service of Facilitating Change

• In-depth distinctions between Psychotherapy Transactional Analysis (PTA) and Developmental Transactional Analysis (DTA).
• To search for cure or growth? A complicated philosophical dilemma.
• Owning vulnerability as a strength.

REFERENCES:

/// English, F. (1975). The Three-Cornered Contract. Transactional Analysis Journal, 5, 383-384.

/// Hay, J. (1992). Transactional Analysis for Trainers. McGraw-Hill

/// Hay, J., Widén, U. (2015). The Transactional Analysis Proficiency Awards. Transactional Analysis Journal, 42, 204-216.

/// Hay, J. (1995). Julie Hay, a.k.a Robin Hood. Transactional Analysis Journal, 25, 37-41.

/// Ramon, C. (1994). Don’t Change: A Cultural Injunction. Transactional Analysis Journal, 220-221.

Other authors mentioned by Julie in this interview: Eric Berne, Graham Barnes, Leonard Campos, Richard Erskine, Leon Festinger, William Holloway.