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Professor Carson sets out from the conceptual standpoint of the late Harry Stack Sullivan, whom he greatly admires, to survey the contemporary scene of ‘transaction’ theories in personality development. From this well-documented piece of work he attempts to build an integrative theoretical framework within which, he infers, the behaviourists may safely lie down with the social psychiatrists, the client-centred therapists and even with some psychoanalysts.
It is a serious attempt and there is sense in it, if you are interested in that kind of enterprise, which I find I am. But analytical psychologists, recalling Jung's extroverted husband with his introverted wife on their elegantly described picnic together, may be forgiven a surge of irritation at being asked to master yet another extremely inelegant language with which to codify their notions of the way people behave towards one another.
Of course, Jung did not work it all out for us as Professor Carson has done on the now fashionable geometric grid. About this, he disarmingly says in his introduction: ‘If you are beginning to sense that you are being ineluctably drawn into something akin to a multi-dimensional chess game, your intuition is correct’.
The trouble is that such games have a fascination for the obsessional analyst, and if one's defences are that way inclined, I wonder whether in the long run it might not turn out better for the patient if the analyst occupied himself during sessions with needlepoint, in the way that many women psychoanalysts are alleged to have done and may still do.
The closing chapters are devoted to the exploration of psychotherapeutic aims, and the use of the transactional grid is offered as a technique for achieving them. Although Professor Carson assumes that all psychotherapists should be aware of the dangers of falling in with their patient's ploys, he suggests that this danger can be counteracted by a conscious alteration of one's attitude towards the patient systematically acros