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The concept of impasse was first conceptualized in the transactional literature as an intrapsychic process that inhibited or blocked internal communication among states of the ego. The authors present an understanding of impasse as an interpersonal process that disrupts the work of the professional dyad in promoting self-understanding and development. As the working relationship deepens, it develops an unavoidable intimacy or closeness, with many of the same pleasures and problems that attend any close relationship. In this often turbulent interpersonal field, points of impasse result from the mutual evocation of each person's unconscious relational patterns, which Berne called protocols. The character of any impasse is, therefore, unique to each therapeutic couple and operates principally at an unworded, body level. Once an impasse has developed, resuming productive work depends on realizing what each person does, what each avoids, and how each becomes stuck when addressing the vulnerabilities and intimacies of this work. These concepts are illustrated with material from a clinical case.

Berne was quite critical and skeptical of those forms of therapy that encouraged feeling over thinking, referring to “Greenhouse” games (Berne, 1964/1967, pp. 141–143) in which clients escalate feelings and often idealize feeling over thinking. For the past decade, however, transactional analysis seems to be developing in a different sort of “Greenhouse,” one of enforced warmth, idealized relationships, and attachment/empathy-based clinical strategies. When the authors were originally trained in the 1970s, transactional analysis therapists were supposed to confront people into health. Now it seems they are to attach, attune, and empathize clients into health. Yet Berne's treatment group was not an empathic holding environment; it was an interpersonal study matrix. This article offers a critical review of clinical applications within transactional analysis of theories of attachment, attunement, and empathy. It critiques the clinical models of therapeutic relatedness and presents a clinical model of therapeutic space, which provides client and therapist with the room and opportunity for curiosity, uncertainty, and conflict.

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Survivors of sexual abuse enter psychotherapy with special needs that challenge some of the traditional therapeutic assumptions. The therapeutic relationship, which is the foundation for treatment with abuse survivors, often must shift in nature and quality to address these needs. The main goal of treatment is the integration of self and affective experience. To facilitate this process the authors discuss the establishment and maintenance of an "affective edge" which allows for direct attention to and intervention with the trauma memories and the accompanying affect.