Personality Adaptations
- A new guide to Human Understanding in Psychotherapy and Counselling.
Authors: Vann Joines and Ian Stewart
Lifespace Publishing, Nottingham, England and Chapel Hill, USA
ISBN: 187024401X 419 pages This book is described as 'a practical guide to understanding personality.' It presents a research-based model of six personality adaptations, which provides a model that can be applied by any therapeutic or counselling approach.
The book outlines the six personality
adaptations in detail, giving a useful framework for understanding how each adaptation develops and outlining the most effective ways to work therapeutically with them all.
It is usefully divided into seven sections with appendices and a glossary mainly for readers unfamiliar with Transactional Analysis.
The first part describes the origins of the model and its reality basis. It introduces the personality adaptations, that are the ‘building blocks', using 'thumbnail sketches' and
suggests both the positive and negative aspects of each adaptation by using Joines' colloquial names (1986) alongside Ware's traditional psychiatric terms (1978, 1983).
In part two the model is developed in more detail exploring developmental influences, using TA as a theoretical framework. The adaptations are described in full detail and the model is related to the categories listed in DSM-IV-TR (American Psychiatric Association 2000).
Part three shows how to diagnose the personality adaptations in practice with particular emphasis on observing the five driver behaviours as a fast and powerful diagnostic tool.
In part four they explain how to apply the model to achieve optimal rapport with clients during therapy or counselling by staying on the appropriate communication mode or 'the same wavelength'.
Part five is entitled 'Inviting Personal
Change' and describes specific therapeutic techniques and interventions designed to help maintain congruency between content and process in order 'to invite personal change most effectively'.
Next in part six the discussion moves on to a more advanced level of theory and practice and describes a comprehensive way of diagnosis and treatment planning. Included in this section is a discussion about how this model relates to Borderline and Narcissistic personality patterns.
In the final
section, part seven, extended transcripts of therapy with the different adaptations are given which I found particularly useful to illustrate the model in practice.
The book is packed with information as this model is rich in detail and for anyone coming to it for the first time the authors stress that they may find it hard to understand in its entirety. Hence they have broken the model down into successive layers from the thumbnail sketches of the introduction to the comprehensive and
detailed final chapters.
I found this book to be extremely clear and easy to read, theoretically detailed yet practical and enjoyable. I particularly liked the transcripts and therapist's comments which brought the model to life for me.
The appendices were also interesting to me, especially Appendix A, 'Relating the Personality Adaptations to Previous Classification Systems', which talked about some of the historical origins.
I consider this book to be a really useful textbook for
Transactional Analysts and an asset to therapeutic literature in general. I imagine that it will be the kind of book that gets well worn as I often take it off the shelf to use as a reference and I wholeheartedly recommend it to TA therapists at all levels.
Francesca Hannah PTSTA | 
