Depth TA
Transactional Analysis enriched by Jungian depth, embodied practice, movement, and arts-based methods Book an Open EveningApply for TrainingOur Approach
The Metis Institute
Depth TA is the way we teach and practise Transactional Analysis when we take the unconscious seriously, and when we refuse to reduce psychotherapy to a set of techniques. It is rigorous, relational, and experiential. It is psychologically precise, and it is willing to meet what cannot be made tidy.
What is Depth TA?
“We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.” — Eric Berne.
In Depth TA, our task is not to shame the “frog”, but to understand how it formed, what it protects, and what it costs, so that choice becomes possible again.
At The Metis Institute, Depth TA integrates Transactional Analysis (TA) with Jungian and archetypal psychology, alongside movement, body-based practice, and arts-based methods. The aim is not to add ornament to TA, but to strengthen its clinical power by widening the lens through which we understand personality, symptom, relationship, and change.
What Depth TA means in practice
Depth TA begins with a simple premise: psychotherapy is not only a cognitive process, and it is not only a behavioural one. It is a relational encounter in which body, image, memory, fantasy, culture, and unconscious patterning are all active participants.
“When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” — C. G. Jung.
This has practical consequences in the therapy room. In Depth TA, we train therapists to:
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Listen for script, game dynamics, and relational patterns, while also tracking what is symbolic, imaginal, and unspoken.
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Work with ego states in a way that remains clinically clear, while staying open to complexity rather than forcing premature certainty.
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Recognise that “insight” is not always a verbal event, and that change often arrives through rhythm, affect, gesture, image, and relational experience.
Why Transactional Analysis
Transactional Analysis offers an exceptionally clear map of communication, personality organisation, and relational dynamics. It gives students language and structure early, which is especially supportive for beginners, career-changers, and early-career helpers who need clarity without oversimplification.
Depth TA keeps the strengths of TA intact, including:
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A clear framework for ego states, transactions, and communication.
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Attention to script formation, repetition, and choice.
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A clinical orientation that can be taught, practised, and supervised with precision.
We then extend TA into depth, because real clinical work rarely stays within neat boundaries.
Depth TA is not built on a pessimistic view of script as destiny. We train with respect for resilience, imagination, and the psyche’s capacity to reorganise.
“The human ability to symbolize, to transform, to create, to seek freedom … and, ultimately, to let go.” — Fanita English.
That sentence names something essential to our pedagogy: psychotherapy training must cultivate both clinical rigour and the capacity to imagine other ways of living.
Depth psychology helps us work with the inner world as a living ecology. It gives language for symbol, shadow, and the ways a person’s suffering can also be carrying meaning, history, and unintegrated life.
In Depth TA, Jungian and archetypal perspectives support students to:
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Differentiate between what is personal, what is relational, and what may be archetypal in tone or intensity.
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Recognise the psyche’s tendency to organise experience through image, story, and repetition.
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Work respectfully with the unknown, including ambiguity, conflict, and paradox, without collapsing into vagueness.
The parts of Depth TA
Depth TA does not treat imagery as decoration, or as something to “interpret away.” We stay close to what appears, and we allow meaning to emerge over time, through contact, resonance, and reflection.
“All we did was ‘stick to the image,’ … stay faithfully close to the actual text.” — James Hillman.
In practice, this means we train therapists to slow down, to track what repeats, to notice what intensifies, and to treat images, dreams, metaphors, and bodily signals as clinically informative.
Depth TA is not “creative therapy” as a style choice. It is a clinical commitment to the fact that human beings are embodied, and that meaning lives in more places than words.
We integrate movement, body awareness, and arts-based methods because they:
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Help students develop finer perception of affect, activation, shutdown, and relational signalling.
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Offer safe, structured ways to approach symbolic material when language is defended, unavailable, or premature.
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Support the therapist’s capacity for presence, containment, and self-regulation, which are essential in complex clinical work.
These methods are taught as disciplined practices, not as performance, and they are always held within ethics, consent, and clinical purpose.
Depth TA is not a retreat into theory. It is training for practice in the world as it is, including power, difference, history, and social context.
“Our stated goal was to couple the spirit of the depths with the spirit of the times.” — Andrew Samuels.
This is one reason diversity and ethical accountability are not add-ons in our training, but part of clinical maturity.
Where this training leads
Depth TA at The Metis Institute is taught within a pathway that is aligned with UKATA and EATA standards, and designed to support progression towards recognised TA training routes, including CTA.
Students begin with TA101, then progress through training years that develop theory, practice, supervision readiness, and clinical maturity.