Unexpected Trauma in Oral Interviewing

This paper seeks to address the issue of expected trauma and how practitioners of oral testimony might draw on some of the principles of transactional analysis to deal practically with recall that is unexpectedly traumatic. Transactional analysis is a psychoanalytic theory and style of therapy that Eric Berne developed in the 1950s. It works on the principle that individuals possess three ego states—parent, adult, and child—and that those ego states engage in transactions or interactions with the ego states of others. This paper argues that as practitioners of oral history, we might usefully mobilize some of the methodological functionality of transactional analysis as a means of better equipping ourselves, particularly in contexts where the interviewee expresses profound and unexpected trauma.