It is a genuine pleasure to celebrate Edward T. Novak as the recipient of the 2026 Eric Berne Memorial Award (EBMA). The EBMA is given for a highly original and innovative published contribution that constitutes a major theoretical and practical advance to Transactional Analysis (TA) and that has had a real impact on the TA community. It honors a specific contribution rather than a lifetime of work—and in Novak’s case, the committee recognized two beautifully paired papers in the TA Journal: "Secret Garden Work" (Novak, 2016) and "A Model of Informed Physical Contact in Psychotherapy" (Novak, 2018). Read together, they invite our field into territory it has long approached with caution, and they do so with warmth, courage, and care.

The first paper takes up Berne’s (1972) tender image of the secret garden—the private inner world Berne described as people’s “visual pictures of what they would do if they could do as they pleased” (p. 130)—and asks how a therapist might be welcomed into that space without trampling it. Novak (2016) traces a nonlinear movement through three phases he names regressive, transgressive, and progressive, and he gently reclaims the word transgressive from its ethical connotations. A transgression, in his usage, steps beyond a client’s script protocol or a standard therapeutic frame without ever breaching ethics; echoing Cornell (2015), it is an exploration of boundaries rather than a violation of them. The therapist’s willingness to go "all-in," he suggests, is often what allows a client to move out of old patterns and toward freer ways of relating and being.

The second paper turns to the body with the same generosity of attention. Mindful of the long shadow cast by the early psychoanalytic "no touch" edict (Mintz, 1969), Novak (2018) offers not a set of techniques but a way of thinking about physical contact. He distinguishes four categories along a continuum—pass-bys, completion touch, containing-informing touch, and somatic mastery and modulation—running from brief social contact to sustained, body-psychotherapy-informed work (Klopstech, 2009; Panksepp, 1998).

What makes the model feel so at home in TA is that it is built from TA’s own materials: contracting, ego states, script, and a culture of supervision and consultation. Touch becomes something to be understood together—a physical anchor that lets a client compare there-and-then trauma with here-and-now safety in the presence of a trusted other (Stern, 2010). His moving clinical account of work with a severely traumatized client shows, with great humanity, how such contact—carefully contracted and patiently processed—can repair rather than repeat.

These papers did not arrive out of nowhere. They grow from a longer, devoted engagement with trauma and dissociation in TA—seen, for instance, in Novak’s (2013) integration of traditional ego-state theory with relational approaches, and in his warm, accessible reflections on healing trauma in The Script (Novak, 2014). Across 25 years of practice, and through his long service as book review editor and editorial board member of the TA Journal, he has quietly tended the conversations our community most needed to have. The award, to be clear, does not honor this body of work as a whole; it recognizes the two specific contributions above. Yet it is a happy thing to see that those two papers sit within a coherent and caring lifelong project.

Why these two papers? Together they do something genuinely new: they extend relational TA from a psychology of two minds to a psychology of two bodies, growing embodied work organically from inside the tradition rather than importing it wholesale from neo-Reichian or body-psychotherapy schools. The contribution is also generous toward what came before. TA has a layered and sometimes painful history with the body—from the centrality of physical contact in the Cathexis school and the ethical controversies that followed, to decades of more scattered writing on somatic experience. Novak lovingly gathers these strands into a coherent, teachable map, neither reviving reparenting nor borrowing a foreign system, but clarifying how embodied work can be thought about and taught within TA.

The case for the award also rested on the ethical clarity and kindness of the work. Novak draws a careful line between unconscious enactment and informed, contracted contact, restoring the therapist’s moral agency and treating avoidance itself as a stance worth examining rather than a safe default. For relational therapists—especially those companioning clients through developmental trauma—this offers a structure for engaging the body with transparency and consent. The impact has been real and tender: supervisors and trainers now use his distinctions to help practitioners tell therapeutic contact from reenactment and avoidance, and his papers have helped a cautious community move from prohibition toward reflective, relational responsibility—offering the field, along the way, a gentler means of processing its own historical wounds around the body.

Novak was nominated by a devoted international team, whose admiration for his work shines through every line of the nomination. In recognizing "Secret Garden Work" and "A Model of Informed Physical Contact," the EBMA committee celebrates a contribution that returns the living body to the heart of TA—and that gives clinicians a language precise enough, and humane enough, to use it well. Congratulations, Ed, and thank you.