I was employed, from 1989, as a live-in deputy for Jenny who was then employed as a project manager by the housing association that housed a residential (Cathexis model) Therapeutic Community. After 10 years, we engineered a staff takeover from the association and continued independently in a large house in Birmingham, all together, for about 25 years, including the period as part of the housing association, until Jenny retired.

In those early days, the community was in Wellington, Shropshire, in a large Victorian Manse with extensive gardens. It had been taken on at Jenny’s request as a project in the housing association after she parted company with Jacqui Schiff. They had, together, established a small Transactional Analysis (TA) therapy group in Jenny’s home, in the manner of a tradition begun by Jacqui many years earlier. Briefly, this involved a decision by the leaders of the group to replicate a ‘family’ setting as an environment in which to work therapeutically with seriously mentally ill residents. They had adopted theories of classical TA developed by Eric Berne along with a group of pioneer Transactional Analysts in the 1960s, including Jacqui Schiff.

Jenny had met Jacqui when they worked together at a TA Cathexis project in Bangalore, India. She had heard about it and visited after an exploratory trip to the USA to explore TA. She was sponsored in this endeavor by the Churchill fellowship, and she had originally wanted to see what might be transferable to her work as a prison psychologist in England.

Around this time, Jenny was one of the founding members of TA in the UK.

For context, it was a time of social change and experimentation. Models such as TA and gestalt psychotherapy were developing and being explored as new ways to work with and help people with serious psychiatric illness.

There is a more detailed history to be written about Jacqui’s development of what was then known as the ‘Cathexis School’ of TA, and it will have to be enough here to say that she, and it, were deeply controversial. The idea and practice of creating pseudo-familial relationships was an ethical minefield, always at risk of being perceived as a cult, which it was not.

That said, the core theories of the Cathexis ‘school’ have stood the test of time and have spread into what could be described as a psychological/cultural diaspora of humanistic psychotherapists and part of the present-day language in the broader world of psychotherapy. As the TA community has grown and professionalized over the last 50-70 years, so have underpinning ideas like discounting, passivity, and symbiosis, which were Cathexis theories. However, this did not include certain Cathexis methodologies like ‘regression’ therapy or reparenting contracts. The move away from early and ethically questionable experiments did not happen overnight; it happened through challenging discussions and committed work over a period of years.

I want to confine this to what I personally was involved with and witnessed. I think it would be true to say that the therapeutic community founded by Jenny Robinson made the lives of many deeply mentally ill people viable and, in many cases, very successful.

The methodology Jenny learned from Jacqui was crucially flawed. Jacqui believed that to make a therapeutic alliance with anyone who was living with infantile terror as a root cause of psychotic-level disturbance, it was necessary to meet that terror with its mirror image in a therapeutic encounter. It may well be true that some people who may not have survived otherwise did flourish as a consequence of Jacqui’s work. It is also not difficult to understand that a gentle soul like Jenny Robinson could not and would not continue to use and support the sometimes brutal methods advocated by Jacqui. This led to an impossible dilemma for Jenny and was the reason for her difficult separation from Jacqui and into the formation of a separate group that subsequently became another therapeutic community, with more respect for the humanistic traditions of kindness and empathy, and a rejection of the controversial and ethically unsupportable methods of ‘fierce’ confrontation.

It would be a mistake to draw a picture of Jenny as fragile and timid. On the contrary, she was anything but and was capable of a single-minded determination that made her an invaluable role model for the people she worked with. This brings up memories of a Christmas holiday card game in the therapeutic community. One in particular involved a group of perhaps twelve people. The only aim of the game was to dive and grab for a particular card when it came up. No holds barred. Much shouting, mirth and accusations. Jenny won the game every single time.

Jacqui’s work was part of a complex story in the early development and experimental stages of TA psychotherapy. The feeling and intensity of it all are still being navigated, especially by the remaining elders of TA who had some involvement at the time.

The contribution of the group that Jenny started after her separation from the Schiffian methodology was primarily in the impact on clients and TA students over the subsequent years. This resulted in a wide understanding of how passivity theory, discounting, and symbiosis could be utilized and applied contractually as a way to safely manage a group of people who previously would have been stuck in a psychiatric world that only knows one way to maintain safety. That way was, and still is, through medications that, while often saving lives, were of little use when it comes to the resolution of serious mental illness. The main point is that psychotherapy for these types of problems cannot even begin without a means to create a safe therapeutic environment, one that can be held communally by a group of committed peers who are invested in each other as well as themselves.

I’m truly grateful for everything I learned from Jenny and the opportunity to learn and practice as a Transactional Analyst in a uniquely creative environment. She is missed by many of us who knew and worked with her, both as colleagues and clients.