“Psychic Truths” The Unconscious Made Known, Jo Stuthridge & Ed Novak
Event Overview
An online IARTA conference — November 2026
We are delighted to welcome two distinguished Transactional Analysts, joining us from opposite sides of the globe, for IARTA’s conference this November: Jo Stuthridge and Ed Novak.
This is our first-ever fully online conference, an exciting new venture for IARTA, and one that allows us to bring together two much-admired authors, teachers, and thinkers from either end of the world, without the constraints of travel or geography.
Across two thought-provoking sessions, Jo and Ed will explore psychic reality, unconscious processes, embodiment, and themes central to Relational Transactional Analysis that shape how we understand truth, pain, and the unseen forces that shape our clinical work and our lives.
These sessions promise rich, generative thinking and space for genuine dialogue with two leading voices in our field.
Jo Stuthridge
Bearing truth and pain: two ways of knowing
Abstract: At the heart of psychotherapy lies the shared task of bearing emotional truth and pain. This task is inherently paradoxical due to the human tendency to both seek and avoid truth. A relational psychotherapy provides a theatre in which these opposing forces are enacted, allowing painful emotional realities to become thinkable. This paper proposes that psychic truth emerges through two complementary ways of knowing held in a creative tension. The first is a logical mode, focused on tracking recurring patterns within the client’s history and the therapeutic relationship. The second is an aesthetic mode grounded in reverie, imagery and feelings. Clinical vignettes illustrate these ideas.
Jo Stuthridge MSc, APANZ is a Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst and a registered psychotherapist in Aotearoa, New Zealand. She maintains a private psychotherapy practice in Dunedin. She is a past director of the Physis Institute, which provided training in transactional analysis for over 20 years and has published several articles and book chapters on transactional analysis. She continues to write, reflect and teach within the international TA community.
Jo can be reached at jo@jostuthridge.co.nz
Ed Novak
The body keeps more than the score: Unconscious processes that cannot be fully accessed through words alone.
Abstract: As our profession continues to integrate mind and body, therapists must consider both psychic and embodied pathways to the unconscious. The body holds relational, transference, and unconscious processes that extend far beyond explicit memory and conscious thought. Integrating transactional analysis with body analysis also opens pathways to preverbal experiences encoded primarily in the body rather than language. While words remain essential, they are not always sufficient to access the deepest layers of unconscious experience. The unconscious is not only represented symbolically in the mind; it is also lived, communicated, and transformed through the body within the transference-countertransference relationship. This keynote will explore how an embodied therapeutic relationship can facilitate access to these implicit processes.
Edward T. Novak is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Akron, Ohio, USA. He has presented at international conferences and published numerous journal articles, as well as the book Physical Touch in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: Transforming Trauma through Embodied Practice (Routledge, 2023). He served as book review editor of the Transactional Analysis Journal for ten years, through 2024, and continues to serve on the editorial review board. In 2026, he received the Eric Berne Memorial Award.
He can be reached at edtnovak@gmail.com.
Friday 20th November 2026
6:30 Opening
7:00
Guest speaker – Jo Stuthridge
Q and A
Followed by a discussion or a panel
21:30 Close
Saturday 21st November 2026
9:30 welcome / AGM
10.00 “Explorations”
11.30 Coffee
11.45
Guest speaker – Ed Novak
£70.00 members/£80.00 non-members.
Ticket sales will end Thursday, 19th November, at noon.
The Zoom Link will be sent out to all participants the day before the event.
Interested in Relational TA? Become a member now
Receive access to valuable content