Who was Eric Berne and what does transactional analysis have to do with dentistry?
Eric Berne was a Canadian-born psychiatrist who taught in the United States in the 1950s and wrote the popular book that launched transactional analysis. He moved past the Freudian obsession with personality and looked instead at the interactions we actually have day to day, because those exchanges are the foundation of both our personal and our business lives. Here’s the part most dentists don’t know. Berne had his own ah-ha moment with his dentist back in the late 1930s, centered on pain and patient experience, and he published a paper in JADA on handling the psychology of pain in a practice. Pain management was primitive then, so his thinking was ahead of its time. The lesson for you is simple. How a patient experiences the interaction shapes the decision as much as the clinical facts do.
If the answers you are finding here resonate with you, my team and I work with a small group of clients each year. The next step is a complimentary Discovery Consultation and Practice Review with Dr. McAnally.