I am pleased to announce the creation of Transactional Analysis Internet, or TAJnet, a branch of the print journals: Transactional Analysis Bulletin (1962 - 1970) and Transactional Analysis Journal (1971 - present). In this age of exponential Internet growth, with information available freely to anyone with access to the Internet: professionals, students from graduate programs to grade school, web surfers and people seeking many different kinds of help, this journal aspires to be a viable resource.

TAJnet is a rapid publication, peer review electronic journal for people in the broad field of social psychiatry including: psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, social workers, psychiatric nurses, medical professionals, corrections administrators and officers, military trainers, educators, social scientists and organizational development professionals. A few ways in which applied transactional analysis has been used are the United States Astronaut training program; the FBI training headquarters at Quantico Virginia ,with local police from across the USA, and for FBI trainees; in The Federal Bureau of Prisons; State prison systems; Texas Department of Public Safety required course for handgun licensees; corporate, organizational and government, and in training and treatment from Moscow to Wellington, from Seattle to Tel Aviv, from Mexico City to San Paulo.

Additionally and very importantly, this journal will also publish articles for those with no previous exposure to transactional analysis. It will also offer suggested articles for those persons on an intermediate level, that is, for persons familiar with the theory but having not as yet reached a stage of advanced knowledge and application.

Many years ago, the great LIFE Magazine photographer David Douglas Duncan called on Pablo Picasso. For this first visit in what was to become a deep friendship, Duncan had brought along an ancient ring, a gift for the great master. He was led upstairs, down a long hallway and into a room where Picasso was having a bath. Duncan gave him the ring. Picasso took it and turned it over in his fingers, gazing at it intently for several moments. Then he said; I wonder how he made it..

Receiving lesson from this story, the social psychiatry section of this fast turnaround electronic journal will concern itself with questions like Picasso's by asking how do we know what we know and more specifically how was, and how is transactional analysis made and can it be better? How did Berne know what he knew: ego states, transactions, life positions, organizational structures and all the rest? How do any of us know what we know? How do we know it, how and...why? Perhaps a quote from Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man" is apt: "Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible..."

Over the years Bernians have evolved theory on two basic, and very different paths. One is a populist version, dedicated to Eric Berne's vision of a psychiatry for everyone, understandable and available. This version has come to be known by the abbreviation "TA", and will be included for people unfamiliar with transactional analysis. The other path known by the longer term "transactional analysis", is a rigorous social-scientific discipline with a long history of scholarly articles. The professional sections of TAJnet will be devoted to this track.

In this spirit please allow a personal indulgence, a story about a contemporary of Berne's interested in transactional analysis as Berne was interested in his theories. Some 30 years ago I asked J.L. Moreno, the founder of group psychotherapy and psychodrama, a theoretical question. I was seeking the definitive explanation, the last word, a crystallization dispelling my doubts and uncertainties. He replied: Young man, one answer produces a thousand questions. And so we at TAJnet hope at the fin de siecle, that we can excite your curiosity and that each article produces questions extending this marvelous theory into the next century.

Alan Jacobs,
Editor

TAJnet Editorial Board