Reparenting

Reparenting is a therapy rooted in Transactional Analysis, which was designed to re-orient into healthier thoughts and behaviors, psychological issues that were believed to have first originated in childhood through neglect, trauma, abuse, abandonment. Some of its practitioners felt they had improved or effected cures of various forms of schizophrenia with or without the use of psychotropic medication. Reparenting involved psychological regression to the age(s) at which the abuses occurred, and then, either reliving and releasing the specific traumas that occurred back then, and receiving normal parenting about thoughts and feelings. The therapist held the role of clinician as well as "healthy parent" figure. The goal was to relieve the circular suffering that often goes on in the minds of persons harmed when young, to teach thinking skills, control of certain negative behaviors. This healthier worldview was thought by some, like Jacqui Schiff, an early proponent of reparenting therapy, to have helped to alter the biochemical and neurological patterns which once produced destructive thoughts and behaviors.

Jacqui Schiff, who created the therapy, was a psychiatric social worker. She took several seriously disturbed persons into her home. and with her husband, taught and wrote about having improved and in some cases, claimed to have cured them. She wrote a best selling book about this in 1970: "All My Children" (Not related to the TV soap opera). She was a member of the International Transactional Analysis Association (ITAA), which had many inter-disciplinary sections. Some were quite intrigued with Schiff's work, and some followed other areas of Transactional Analysis treatment. When she divorced, she moved to California, where she set up the Cathexis Institute, a treatment center with an educational component to train additional Reparenting therapists. A number of psychotherapists became interested in Reparenting and undertook to learn about it and practise it. The Cathexis Institute closed in the late 1980s, relocated briefly in India, and eventually settled in England. Reparenting was disavowed by the ITAA in the 1990s.

Schiff died in the late 1990s.