Afterburn (psychotherapy) Afterburn (psychotherapy) Afterburn is a psychological term coined by Eric Berne, who defined it as "the period of time before a past event is assimilated". Eric Berne, the founding father of transactional analysis, used the term "afterburn" to indicate the effect an atypical past event continues to exert on a person's daily schedule, activities and mental state even "after" it is over: to "those occasions when it disturbs normal patterns for an appreciable period, rather than being assimilated into them or excluded from them by repression and other psychological mechanisms". For Berne, afterburn is the flip side of reachback, which
Eric Berne psychiatric residency at the Psychiatric Clinic of Yale University School of Medicine, where he worked for two years. In 1939, Berne became an American citizen and shortened his name from Eric Lennard Bernstein to Eric Berne. In 1949, he was admitted as a Fellow in the American Psychiatric Association. From 1938-40, Berne was an assistant physician at Ring Sanitarium, Arlington Heights, Massachusetts. From 1940-43 he was employed as a psychiatrist in a sanitarium in Connecticut, and concurrently as a clinical assistant in psychiatry at Mt Sinai Hospital in New York. He also maintained a private practice. In 1943, during World