In later years when I decided to go back to college, I double-majored for awhile in history and psychology, thinking that I might go into the head shrinking business. I eventually changed to a minor in psychology to allow myself to graduate a bit sooner—I had a goal to finish my BA before I turned 50 and I did not want to wreck my schedule, thinking that I would decide on graduate school either in history or psychology after graduating. As it turned out, I did neither in the end, deciding to get a Master’s in Occupational Safety and Health, a career that I was already working in. But, I digress. I found in college that TA was no longer a popular theory. Most in the field of psychology at the time were embracing behavioral and drug therapies. Still, I found TA to be a good answer to my questions about personality and human behavior and continued to study it. And today, on New Year’s Eve, 2007, I still find it helpful.
Transactional Analysis
In 1961, Dr. Eric Berne, a prominent psychiatrist in California, published a book entitled, Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy. In his book, he explained his theory of personality structure and its applications to psychoanalysis. In the decade or so that followed,
he wrote other books about TA (Transactional Analysis) including the very popular Games People Play and What Do You Say After You Say Hello. His Theories became popular amongst the mental health community during the decades of the 60s and 70s and spawned other books including I’m OK—You’re OK written by California psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Harris. Though TA is not as popular today as it was in the 60s and 70s and is considered a fad of the times by some clinicians today, it still offers a simple and coherent understanding of the human personality.Structure
Like Sigmund Freud, Eric Berne believed in the existence of the unconscious and he developed a similar theory for the structure of the personality. Berne describes the personality as divided into three separate ego states. Instead of the Id, Ego, and Super Ego of Freud’s theory, Berne refers to the three ego states as the Child, the Adult, and the Parent. Berne also recognized stages of development, but did not see them as complicated and as numerous as Freud did. Like Freud, Berne believes that, through therapy and enlightenment, a free-willing patient can change.
The unconscious lies at the heart of both psychoanalysis and transactional analysis. In his book, I’m OK—You’re OK, Thomas Harris wrote about experiments performed by neurosurgeon, Dr. Wilder Penfield in 1951. During brain surgery on patients suffering from epilepsy, Penfield touched the temporal cortex of the brain of the fully conscious patients under local anesthesia with a weak electric probe. Penfield found that the electric stimulation forced vivid recollections from the patients’ memory. Most significant was the discovery that, along with past events, feelings associated with those events, are also recorded in the brain. Penfield reported, “The subject feels again the emotion which the situation originally produced in him, and he is aware of the same interpretations, true or false, which he himself gave to the experience in the first place”(Harris, 1967, p. 7). Recollections, Harris believes, are evoked by day to day experience in much the same way as Penfield’s electric probe evokes them. Harris concludes from Penfield’s experiments that: (1) the brain operates like a tape recorder. (2) Feelings associated with past experiences are also recorded and locked to those experiences. (3) Persons can exist in more than one mental state at the same time, as when the patient was able to both converse with Dr. Penfield during the operation and relive a past experience, via the electric stimulation. (4) Recorded past experiences and feelings are available for replay at any moment.
It is the belief of psychoanalysts that often people’s actions and reactions are influenced by the unconscious. Freud believed that irrational and illogical behavior (i.e. phobias and obsessions) was caused by unacceptable thoughts and feelings prompted by the id but repressed by the ego in the unconscious. In An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Charles Brenner states, “All
(unwanted id impulses such as memories, emotions, desires, or wish-fulfilling fantasies) are as though they did not exist as far as the individual’s conscious life is concerned” (Brenner, 1955, p. 89). In TA, irrational and illogical behavior is caused by the impulses of the confused Child (ego state) exhibited, also out of awareness, against the exclusion (repression) of the Adult and Parent (ego states).Animal instincts (sex, aggression, and the libido), as Freud believed, are the responsibility of the id. The id, from the time of birth until the ego starts to develop, is in complete control. “We believe,” states Brenner, “that the id functions in conformity with the primary process (immature thoughts) throughout life and that the ego does so during the first years of life, when its organization is immature and naturally still very much like the id, whence it so recently sprang, in its functioning” (Brenner, 1955, p. 49). As development progresses, society demands that the ego and superego control the id. According to Freud, all persons necessarily go through stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital) that will help them conform to society. In Calvin S. Hall’s A Primer of Freudian Psychology, Hall says, “The development of personality takes place as a result of two major conditions. These are (1) maturation of natural growth and (2) learning to overcome frustration, to avoid pain resolve conflicts, and reduce anxiety” (Hall, 1954, p.113)
Transactional Analysts claim that the human brain starts making “recordings” from birth. Both external and internal events are recorded in the infant brain and continue through life till death. Recordings of internal events (emotions and feelings), which are connected both consciously and unconsciously to external events (perceptions), are compiled by the individual to create the Child. As with the id, the Child has dominion over pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. But unlike the id, the Child is the receptor of self-esteem.
In the Child we find an endless supply of “a-ha” experiences. According to Thomas Harris, a-ha experiences are the firsts in the life of a small child; the first time he catches hold of his mother’s nipple, the first drink from a garden hose, or the first time the lights come on as he flips the switch. The way that a child interprets his experiences determines the way that the Child feels about himself. The Child houses intuition, creativity, and spontaneity. Feelings of delight, security, and love are interpreted and recorded by the Child, as well as feelings of frustration, rejection, and abandonment. Thus, an individual can possess a happy Child or an unhappy Child.
Similar to Freud’s superego, Berne’s Parent is, as Thomas Harris explains it, “a collection of recordings in the brain of unquestioned or imposed external events perceived by a person in his early years, a period which we have designated roughly as the first five years of life” (Harris, 1967, p. 18). At the same time that the small person is recording internal events (feelings etc.), he is also recording external events, such as examples and pronouncements from his literal parents. Value systems and prejudices are housed in the Parent.
Never, always, should, shouldn’t, etc. are words that are recorded in the Parent and often played back when the person takes on literal parenthood. It is important that the yo
ung person learn to become a parent. Parenting is crucial to the survival of the human race. If adults did not govern children, humans would soon become extinct. So, mental and physical health both require a healthy Parent (ego state).Just as the ego in Freudian Psychology works to satisfy the requirements of both the id and the superego, Berne’s Adult operates between the Child and the Parent as a reality checker. At about 10 months of age, according to Transactional Analysists, persons start to find out for themselves the validity of the “taught concepts” (prejudices, etc,) that reside in the Parent and the “felt concepts” (fears, etc.) that reside in the Child. “The Adult,” says Harris, “develops a ‘thought concept’ of life based on data gathering and data processing” (Harris, 1967, p. 29).
The Adult, acting as a kind of computer, grinds out decisions after computing information or data from all of the three ego states. The happy and healthy Adult discovers that most parental data, such as “playing in the street is dangerous” and “dry pants are more comfortable than wet pants,” and that Child data, such as “I feel loved,” are reliable. An unhappy and unhealthy Adult is one that is “contaminated” by the Parent and, or the Child. Contamination is the ‘leaking in’ to the Adult of prejudicial data from the Parent or delusional data from the Child. Just as parenting is required for human survival, the uncontaminated Adult is required for the survival of the individual. Faulty judgments based on unreliable data often bring unhappy results.
Process
The process of human behavior, as explained in Transactional Analysis, is similar to that which was accepted by Freud. Just as the individual, in Freudian Psychology, is energized by the id to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, the individual in TA is prompted to seek “strokes.” Eric Berne believes that research shows that strokes are necessary for human development. In the introduction to his book Games People Play, Berne explains that “infants deprived of handling over a long period will tend to sink into an irreversible decline and are prone to succumb eventually to intercurrent disease” (Berne, 1964, p. 13). In essence, Stimulus deprivation can be fatal.
The human craving for continued strokes and social intimacy is the basis for transactions. A “transaction” is the basic unit of social intercourse. “If two or more people encounter each other in a social aggregation, sooner or later one of them will speak, or give other indication of acknowledging the presence of the others. This is called the transactional stimulus. Another person will then say or do something which in some way related to the stimulus and that is called the transactional response” (Berne, 1964, p. 29). The types of transactions we engage in, the quality of strokes we receive for our trouble, and the way that data is recorded in our child define the basis for the individual’s growth and development.
Growth and Development
“Life positions” are the end result of human growth and development. In TA, it is recognized that the child can be happy or unhappy. Freud theorized that a person must go through stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital) as he passes from birth to young adulthood. TA focuses on stages of development as well, but identify their four stages of development or “births of the individual” as periods from conception to age five” (Harris, 1967, p. 40). The first block of time is between conception (cellular birth) and physical birth, where the individual experiences “the most perfect environment the human individual may ever experience” (Harris, 1967, p. 40). Next, the little human within a few hours experiences what may be the most traumatic experience possible for a human being; biological birth where he is exposed to “doubtless terrifying extremes of cold, roughness, pressure, noise, nonsupport, brightness, separateness, and abandonment” (Harris, 1967, p. 40). Then comes “Psychological birth,” when, moments after the ordeal of birth, the infant is rescued by “another human being who picks him up, wraps him in warm coverings, supports him, and begins the comforting act of ‘stroking’” (Harris, 1967, p. 41). During the next five years, the young child continually records his feelings, which grow from relationships with others and the stroking and nonstroking that he receives. “Social birth” is experienced when, at age five, the child starts school. He has, by this time developed rational thought and a basic perception of his life position: OK or not OK.
As explained earlier, Parent tapings are being recorded simultaneous with the Child tapings. During the first five years of life, the Parent is loaded up with “tapes” of external events. These Parent recordings are live and unedited, and the dependency of the small child during those five years of development make it crucial that Parent data being recorded be reliable. For example, the ability of a small child to distinguish between a sober mother or father and inebriated ones, and to understand why Mom or Dad behaves different from time to time is minimal. Parents often say one thing but do another. Clearly, it is also possible to get Parent data from sources other than from literal parents. Children spending long hours in front of a television or at the babysitter’s will undoubtedly gather lots of “taught” concepts for life.
The editing needed for the huge amounts of data collected by the Parent and Child is performed by the Adult. As explained earlier, the Adult begins to function at about ten months of age. This function starts slowly and grows as the small person realizes that he is able to do more and more things for himself. At first (ten months), the Adult is heavily contaminated by the Parent and Child and not well defined. In this fragile state, commands from the Parent and fear from the Child the Adult is easily intimidated. But, as the person learns more things for himself, the Adult becomes a complete part of the personality. By age five, the person should have a functioning personality with a healthy Parent, Child, and Adult to ready him for social birth and to guide him through the rest of his life.
A person’s life, according to TA, is very much controlled by his life “script.” The script allows the person to feel OK or not OK about himself. Berne, in his book What Dou You Say After You Say Hello?, explains that scripts or behavior patterns “are determined by rigid reflex genes, primitive imprinting, infant play and imitation, parental training, and spontaneous invention” (Berne, 1972, p. 65). DNA, for example, will determine the limits of our physical and mental development and will influence, to a degree, what we look like and how we perform. Jesse Owens was especially prepared genetically to be an exceptional athlete. Albert Einstein, on the other hand, seems to have been prepared genetically to excel in science.
Imprinting, infant play and imitation allow us to attach to parent figures and then to learn from those “parents,” the subtleties of human behavior. Parental training is especially powerful in determining the script. A person carries out his script because, says Berne, “it is planted in his head at an early age by his parents, and stays there for the rest of his life” (Berne, 1972, p. 65). Scripts, generally speaking, can be traced back to great grandparents. If family history is recorded, as perhaps in the case of royal lineage, scripts can be influenced even from centuries past. Ancestral pride, idealization, rivalry, and personal experience can all influence, for good or bad, a child’s life script. The circumstances of conception (accidental, difficult, rape, incest, etc.), birth position (oldest, middle, youngest, etc.), and names (including surnames) can influence the life script that a young person takes on.
Parental attitudes translate heavily to the life script of a young person. “The comedy or tragedy of each human life,” says Berne, “is that it is planned by an urchin of pre-school age, who has a very limited knowledge of the world and its ways, and whose heart is filled mainly with stuff put there by his parents” (Berne, 1972, p.97). What a young person hears from his parent is very often different from what the parent intended. For example, “You are too young to smoke” may mean to a young person that, some day to prove that he is a grown up, he must smoke. A big part of the job of growing up is to understand what parents really mean.
“Ok-ness” is the most important part of a person’s development. Thomas Harris classifies the four possible life positions held with respect to oneself and others as (1.) I’m not OK—you’re OK. (2.) I’m not OK—you’re not OK. (3.) I’m OK—you’re not OK. (4.) I’m OK—you’re OK. The first position is considered to be the universal position of early childhood. Babies logically conclude this because of their total dependency on their grownup parents. The Child learns self esteem by the reactions of others to him, so the first position can be reinforced by the perceived appraisals of parent figures. If the Child is critically or chronically abused, the stage is set for position number two. The third position is a life saving decision on the young person’s part. It is believed to be caused by brutality or extreme neglect by parents combined with self-stroking by the Child, like a hurt puppy licking its wounds. The fourth position is considered to be a conscious decision, where as the first three are not. “The first three positions,” says Harris, “are based on feelings. The fourth is based on thought, faith, and the wager of action” (Harris, 1967, p. 50).
Psychopathology
As explained earlier, transactions are the basic units of social intercourse. Through transactions we acknowledge and are acknowledged by others. The simplest and most mutually satisfying transactions, according to Berne, are those between Adults. These can be as unimportant as discussing the weather or as important as negotiating peace treaties. This type of transaction implies accurate data being correctly communicated both ways. Another appropriate and natural transaction is one between Child and Parent. For example, the nurturing of a Child suffering from illness by his mother is a beneficial transaction.
In both Adult—Adult and Child—Parent transactions, stimulus and response are natural and mutually beneficial. Complimentary transactions such as Parent—Parent (critical gossip) and Child—Child (playing together) are considered harmless depending on the nature of the content. However problems arise when Parent—Adult or Child—Adult transactions occur. In these types of transactions accurate data is lost or ignored and incorrect communication follows, especially when one party’s Adult is trying to communicate with the other party’s Adult only to have the second party’s Parent respond to the first party’s Child. These types of “crossed transactions” are blamed for failing marriages.
Transactions are further identified, by their motives, as procedures, rituals, pastimes, and games. Procedures and rituals are transactions that are programmed from one of the Parent, Adult, or Child ego states and are social in nature. In Games People Play, Berne describes a procedure as a ‘series of simple complimentary Adult transactions directed toward the manipulation of reality” (p. 35), and a ritual as “stereotyped series of simple complementary transactions programmed by external forces” (p. 36). Berne describes pastimes as a “series of semi-ritualistic, simple, complimentary transactions arranged around a single field of material, whose primary object is to structure an interval of time” (p. 41). Pastimes are typically played at social gatherings (parties), where groups of people may divide into smaller groups and chit-chat. Berne notes and names such pastimes as “PTA,” “Psychiatry,” “General Motors,” and “What became,” all being played in various corners of a room. “A game,” says Berne, “is a recurring set of transactions, often repetitious, superficially plausible, with a concealed motivation; or, more colloquially, a series of moves with a snare, or ‘gimmick’” (p. 48). Games require an ulterior quality and a “payoff.”
Payoffs are the dramatic climax and reason for playing such games as (identified by Berne) “Alcoholic,” “If it weren’t for you,” “See what you made me do,” “Schlemiel,” and “I got you now you son of a bitch.” The payoff reaffirms the player’s life script and life position. Games, as might be gathered from the various titles referred to above, are destructive in nature and deadly for healthy relationships. It is obviously necessary to have more than one player for a successful game, and many games can be played simultaneously. For best results, one playing “I’ve got you now you son of a bitch” will play with another playing “Look what they’ve done to me now.” Each player gets a payoff. Each reaffirms his life position and script, but fails in the search for true intimacy.
Change
Berne and Harris believe true intimacy, as described earlier, is the goal of every person from the time of their cellular birth. Transactional Analysis, according to Berne and Harris, provides the best hope for those suffering in confused ego states, destructive relationships, and with poor life scripts and life positions to change. To change requires enlightenment and a renewed desire for intimacy.
Three elements, according to Harris, are necessary for an individual to want to change. He must hurt sufficiently. He must be tired of his state. And, he must suddenly discover that he can. The first step in changing is making decisions. Harris stresses that it is necessary “to recognize that in each decision there are three sets of data that must be processed. The first is in the Parent, the second is in the Child, and the third is in the Adult” (Harris, 1967, p. 55). Parent and Child data are dated and suspect, while Adult data represents the reality of the present along with data from the past that was gathered independently of the other two ego states. Through therapy, the patient can learn to recognize his contaminated Adult data (prejudices, phobias, etc.) and to realize that everyone else he meets also has a Parent, Child, and Adult. He works to separate contamination ego states by persistently making decisions based on facts.
The Adult data that is processed for change will include recognition of the desirability of true intimacy. The goal of true intimacy can not be reached with anything but an “I’m OK—you’re OK” life position. A sense of self worth and the worth of others will eliminate the desire to play games and will allow the individual to enjoy an honest, giving and receiving relationship, where strokes are freely given and received.
Basic to the TA theory of personality is the notion of man’s free agency to choose. Though past events may have powerful effect on the individual, he has power to affect his future through his ability to choose. Harris argues that “one of the most difficult problems of the Freudian position is the problem of determinism verses freedom. Freud and most behaviorists, held that the cause and effect phenomenon seen in all the universe also holds true for human beings, that whatever happens today can theoretically be understood in terms of what has happened in the past…The pure determinist holds that man’s behavior is not free and is only a product of his past” (Harris, 1967, p. 61). The truth is, according to Transactional Analysists, that man’s behavior has as much to do with his contemplation of the future as it does with events in his past. Man is not like a billiard ball. Everyone is capable of change. Everyone is capable of betterment.
Conclusion
The genius of TA is that Berne and his followers have taken the best elements of some of the most popular personality theories and incorporated them into their own. The structure is obviously similar to Freud’s. The ideas of the mental tape recordings and the emphasis on recognizing contaminated data is fairly Cognitive. Carl Rogers’ ideas about the necessity of unconditional positive regard in personality development are comparable to the positive stroke idea in TA. Human ability to change, as viewed by Transactional Analysts, is Existential/Humanist. Having mixed some of the best parts of the prominent theories together in one, Berne simplified it to understandable terminology and made it accessible to the layperson.
In TA, I personally found a theory that is extremely useful and compatible to a moralistic philosophy. Berne and Harris, especially, seem to accept the notion of good and evil and the reality of a spiritual experience. Harris declares, “Sin, or badness, or evil, or ‘human nature,’ whatever we call the flaw in our species, is apparent in every person. We simply cannot argue with the endemic ‘cussedness’ of man” (1967, p. 225). The fallen state of man and his willingness to commit sin is comparable to the not OK life positions that prompt the playing of games that are explained in TA. Saving grace or spiritual rebirth is not unlike the concept of the “I’m OK—You’re OK” life position. Moral values, which are strongly housed in the balanced and uncontaminated Parent, Child, and Adult, will not allow the individual to play games.
“What is a religious experience?” asks Harris towards the end of his book, “Does the mind ‘just get carried away’ with a wish, as Freud suggested, or is there more to it than fantasy?” (1967, p. 231). I think that a religious or spiritual experience is the feeling of working in concert with the universe instead of working at cross-purposes to it. I think that it is the ultimate feeling of OK-ness and true intimacy with the Creator. It was appropriate, I believe, that I first learned of TA in church.
References:
Berne, E. (1961). Transactional analysis in psychology. New York, New York:
Ballantine Books.
Berne, E. (1964). Games people play. New York, New York: Groves Press Inc.
Berne, E. (1972). What do you say after you say hello? New York, New York: Grove
Press Inc.
Brenner, C. (1955). An elementary textbook of psychoanalysis. Garden City, New
York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Hall, C. S. (1954). A primer of Freudian psychology. New York New York: The World
Publishing Company.
Harris, T. A. (1967). I’mOK—you’reOK, a practical guide to transactional analysis.
New York, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
