Transactional Analysis

Transactional Analysis (TA) was developed by Eric Berne in the 1960s and 1970's. 

The philosophical assumptions of TA 

• People are OK – i.e. have worth, value and dignity. I may not always like or approve of your behaviours, what you do, but your essence as a human being is OK with me.
• Everyone has the capacity to think. Therefore it is the responsibility for each of us to decide what he or she wants from life. Each individual will eventually live with the consequences.
• People decide their own destiny, and these decisions can be changed.

Decisional model:

You and are OK. We may sometimes engage in some not-OK behaviour. When we do we are following strategies we decided as young children. These strategies were the best way we could work out as infants to survive.

To realize our full potential as grown ups we need to update the strategies for dealing with life that we decided upon as infants. When we find that these strategies are no longer working we can chose to review them and to act differently. In TA terminology we need to gain autonomy. The TA tools for working to achieve this are awareness, spontaneity and the capacity for intimacy.

For a healthy, balanced personality we need to access all three states: Adult for the here and now problem solving; to fit comfortably into society we need the sets of rule we carry in our Parent; while in our Child we have access to the spontaneity, creativity and intuitive power we enjoyed in our childhood. 

PAC EGO STATE MODEL

An ego state is a set of related behaviours, thoughts and feelings. It is the way in which we manifest a part of our personality at a given time. The model sets out three distinct ego-states:

• Adult - if I am behaving, thinking and reacting in response to what is going on around me here and now and using all the resources available to me as a grown up person I am said to be in my Adult ego state.
• Parent - at times I may behave, think and feel in a way which is a copy of my parents, or of others who are parent figures to me.  If I do I am said to be in my Parent ego-state.
• Child - sometimes I may return to ways of behaving, thinking and feeling which I used when I was a child. Then I am said to be in my Child ego-state. 

Transactions – If I am communicating with you I can chose to do this from any of my three ego states. You in turn can decide to reply from any of your three ego states. This exchange of communication is known as a transaction.

Complementary transactions

Complementary transactional vectors (of stimulus and response) are parallel; the ego state addressed is the one that responds

• Adult :Adult
• Child: Child
• Parent : Parent
• Parent : Child

Crossed transactions

Crossed transactional vectors (of stimulus and response) are not parallel, or in which ego-state addressed is not the one which responds.

• Stimulus: – Adult – Adult
• Response: 
• Parent – Child;  
• or Child - Parent

Ulterior transactions

In ulterior transactions two messages are conveyed the same time.  An overt or social message, plus a covert or psychological message.

Overt: Adult – Adult

Covert: Parent - Child

When I offer you a transactional  stimulus I can never make you go into a particular ego-state. You can choose to respond from whichever ego-state you want.

Childlike not childish – there is no such thing as an ‘immature person’ only someone in whom the Child takes over inappropriately or unproductively.

In the Child resides intuition, creativity and spontaneous drive and enjoyment.

The Adult is necessary for survival. It processes data and computes the probabilities which are essential for dealing effectively with the outside world.

The Parent has two main functions. First it enables the individual to act effectively as the parent of actual children, thus promoting the survival of the human race. Secondly  it makes many responses automatic, which conserves a great deal of time and energy.

Thus all three aspects have a high survival and living value and it is only when one of them disturbs the healthy balance that analysis and reorganization are needed. … each has its legitimate place in a full and productive life.

Life scripts

Berne proposed that life scripts are started at birth, completed in childhood and updated with real characters in adolescence.  Script decisions represent the infant’s best strategy for surviving in a world that seems hostile, even life threatening. Script decisions are made on the basis of a child’s emotions and reality-testing.  Life scripts are classified under three headings:

• Winning  - relative to accomplishing the ‘declared purpose’ I have set myself,  comfortably, happily and smoothly.
• Losing or hamartic (Greek hamrtia ‘basic flaw’) – someone who does not accomplish a declared purpose.
• Losing or banal – ‘middle of the roader

You can determine a winning life script by putting the question - What would you do it you lost?  

• A winner has additional options, that is how he wins. If one thing doesn’t work out, he tries something else until he is successful.
• A loser doesn’t know, all he can talk about is winning – when my horse comes in….
• A non-winner sometimes wins, sometimes loses, but never very big in either direction, he does not take risks.

Most of use decide on scripts which are a mixture of winning, non-winning and losing.   Our personal combination of decisions may be entirely different. What is non-winning to you may be winning to me.

Most important of all to realize is that any script can be changed. By becoming aware of my script I can discover areas in which I made losing decisions, and change them to winning decisions.

As adults we sometimes replay the strategies we decided on as infants: 

• When the here-and-now situations is perceived as stressful. 
• When there is some resemblance between the here-and-now situation and a stressful situation in childhood.

The movement into script is decisional, even though the decision is out of awareness. By being aware of script we are able to take greater stress before moving into scripty behaviour (or via therapy improve my ability to problem solve rather than resorting to scripty behaviour).  We ‘rubberband’ back to a childhood situation, often ‘putting a face on someone’ from my past experiences (parent, sibling)  - Freudian ‘transference.’  One of the goals of TA is to ‘disconnect rubberbands.’

While in script we attempt to meet adult problems by re-playing infant strategies. Necessarily these bring the same results as they brought when we were infants. Without conscious awareness we seek to set up the world so that it appears to justify our early decisions. When we get those uncomfortable results we can say to ourselves in our Child ego-state, yes the world is like I decided it was.  

Our scripts are often ‘magical solutions’ for resolving the basic issue that was unresolved in childhood: how to get unconditional love and acceptance. As adults we have a hard time letting to of that magic and are terrified of what the alternative might be – some terrible, unspeakable disaster that we had build as infants and that our script was crafted to avoid.  For this reason some people continue to follow ways of behaving which, at the same time, they recognize as self-damaging. 

Extracted from TA Today: A New Introduction to Transactional Analysis. Ian Steward & Vann Joines, 1987.


If you are interested in reading more I recommend Dave Spenceley's notes on the TA101 introductory course and his articles and book reviews.  He also offers a 2-day TA 101 workshop in Leeds.