Transactional Analysis

With Transactional Analysis, Eric Berne made complex interpersonal transactions understandable especially the "games" that the "inner child" plays in order to gain recognition from others.

The TA therapist's task is to help the person to regain its inner child's innate "Okness" so that it will be able to obtain the recognition or "strokes" --in short, the love--that it needs and so that the whole person can function in a positive manner. As consultants, educators and organizers, transactional analysts with their skills in analyzing transactional patterns are able to understand, predict and help improve people's communication and productivity.

Transactional Analysis started as, and has remained, a social psychology, a clear departure from psychoanalysis, as a system that focuses on people's external behavior and only secondarily on analyzing their internal psychological processes. Eric Berne designed Transactional Analysis as a system that seeks to understand the interactions of people and to improve the human social environment. Almost fifty years after Transactional Analysis' inception and thirty years after Eric Berne's untimely death it has become a movement with thousands of members all around the world and is poised to enter the third millenium as a highly effective, information based psychology and psychiatry of human communication.

Egos States.

Berne made complex interpersonal transactions understandable when he recognized that people can interact from one of three "ego-states" -- Parent, Adult or Child -- and that these interactions can occur at overt and covert levels. Each one of the ego states in is effect a system of communication with its own language and function; the Parent's is a language of values , the Adult's is a language of logic and rationality and the Child's is a language of emotions. Effective functioning in the world depends on the availability to of all three, intact ego states. Transactional Analysts are trained to recognize what ego states people are transacting from, and to follow, in precise detail, the transactional sequences that people engage in as they interact with each other. With this training they are also able to intervene effectively to improve the quality of communication and interaction for their clients.

Games

Berne codified socially dysfunctional behavior patterns in terms of the "games" that people play. Games are essentially devious, toxic and sometimes deadly methods of obtaining "strokes." The term stroke is Berne's name for the unit of human contact and recognition. Strokes, Berne pointed out, are needed by people for psychological and eventually physical survival, just as they need food, water and air. These repetitive stroke-gathering interactions, labeled by Berne with the instantly recognizable names ( "Why Don't You Yes But," "Now I've Got You."and "I'm Only Trying to Help", etc) which made TA famous, are the building blocks of people's life scripts.

Scripts

People build their lives around certain favorite games which, with their repetitive toxic outcomes, promote dysfunctional, life-long scripts. Scripts are based on early-life decisions, made by the originally OK child. These decisions which dictate people's actions throughout life always represent the relinquishing of the child's Okness. They determine the dysfunctional roles (Rescuer, Persecutor, Victim) which people fall upon throughout life unless they are changed or "redecided," or as Berne put it unless the person "closes down the show and puts on a new (aware, autonomous, intimate, in short OK) one on the road."

Transactional Analysis as a Communication Skill

Transactional Analysts are specialists in human communication in psychotherapy, in relationships and at work; in particular the transactional methods that people use to obtain much needed strokes. Transactional Analysis psychotherapists task is to help people identify their ego states and evaluate and improve the ways in which their ego states function, to recognize the inner dialogues between a person's ego states, especially those that involve a harsh demeaning Parent, to recognize the games that people play and to help them stop playing games and get strokes in a spontaneous aware and intimate and manner. The potent therapist provides permission to change and protection against the anxiety that change creates. Stopping the playing of games is the first step in eventual replacing them with direct and honest interactions and eventually abandoning the dysfunctional life script. Transactional Analysis' efficient, yet insightful, contractual method makes it ideally suited for brief psychotherapy.

Likewise as consultants, educators and organizers transactional analysts with their skills in analyzing transactional patterns are able to understand predict and help improve dysfunctional, unproductive, toxic, uncooperative interactions between people and can quickly help people communicate clearly and effectively at the three levels of the Parent (values,) the Adult (rationality) and the Child (emotions, creativity.)