Transactional Analysis is a psychotherapeutic school founded during the 60’s by Eric Berne (1910-1970) in Montreal. It is a model that draws a lot of its power and relevance from its simplicity, making it widely understood an usable.
It is a humanistic model that allows therapist and client to map out the core “roles” we play in our relations and how these can stray from say, an adult ego-state (mature, open, integrative) to parental (judgmental, controlling) or to child (ego, tantrum, etc.) in a variety of contexts.
Transactional Analysis asserts that human interactions often follow a narrative a set of “games people play”. These “games” can mirror a very predictable set of transactions and patterns that belie unexpressed emotions or unresolved issues. Becoming more aware of what roles we play, and how, in what context, following what trigger can therefore help patients grow. Transactional Analysis aims to simplify smartly that kind of relational analysis around the key core roles and their major most common variants.
4 key principles of Transactional Analysis
The Philosophy of T.A.
T.A. is premised on philosophical assumptions, about people, life and the possibility of change and psychological growth.
These assumptions are:
• People are OK.
Transactional Analysis holds that we, anyone, hold inherent worth and dignity. I accept myself as me and I accept you as you. This “OK” describes each our essence. It is understood that behaviour can be “not ok”. But your essence as a human being is OK with me. In short: I’M OKAY: YOU’RE OKAY! (which was the title of a best seller that also structured Transactional Analysis, by Thomas Anthony Harris, on par with the seminal “Games people play” by Eric Berne).
• Everyone has the capacity to think.
As a general rule everyone has the capacity to think. IQ and cognitive biases and many other considerations can influence this ability but on the whole, people can think. What Transactional Analysis also says here is that we all have the responsibility to decide what we want from life. And obviously as adults, we are supposed at least to live with the consequences of these decisions.
• People decide their own destiny, and these decisions can be changed.
Even though we are OKAY, we may sometimes or often behave in ways that are less than OKAY, or absolutely not OKAY. This is when a lot of the therapeutic work can start. Looking at the issue and and identifying typical strategies we use to hand the situation (many of which we developed in childhood).
These strategies (sometimes called “scripts”) represent our integration of whatever has seemed to work when we were children confronted to tough decisions, connection or abuse, conflict, uncertainty, etc.
Transactional Analysis asserts that these strategies are generally unhelpful and unconscious. We have effectively outgrown them but have not managed to stop using them. We may have learned enormous amounts about life, have a higher IQ at 40 than 4, but it’s often as 4 year olds that we still feel, act and react.
Life Scripts & Discounting
The need for a life script arises early in life. Young children base decisions on life scripts because they represent the best strategy to handle the world which often appears scary.
Problems arise however in adult life when we keep following the same scripts for situations that have far outgrown that kind of primary (and sometimes plain erroneous) script. We react often, with far more emotional expense than what situations call for, something Transactional Analysis would see as proof that our “over-reactions” are result following infantile scripts, emotional swing and all. Infants often over-react obviously, seeing a minor upset as justification to tantrum or even feel existential panic about.
The problem with our childish scripts is that according to TA, we often come to “discount” the reality that does not fit our script, rather than truly accept a new reality and see it gradually inform us into new, more relevant and justified opinions.
Our mind does that by giving selective importance and meaning to events whether they conform or challenge the script. Worse yet without conscious awareness we even tend to cancel out or selectively ignore what does not fit our script. We “discount” what does support the script and thereby pretty much guarantee we cannot grow mentally.
The concept of a script applies to small behavioural sequences (action-reaction in a given context) all the way to meta-events such as finding a mate. We do often get into romantic relations Transactional Analysis says, as grown-ups, that repeat patterns we followed with our parents during childhood. This is obviously unconscious, and the ensuing relation typically follow patterns were one actor is Parent the other child, and vice-versa.
• The Ego State Model
The most central concept in Transactional Analysis is the “Ego state” which represents a set of typical behaviours, thoughts and emotions. It’s how we express our personality in a given context.
Adult
The ideal state really. Can be said of every time we behave, feel and (re)act to our environment, using all the resources available to an adult (reason, patience, openness, growth, sincerity, honesty, resilience, etc).
Parent
Sometimes we unconsciously imitate our parents, or of others who were parent-figures to us. When I do so, I am said to be in a Parent ego-state. Parents tend to be judgmental, responsible, rigid, impatient and occasionally insincere.
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 a Child ego-state. Child state is close to the Freudian “Id”: Shirking responsibility, throwing exaggerated tantrums, romping happily or angrily.
Notation: The use of capitals is deliberate in TA when describing roles: Capitals are always used when referring to the ego-states (Parent, Adult, Child). A lower case word describes a real-life parent, adult or child (this is also in structural analysis)
• The Functional Ego State Model
The functional model in Transactional Analysis describes these core roles in more detail and meaning. It integrates the relational nature of TA: We do not look at someone “in a role” independently but someone in a role, matching someone else’s.
The functional ego model gives particular importance to “breaking” down two key types of role: Child and Parent. The Child ego-state is divided into Free Child and Adapted Child, the Parent ego-state is divided between Nurturing Parent and Controlling Parent.
Adapted Child
When we behave as we did when children by adapting to the demands of a parent.
Free Child
When we behave in ways that were independent of parental pressures. Behaving in uncensored childhood ways.
Controlling Parent
When we behave think or go through emotional states that we mimic from our parents. Also known as “Critical Parent”.
Nurturing Parent
When an behave in ways similar to how our parents did when they were expressing love and care.
You will notice that the “Adult” ego-state is not separated, because it is whole: It reacts broadly well to his/her environment, uses an independent and resourceful approach to communicate, learn, accept. Behaviour, thoughts and feelings are to the here-and-now situation.
Karpman’s Drama Triangle
Metaphor has always been central to Transactional Analysis, making it maybe more of a humanistic, philosophical and artistic school of thought than the name suggests. Life is seen as a “game” as a “narrative” “script”. The immediate aftermath of WW2 also had precipitated access to a variety of new dramatic devices and fashions (absurdist theatre of Beckett and Ionesco, silent miming of Marcel Marceau, mass TV media, telenovelas, etc.) Times had been dramatic and there was drama everywhere, including in Karpman’s mind, as a simple extension behind Berne’s ego-states.
His model is therefore very similar to the Functional ego-state model, but includes a new variety of actors, each with specific roles, dynamics, challenges and responsibilities. It met with quick adoption in the medical field as the roles it described were more accessible and vivid to the layman, who obviously needed to be engaged for any kind of therapy. It is widely used to this day in psychosexual and couples therapy.
Connection and power; dependence and independence in Karpman’s Drama Triangle
For Karpman (and many philosophers such as Nietzsche) power (and responsibility) drives everything at some fundamental level. In simple terms, power and responsibility inform directly the “Script” that any one of us can be following in a given context. The script is about early learned templates shaping how we make sense of the world, how we solve issues, and how we treat others.
Karpman’s Drama Triangle illustrates a different triangle than Transactional Analysis, following similar patterns:
Karpman’s Drama Triangle Roles
The Rescuer
Someone unaware or unwilling to look at their own issues and vulnerability to “rescue” someone else. Rescuers often do more than their fair share of work, proactively offer help or taking helpful action of their own accord without necessarily validating it is help that the other person wants. Similarly, helping the other person may not be entirely what the rescuer him/herself wants either. Rescuers often act in this fashion to later end feeling unfairly treated, unappreciated. Rescuers “transfer” their personal responsibility on the rescuee, which helps not taking full responsibility of their own.
Rescuers invariably end up migrating to another role that of the “Victim”. Rescuers may be occasionally perceived by others as being the Persecutor.
The Victim
“Victims” typically experience loss of control over their environment, over their adequacy for their perceived responsibilities. Victims often look for rescuers to take care of them.
How their relation with rescuers evolve is specific but can follow broad established patterns: If the Victim feels at some point that they are not being looked after, overwhelmed or even persecuted by their rescuer, they may then turn to Persecutors. However, the Victim will continue somehow feeling as the Victim in the dynamic, not the Persecutor however they act like it.
The Persecutor
The “Persecutor” typically is unaware of their own power, or semi-consciously underplays their own power so as to be able to exert as much of it on the Victim. Effectively, the script followed by Persecutors is to “discount” their own power, so that real-life events fit better with their often critical and controlling ways.
It is worth noting that if some individuals may rather follow one of these roles than another, that these roles can change very quickly depending not just on the individual but the context, the timing, the value or issue at hand, etc. We all oscillate between these 3 states, and it must be warned that people should be easily branded as one or another. Anyone in the “triangle” may at any time be experienced as the Persecutor by the others. However their own internal perception may be that they are being persecuted, and that they are the Victim.
Obviously there are very real-life situations where the Persecutor is deliberately persecuting the other person. In that case the Persecutor is no longer playing a “Game“, in the Transactional Analysis sense of the word, as the Persecutor is operating from a place of conscious awareness. The point is, these describe real life events, but also general trends, and/or a variety of quick changes that can happen in everyone of us.
How to address discounting and disowning in Karpman’s drama triangle
At heart Karpman posits that each of the positions in the triangle is an extreme, most of us are somewhat in the middle. But the extreme positions bring imbalance, unfairness, structural stress. These 3 extreme positions are a result of being discounted according to Karpman.
- The Rescuer needs to take responsibility for him/herself, own their vulnerability and address it with their own power.
- The Victim needs to own their vulnerability, take responsibility in their own name and recognise they have power and can use it appropriately.
The Persecutor needs initially to own their power, rather than be afraid of it or use it covertly.
Some later researchers have also “adapted” Karpman’s drama triangle into a variety of more positive and creative toned ones. Moving from a “problem/anxiety” lens, they kept the general actors and vectors but replaced them with more positive names, to foster a more inspiring, less traumatic description. We attach here that of TED’s The Empowerment Dynamic (effectively addressing the power roles in a positive light):
Life-script in Transactional Analysis Introduction and Definition
Script as we mentioned above can cover any patterned behaviour from basicest of interactions, to life-long scripting.
Transactional Analysis asserts that we all follow an existential plan, a basic idea of what we feel/think is right, worth doing, how we learn about the world, what values we cherish, what states we favour.
As for PCT or Psychoanalysis in their own ways, TA places much emphasis on early childhood development. Transactional Analysis believes that children lay down life plans very early on. Some of the life plan is openly “decided” and some is unconscious. Many children born to close, similar circumstances end up adopting very different life plans. By the same token research on twins has also shown a high potential for similar life plans, even for twins separated at birth and raised in wildly different environments. It is a mixed bag.
Script decisions and life-plans
The life plan of a child is built gradually through a series of “Script decisions”, largely influenced by parents. The messages conveyed by parents to children vary themselves from body language (facial expressions, non-verbal) to fully conscious preferences for specific choices (philosophical, cultural, political etc.)
These script decisions are made also too early on in life for any kind of mature awareness, that we only acquire later on in life. The position of a child at birth is one of ‘basic trust’ and that the mother will respond unconditionally to the child’s needs. We choose the scripts to a point, we are influenced to a point, but we are generally unaware of the script decisions that built our life plan.
Script decisions start happening in Transactional Analysis development theory when a baby is confronted to his/her first issues (parent absent, parent uncooperative). The script formation will simply be whatever get the baby attention and/or the desired support, response, etc. The positive, reinforcing communication of the script (whatever worked) is called in Transactional Analysis a “Script Message” and is central to early Script Decisions making.
Script Messages in Transactional Analysis
Script messages can be verbal, non-verbal (faces, tones, smells, movements). Other seemingly random events in a child’s environment – loud noises; parental absence. Transactional Analysis includes a wide variety of media and sources, in whatever format life doled them out to us, in its consideration of “scripts”.
Aggression, silence, passive aggression, manipulation, criticism, words, tones, all manners of experiences and go into our script building, much of it unconsciously.
Non-verbal messages
Non-verbal messages are considered to be the most potent, but they can also be potentially reinforced by verbal messages. In any case non-verbal messaging influences script decisions in early childhood, particularly pre-speech.
These messages are generally understood in Transactional Analysis to come from the parent’s Child ego-state, in the form of injunctions (a facial expression implying “don’t do that!”) or permissions (an approbative grunt meaning “It’s ok to…”)
Verbal Messages
Those can be described as the ‘voices in our heads’ stored in the Parent ego state and are known as ‘counterinjunctions’.
These messages, which originate from a parent’s own Parent ego state, lead to a set of alternative decisions called ‘counterscript’.
Counterscript consists of commands and definitions of the world issued to the child – for example ‘Be Good’, ‘Work Hard’, ‘Be A Good Boy’ – requiring ‘acquiescence to the cultural and social demands that are transmitted through the Parent.
