OnTransactional Analysis

I had found the works of Eric Berne once very interesting. His book on “Games People Play’ was intriguing for me... He introduced a new concept into psychology, the Transactional Analysis. It simplifies human social activities into the realm of Stimulus- Response. This is essentially a Behaviorist approach. This group of psychologists does not take the existence of mind for granted. To them the chemical activities of the brain is more important. So psycho- analysis a la Freud is not their forte, they rely on observable and tangible phenomena for their analysis. The theory being there is no organ in the body called the mind.

Behaviorism goes way back, you would probably recall the experiments of Pavlov on dogs which are still used in educational theories. Eric Berne and his followers made wide use of the works of neurologists in developing their theory. Penfield’s researches into the brain had established that the human brain performs like a high fidelity tape recorder (now we may probably call it a digital recorder). Certain points of the brain of the patients who were being operated upon were stimulated with the use of electrodes during surgery. This brought forth a recall of certain events in their past. Almost invariably these events were linked to the emotional experiences of the time. Tastes, smells, emotional responses were all recorded in detail inside the brain and they retained their original clarity even decades afterwards.

These discoveries more or less made the seat of the human consciousness at the brain. Berne relied more on the works of R. Spitzs for the development of his theory. Spitz, working with infants, had found that unless they are stroked, fondled etc they would sort of fade away and would fall prey to various illnesses. This was the theory behind Berne’s concept of stimulus- hunger. Such stimulus –hunger is evident in individuals shut up inside solitary cells according to Berne. The total absence of stroking would even bring forth psychosis in such persons.

But the human child grows up. It can not be stroked and fondled always. Then what happens is that the physical stroking is replaced with more subtle forms of stroking. This is a compromise on the part of the individual. Praises form the major part of this kind of stroking. This comes through recognition. The individual hungers after recognition and if it is not provided the phenomenon of fading occurs. This is the basis of Berne’s conception of recognition –hunger.

The basic factor in these hungers is the Stroking, and Berne take it as a fundamental unit of social action and he says that exchange of strokes between individuals in a social situation constitutes a transaction, from this Berne moves on to the need for structuring time. Stroke or recognition is necessary for survival. But the social intercourse does not merely consist of exchanging strokes with each other. It requires further work, that of filling up of waking hours with activity. This comes in the form of structuring time or structure -hunger. It requires the involvement of all the members in a given situation. The operational aspect of this activity is called by Berne as programming. According to him there are three types of programming, Material Social and Individual. All work comes under the material category. Good manners etc come under Social category. Individual programming is the aspect from which games originate.

He theorizes that the bulk of social activity consists of playing games. In these games activities from suicide to cannibal feasts may be included. That is, the games are not mere games they are often serious activities. He has categorized the effort to structure time into five groups. 1. Rituals 2.Pastimes 3. Games 4. Intimacy and 5. Activity. These transactions happen between individuals with the aim of obtaining satisfaction. They are generally devised to help people find equilibrium and relieve tension.

Berne makes use of his method of Transactional Analysis to throw further light on the subject of games. His basic concept is that human personality is divided into three parts. This he calls the 1.Parent. the 2. Adult and the 3. Child. These are not technical terms. In fact the system uses such colloquial terms to make the concepts intelligible to the layman. This is how the three parts of personality is described by Berne.

Parent

Ego states which resemble those of parental figures

Adult

Ego states which are automatically directed towards objective appraisal of reality

Child

Ego states which were fixated early in child hood

Berne says that an individual would exhibit one of the above states in any one moment in his life. The above statements do not require many explanations to make their meanings clear.

Yet the parent and child are said to be exhibited in two ways. In one the person takes on the role of the parents being authoritarian, in the second instances he acts in the way his parents asked him to. As for the Child it is exhibited in two ways, the adapted and natural child. The natural child is spontaneous, but the adapted child acts as a child in the manner that his parents wanted him to.

The Adult in the individual is necessary for survival. The parent part on the one hand makes many of our responses automatic helping us to save time and on the other hand helps us to bring up our own children. And the Child in us is the seat of all the creativity, intuition and spontaneous drive and enjoyment. Thus all aspects are needed for survival of the individual in one regard or the other.

All human transactions involve the activation of one or more parts of the personality in persons who are interacting. Thus there can be complimentary, simple or crossed transactions due to the preponderance of various parts of the personality. These are generally the cause of troubles and problems in an individual’s life. The main theme of the book is that people play various games to obtain strokes and to structure time. It is argued that early on in life people take on certain life positions and plays on according to their influence. The only escape route is to stop playing games and attain autonomy. But Berne is of the view that most would find it difficult to survive without the games which structure time in their lives. Also the relationships of the person with others are formed or severed by the help of games. They are significant in this sense. But mostly games are debilitating. According to Berne autonomy from games rids a person of the debilities imposed by them.

Only few individuals can replace these with what he calls the “awareness” “spontaneity” and “intimacy”. These could be described as follows. Awareness is being aware of this moment, the present in its essence, Spontaneity is living in the present and intimacy is the relationship bereft of any limiting selfish feelings between two individuals.
Some time has passed since I came across the book. I wonder whether this approach is still fashionable, or if it is still used to correct emotional disturbances in individuals. More researches into the nature of brain and its functioning have been conducted in the world. Though following the descriptions of the games are interesting I have some doubts on the efficacy of the system in these times. The whole system of Transactional Analysis seems to be rather simplistic in approach to me. It limits itself to the analysis of the period after the birth of the individual (or more precisely from the point the child starts to make responses to stimuli) and does not take hereditary factors into consideration. The individual is a repository of the experience of humanity and that determines some aspects of his behavior. It would be too simplistic to ascribe them wholly to Parent.

Also the system does not deal with induced states of fissure in individuality by methods like Hypnosis. Perhaps multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia could be explained away in some manner. But there are things like altered states of consciousness and the subtle practices like shifting of consciousness which has been proved achievable; there is also the brutal method of splitting the personality into different segments unrelated to each other and programming them for various nefarious purposes. The psyche of the modern man is buffeted from all sides by subliminal and electronic stimuli and even personality of the individual is not taken as granted. Some in the world are trying to turn most of the human race into remote controlled robots. In such a scenario would methods of treatment and analysis like Transactional Analysis be useful?

I do not know. Perhaps you do?