Greetings from my recovery vacation near Merano, in the northern part of Italy. I just have to say: It is one of the greatest places I have ever been to.
The people are very friendly, the quality of hotels in relation to their prices is very attractive; the hiking opportunities are superb; the food is amazing and everybody speaks Italian, German and English. I can only recommend it to everybody.
Therefore, today's letter is about something I read here. It is about the beginning of Dr. Eric Berne's "Games People Play".
Who was Eric Berne
Dr. Eric Berne (1910-1970) was a prominent psychiatrist and bestselling author in Montreal, Canada, and received his MD degree. He grew up at McGill University in 1935. He completed his psychiatry training in the United States and then entered the US Army as a psychiatrist.
Living his life, he invested a lot of his time into psychoanalysis but felt increasingly frustrated with the psychoanalytic approaches at the time. As a result, he began developing a new and revolutionary theory, which he called Transactional Analysis. In 1958 he published the paper "Transactional Analysis: A New and Effective Method of Group Therapy" where he outlined this new approach.
I won't get into the details of chapter 1 (Social Intercourse) and 2 (The Structuring of Time) of the introduction because they are mostly about defining the frame of scientific theory. I would rather go into Structural Analysis and Transactional Analysis, which offer two paradigm shifts that I have been thinking about since reading about the concepts.
Ego states: Parent, Adult & Child
Simplified, an ego state is the mapping of a set of behaviors related to a state of mind. I know... "simplified". But believe me: the description in the book is much more complicated! But it will get more intuitive in a minute.
The states can be categorized into the three main classes:
- ego states which resemble those of parental figures, called "Parent"
- ego states which are autonomously directed towards objective appraisal of reality, called "Adult"
- those which represent archaic relics, still-active ego states which were fixated in early childhood, called "Child"
Structural Analysis
At any given moment each individual in a social aggregation will exhibit a Parental, Adult or Child ego state, and that individuals can shift with varying degrees of readiness from one ego state to another.
This represents, from the present viewpoint, a diagram of the complete personality of any individual. It includes his Parental, Adult, and Child ego states. They are carefully segregated from each other, because they are so different and because they are so often quite inconsistent with each other.
Transactional Analysis
In a social interaction of two or more people, sooner or later one of them will communicate by speaking or indicating non-verbally the presence of the other.
There is always somebody who initiates the communication ("transactional stimulus") and another person will react related to this initiation ("transactional response").
The simplest transactions are those in which both stimulus and response arise from the Adults of the parties concerned.
Next in simplicity are Child-Parent transactions. The fevered child asks for a glass of water, and the nurturing mother brings it.
Both transactions are complementary; the response is appropriate, expected and follows the "natural order" of a healthy relationship.
The most common crossed transaction, and the one which
causes and always has caused most of the social
difficulties in the world - whether in marriage, love,
friendship - is the Crossed Transaction Type I. The
stimulus is Adult-Adult: e,g., “Maybe we should find out
why you've been drinking more lately.
The Adult response would be something like: "Yeah, I
would be interested, too."
Conversely, the pathological Child-Parent response would be: "You're always criticizing me, just like my father did," or, "You always blame me for everything."
There are levels
I could drag you deeper by talking about "Ulterior Transactions" or "Duplex Ulterior Transactions" but I think this is more than enough for now.
Perhaps one other example would be the inverted reaction, which would be an objective (Adult) observation, and the other person's response is like a parent to a child. This is one I am guilty of a lot because I always believe that I know things better.
On the other hand, I catch myself a lot at work getting addressed by a child and responding as a parent. I guess, this is what a Project Manager is all about...
So, that is what I would like to leave you with: The next time you communicate with somebody and you feel a (yours or the other person's) response emotionally off, think about what ego state of yours is communicating with which ego state of hers/his.