Start Here To Find Out About TA

Eric Berne at work

When delivering individual therapy in Manchester I use Transactional Analysis as a way of guiding the therapy session.  In this blog post I am going to outline the basic ideas in Transactional Analysis (TA). See it as an airport from which you can jet off to other pages of my blog. As with any airport, it’s always good to have an idea of the possible destinations you can go to before making your decision. One of the reasons I love Transactional Analysis so much is because it has a great framework to hang ideas about human personality onto. No one is pretending it has all the answers. No theoretical model out there has. For me it’s a bloody good start though, and it allows my poor old addled brain to start to understand how we humans are wired up and why we do such peculiar things.

The birth of TA

Eric Berne (1910-1970) is the founder of Transactional Analysis and a general all round good egg. He started off as a Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, but, to cut a long story short, got fed up with the slow pace and big complicated words of psychoanalysis and created Transactional Analysis instead. Thanks Eric, you saved me from having to buy a chaise longue and smoke a pipe (though I do have a beard and am known to say “tell me about your father” here and there).

Below I am going to outline the basic theoretical ideas that Eric Berne came up with. These have been added to, improved and generally transmogrified throughout the years by other great Transactional Analysts, but they are still remain the fundamental building blocks of TA.

1. Ego states. This was Eric’s way of breaking down personality into manageable bite size chunks. In order to understand behaviour it helps to be able to do this. The three ego states are Parent, Adult and Child. The rules say that when we are talking about an ego state then we capitalize the first letter to distinguish from an actual parent adult or child. For more information on these bad boys check out my post “Ego States, Urges and Me-part 1” where I link ego states with wanting an Apple iPad (hmmm – wierd, still haven’t got one!)
2. Strokes. Strokes are “a unit of recognition”. That could be a “hello”, a smile, a nod, a conversation, a smack across the chops or a pat on the back. Claude Steiner, one of Eric’s first students and a good friend of Eric, took the concept of strokes and flew with it. It’s one of my favourite ideas in Transactional Analysis and I blog about it in the post “Facebook, Twitter and the Stroke Bonanza“. Read, enjoy and join me on Facebook and Twitter so you can receive my inane ramblings every few hours (sign me up, sign me up I hear you cry!)
3. Transactional Analysis Proper. I love that phrase, it just sounds so…posh! To understand what this is all about you have to really understand the whole ego state thing so go back up to number 1 and stop trying to jump ahead you eager beaver! Read it? Good! Now I give you full permission to read “How to shut your boss up in one sentence“.
4. Time Structuring. A bit of a whopper this one, so I’ve had to break it down into a couple of posts. The basic idea of time structuring is that human beings like structure. It’s the only way we avoid the pain of boredom. So we find different ways to spend our time and each different way exposes us to other people with varying degrees of intimacy. I have outlined the framework for this time structuring in the post “The Fear of Boredom – How We Manage Time“  and dedicated a whole post to one of our most significant use of time in “Transactional Analysis Games“.
5. Script. Now this is a deep concept and a bit spooky if you ask me. Eric said that by the time we are three (or six depending on who you ask), we have made a decision about how we will live our life, what will happen during our life and even, how we will die. Whooooaaa! Before you really start to panic and start wracking your brain to remember exactly what you might of decided whilst you were chomping on that rusk, I would like to remind you of the fundamental principles of TA. One of them states that as an adult you can change any decision that you have made. TA theory does not state you are on some predetermined journey, like a train on rails – in fact it’s kinda the opposite. It’s your journey, your rails and you get to drive because you have a big brain in your head that you can use to think for yourself. Read more about it in the post “Do We Choose Our Own Destiny?“

So there we have them, the basic ideas behind Transactional Analysis. If you can get your head round that lot then you’re well on the way to passing a Transactional Analysis 101. Good luck with it. I hope you enjoy the posts and I invite you to comment on them as you read. Please contact me if there is anything you feel uncertain about, need clarification on or if you think I can help you in any other way. And Thanks Eric for such a great theory!

Download your free guide to TA

Now super bonus feature!!!  If you want to download all the posts mentioned in this article in one handy pocket sized PDF guide to Transactional Analysis just click on the free Transactional Analysis ebook link here!! Transactional analysis made simple.