Transactional Analysis

Transactional Analysis (TA) is a psychology concept developed in the 1950s by Eric Berne. A purely behaviorist approach to psychology, it holds that behaviors are the result of early childhood conditioning. TA tends to reject the disease model of mental illness, viewing mental illnesses as life scripts one picks up from early childhood conditioning rather than as diseases; said mental illnesses can be cured by recognizing the script and the conditioning that led to it, and making a conscious decision to stop "living" that script. The basic concept of TA is each person has three different aspects to their personality:

• The Parent, which consists of what a person does and tells others to do because they were told it was the right way by authority figures, such as their parents, teachers, and government.
• The Adult, which consists of thoughts and behaviors resulting from reason, careful consideration, and the intellect.
• The Child, which consists of purely emotional thoughts and behaviors, such as anger and humor.

TA then analyzes interpersonal interactions in terms of which personality aspects are being communicated. These interpersonal interactions are called "transactions", and the most basic unit of a transaction is called a "stroke". Transactions between two people are analyzed by both the personality aspect of the one speaking, and of the one being spoken to. For example a child may attempt to hold an Adult-Adult conversation with their mother or father (the child's Adult personality addressing the Adult personality of their parent), but the parent may respond with a Parent-Child response (the parent's Parent addressing the child's Child), leading to misunderstandings and possibly hurt feelings on the part of the child, who was not expecting to be spoken down to. In TA, any use of the three concepts of Parent, Adult, and Child is capitalized to avoid confusion, as seen above with the child's Adult addressing the parent's Adult followed by the parent's Parent addressing the child's Child - huh?

TA also seeks to help people identify which of their behaviors are Parent and Child behaviors, and to understand that those behaviors are not always appropriate and to help people bring them under the direction and control of their Adult. TA further posits different types of human activity, in increasing order of the social interaction involved: withdrawal, procedures, rituals, games, intimacy. Intimacy is seen as the only purely honest form of social interaction; the next lowest level, games, is the most common form of transaction. A great deal of emphasis in TA is on identifying and naming the various social games, which have acronyms like "SWYMD" (See What You Made Me Do?), "NIGYSOB" (Now I've Got You Son of a Bitch), and "AIA" (Ain't It Awful?).

Eric Berne's 1963 book Games People Play was intended for the psychiatric community but became an unexpected bestseller on the self help market, leading to, in the words of the introduction by James Allen to the 2004 edition of that book, TA becoming a "pop-psychology circus". Thomas Harris' 1969 book I'm OK, You're OK became an even bigger bestseller. Claude Steiner's Games Alcoholics Play (1970) applied TA game analysis to the more specialized area of alcoholism and recovery.

The resulting fad of "game calling", some dubious pop-psychology and Human Potential Movement spinoffs from TA (such as regression/reparenting), and a segment of the TA movement taking off in the direction of postmodernism and leftist critical theory since the 1980s, all left TA's reputation tarnished and somewhat marginal among mainstream psychology once the dust settled. The old TA books remain staples within the self help book market, and some of Steiner's terms and concepts have passed into wider use within leftist critical social theory although by now far removed from their pop-psychology origins.

As an arbitrary categorization of human behavior lacking in empirical evidence, TA is often considered a pseudoscience and a pop-psychology fad.