Scripts People Live

Transactional Analysis of Life Scripts

Claude Steiner

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780802196804
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A "stimulating and thought-provoking" guide to help you make productive and autonomous choices toward rewriting your life ( Los Angeles Times ). We choose a "life script" at an early age. But you can change its course. Whether born into wealth or poverty, into nurturing families or damaged abusers, fostered by strict parents or careless and undisciplined ones, each individual still has a spiritual core that exists independent of the environment and is equally crucial to his or her destiny. Countering the fundamental principle of psychiatry which asserts that emotional and mental distress comes from within, Claude Steiner believes that people are innately healthy but develop a pattern early in life based upon negative or positive influences of those around them. Those influences can rule every detail of our lives until our death. Thus children decide, however unconsciously, whether they will be happy or depressed, winners or failures, strong or dependent, caring or cruel, and having decided, they spend the rest of their lives making that decision come true. For those who choose to live by their negative script, the consequences can be disastrous unless they make a conscious decision to change. In Scripts We Live, Steiner tackles the puzzle of human fate. He reveals what determines our life scripts, and how each person's combination of spirit and circumstance contributes to the final path that life takes. And he offers hopeful advice and practical analysis so that we all can rewrite for ourselves more meaningful and fulfilling lives.

SECTION 1
TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS THEORY

When organizing this book I had a difficult time deciding what to do with the next section. Logically, because it is an overview of existing transactional analysis (TA) theory, it belongs here, ahead of all the other sections.

However, it is dry, tedious, and, some even say, boring. It may give readers the impression that it is an omen of things to come and prevent them from reading on. I even thought at one time it should become an appendix at the end of the book rather than an impenetrable barrier standing in the way of the land of tragic and banal scripts and the riches of the Good Life beyond.

Obviously, though, logic won out. However, with a simple flick of the thumb, you can bypass this section—and refer to it only whenever you need to find definitions for terms mentioned later on in the book. Every new concept is italicized and referenced in the index, so you should have an easy time finding it. So read on or skip; I hope you enjoy the book.¹

1 Structural and Transactional Analysis

The building blocks of the theory of transactional analysis (TA) are three observable forms of ego function: the Parent, the Adult, and the Child. They may seem to resemble three basic psychoanalytic concepts—the superego, the ego, and the id—but they are, in fact, quite different.

The Parent, Adult, and Child differ from the superego, ego, and id in that they are all manifestations of the ego. Thus, they represent visible behavior rather than hypothetical constructs. When a person is in one of the three ego states, for instance the Child, the observer is able to see and hear the Child sing, skip, and laugh. TA therapists focus on the ego and consciousness because they have found these concepts explain and predict social behavior better than other concepts.

Structural Analysis,

A person operates in one of three distinct ego states at any one time. Diagnosis of ego states is made by observing the visible and audible characteristics of a person’s appearance or ego. The ego states are distinguishable on the basis of skeletal-muscular variables and by the content of verbal utterances (words and sounds). Certain gestures, postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and intonations, as well as certain words, are typically associated with each one of the three ego states. In addition to what she sees in the person being observed, the observer can use her own emotional reactions and thoughts as information in the diagnosis; a parental reaction in the observer may indicate that a Child ego state is being observed, while feelings of inferiority or rebelliousness may mean that the ego state being watched is Parent, and so on.

The most complete diagnosis of an ego state includes three sources of information: 1) The behavior of the person being observed; 2) the emotional reaction of the observer; and 3) the opinion of the person being observed. When diagnosing an ego state a transactional analyst doesn’t say, “That’s your Child!” but, “You act and sound as if you were in your Child ego state, and it feels like it is your Child because it brings out nurturing feelings in me. What do you think?” Naturally, if there are other observers their opinions must be taken into account as well. (See Chapter 6 for a further discussion of transactional analysis diagnosis.)

THE CHILD

The Child ego state is essentially preserved in its entirety from childhood. When a man is functioning in this ego mode, he behaves as he did when he was a little boy. It appears that the Child is never more than about seven years old and may be as young as one week or one day. When a person is in the Child state, she sits, stands, walks, and speaks as she did when she was, say, three years old. This childlike behavior is accompanied by the corresponding perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of a three-year-old.

The Child ego state tends to be fleeting in grownups because of a general societal injunction against “childish behavior.” However, Child ego states can be observed in situations which are structured to permit childlike behavior, such as sports events, parties, and revivals. A good place to view the Child ego state in grownups is at a football game. Here, childlike expressions of joy, anger, rage, and delight can be observed, and it is easy to see how, aside from bone size and secondary sexual characteristics, a man jumping for joy when his team scores is indistinguishable from a five-year-old boy. The similarity goes further than the observable behavior since the man is not only acting as a boy, but feeling, seeing, and thinking as a boy does.

In the Child ego state, a person tends to use short words and expletives like “golly,” “wow,” “gee,” and “nice,” delivered in a high-pitched voice. He adopts stances characteristic of children: a downward tilt of the head, upturned eyes, feet apart or pigeon-toed. When sitting, the person may balance on the edge of the chair, fidgeting, rocking, or slouching. Jumping, clapping, laughing expansively, or crying are all part of the repertoire of the Child ego state.

Aside from situations which permit childlike behavior, the Child can be observed in a fixated form in so-called “schizophrenics” and in such persons as comedians, actors, and actresses whose profession requires them to appear habitually in a Child ego state. Of course, the Child ego state is readily observable in children.

A Child ego state much younger than a year is rarely observed, since persons who habitually express this ego state are usually severely disturbed. However, this type of a very young Child appears in “normal” persons under circumstances of severe stress, or when great pain or joy is felt.

The value of the Child should not be underestimated. It is said to be the best part of a person and the only part that can really enjoy itself. It is the source of spontaneity, sexuality, creative change, and is the mainspring of joy.

THE ADULT

The Adult ego state is essentially a computer, an impassionate organ of the personality, which gathers and processes data and makes predictions. The Adult gathers data about the world through the senses, processes them according to a logical program, and makes predictions when necessary. Its perception is diagrammatic. While the Child perceives in color, in space, and from one point of view at a time, the Adult may perceive in black and white, often in two dimensions, and from several points of view at the same time. In the Adult ego state, a person is temporarily detached from her own affective and other internal processes, a condition indispensable for the proper observation and prediction of external reality. Thus, in the Adult ego state the person “has no feelings,” even though she may be able to appraise her Child or Parent feelings. Often the Parent ego state is confused with the Adult ego state especially when it is calm and appears to be acting rationally. However, the Adult is not only rational but it is also without emotion.

According to Piaget’s detailed discussion of “formal operations,”¹ it appears that the Adult grows gradually during childhood as a consequence of the interaction between the person and the external world.

THE PARENT

The Parent is essentially made up of behavior copied from parents or authority figures. It is taken whole, without modification. A person in the Parent ego state is a play-back of a video tape recording of his parent or whoever was or is in place of his parents.

Thus, the Parent ego state is essentially nonperceptive and noncognitive. It is simply a constant and sometimes arbitrary basis for decisions, the repository of traditions and values, and as such it is important to the survival of children and civilizations. It operates validly when adequate information for an Adult decision is not available; but, in certain people, it operates in spite of adequate Adult information.

The Parent, while taken whole from others, is not a completely fixated ego state since it can change over time. Thus, a person’s experiences can add to or subtract from his Parent’s repertoire of behavior. For instance, rearing of a first-born child will greatly increase the range of Parent responses of a person. The Parent ego state changes throughout life, from adolescence to old age, as the person encounters new situations that demand parental behavior, and as the person finds authority figures or admired persons from whom examples for such behavior are adopted.

For instance, it is possible for people to learn nurturing Parent behavior and discard the oppressive aspects of the Parent. Some Parent behavior is genetically built into people, such as the tendency to nurse and defend one’s young, but most human Parent behavior is learned, built as it were, on those two innate tendencies: nurture and protection.

VOICES IN THE HEAD

Structural analysis is organized around the fundamental concepts of these ego states. Some further concepts in structural analysis will be advanced.

Ego states operate one at a time; that is, a person is always in one and only one of the three ego states. This ego state is called the executive, or is said to have executive power. While one ego state has the executive power, the person may be aware of literally standing beside himself, observing his own behavior. The feeling that the “self is not the ego state in the executive usually occurs when the Child or Parent has executive power, while the “real self,” perhaps the Adult, observes without being able to behave. Thus, while only one ego state is cathected —that is, imbued with the energy necessary to activate muscular complexes involved in behavior—it is possible for another ego state to become conscious to the person, even though it is unable to activate the musculature.

Since a person can be acting in one ego state while another state observes, internal dialogues between these ego states become possible. For example, after a few drinks at a party, a man may be swept by the music into an expansive, childlike dance. His Child is now in the executive while the Parent observes his gyrations and mutters something like, “You’re making a fool of yourself, Charlie,” or “This is all very well, but what about your slipped disk?” Often this comment by the nonexecutive ego state decathects the Child and transfers the executive to the Parent, in which case Charlie will stop dancing, perhaps blush, and retire to his seat where the situation will be reversed and Charlie, now in the Parent ego state, will look disapprovingly at other dancers. Becoming aware of the conversations that occur between the executive and the observing state is a very important step in therapy.

These internal dialogues can happen between any two ego states. One specific dialogue, between the Critical Parent and the Natural Child (see p. 44), is most relevant to psychotherapy.

Some people find that they are constantly plagued by statements which they perceive as voices in their heads. These statements sometimes are even audible and felt to come from outside the person, but they are more commonly understood to come from within one’s own head. They are usually put-down statements like, “You’re bad, stupid, ugly, crazy, and sick,” in short, “You’re not O.K.,” or statements predicting failure, or preventing action, such as, “You can’t do it,” or, “That is a stupid idea, don’t try it.”

These internal messages have been observed by other theorists such as Ellis¹ and Freud.² Ellis speaks of “catastrophic expectations” and Freud speaks of the “primitive, harsh superego.” Wyckoff has named this Parent ego state which is the enemy of the natural Child, the Pig Parent.³

EXCLUSIONS AND CONTAMINATIONS

At times it is difficult to diagnose ego states because people tend to masquerade their Child and Parent as Adult ego states. Opinionated and judgmental attitudes are often couched in rational language. The Parent, with a straight face pretending to be Adult, may express very logical points of view. From his Adult ego state, a husband might ask his wife, “Why isn’t dinner ready?” From his Parent masquerading as an Adult, he may ask the identical question. The difference, however, is that in the former case the husband is simply asking a question, while in the latter he is attempting to pressure and blame his wife for being lazy and disorganized.¹

Sometimes two sets of muscles may seem to be powered by two separate ego states at the same time. For instance, a lecturer’s voice and facial muscles may indicate an Adult ego state, while an impatient toss of the hand reveals a Parent ego state. In such cases, it is likely that the behavior is Parent in Adult disguise and therefore Parent, or that Parent and Adult are alternating rapidly.

Alternation between ego states depends on the permeability of the ego state boundaries. Permeability is an important variable in psychotherapy. Low permeability leads to exclusion of appropriate ego states. Exclusions of the Parent, Adult, and Child ego states are all problematic since they preclude the use of ego states that, in a given situation, may be more useful and advantageous than the excluding ego state.

For example, at a party the excluding Adult is less useful than the Child. The purpose of the party is to have fun, which the Child can do, but the Adult, analyzing and computing data dispassionately, would deter the party’s purpose. A father with an excluding Adult prevents the more useful Parent from properly raising hi...