Terms, Concepts and Ideas helpful for understanding Transactional Analysis in perspective

General Terms, Concepts and Ideas

There are some terms, concepts and ideas that help to study and understand Transactional Analysis. They are stated and explained here:

Ø Reality: Reality is whatever engages us or we get engaged in. Some realities are: we ourselves or about ourselves; others or about others; animate and inanimate objects or about such objects; issues, incidents, events, occurrences or about them; objectives, tasks, goals or about them; situations, problems, difficulties, conditions and challenges or about them; matters of money, health, travel, assets and possessions; and matters of topical interest - like sports, politics, world issues and discussion topics; feelings and emotions of hurt, pain, insult, neglect, isolation, guilt, embarrassment, anxiety, distress and similar other and engaging in thinking about the causes of these feelings and emotions and reflecting on the behaviour of persons who caused them.  

Ø Reality Situation: Reality is whatever engages us or we get engaged in. Reality situation is the resulting mind engagement and its affect. It is a situation arising from manipulations by persons, institutions, organisations, bodies and things. We ourselves are perpetrators of manipulations, and victims of manipulations at hands of others. Situations that startle us or take us by surprise are Reality Situations.

Ø Reality Principle: It is a mind-set and an approach that helps a person to wait, assess, evaluate and then act. This after weighing the consequences and outcomes of each of the available courses of actions. It therefore reduces the possibility of one committing mistakes. It prevents us from being impulsive in reaching to conclusions, expressing opinion, decision making and responding. It helps us to conceptualise the reality accurately and deal with in effective ways.

Ø Reality Testing: It is the act of checking subjective view of reality against objective facts.  

Ø Social Control: It is a capacity to resist the manipulation by others and also the capacity to resist the impulse to manipulate others. It helps in better self-management, other-person management, relationships management and generally in managing our life and living.

Ø Psyche: Our mental activities, evaluations, assessments, responses happen in auto mode. We also happen to engage in intense mind talk that evaluates, labels, justifies, blames oneself or another or others. It is difficult for us to disengage from such activity. We are also hijacked by mind processes getting us to do things that may harm us in the process. Such actions are undertaken impulsively. We are as though psyched. That non material entity which structures state of mind is the psyche.

Ø Mind: Mind is a name for the space in which processes of our thinking, feeling, evaluations, understanding, reasoning and experiencing; planning, imagining, dreaming and flights of fantasy; the smarting in a variety of emotional overcharges occur. The processes in the mind almost always take place unknown to us.

Ø Psyche and Mind: Psyche is an internal controller of the mind. The psyche may be imagined as being structured by associated memories of experiences that bear upon  a person’s worth, value and esteem. These attributes concern oneself, others, capacity to deal with situations and problems and entitlements to enjoy or limit attributes of happiness, love, affection, importance and success among many others.  The states and engagements of the mind may be considered as happenings due to the activation of psychic mechanisms.

Ø Human Behaviour: By behaviour is meant verbal and non-verbal expressions by people. Verbal components are words, volume, tone, sentence structures, rhythm and delivery. Non verbal components are pose, posture, body movements, facial expressions, slants of the head and the body and similar other.

Ø Man is an Energy System: We human beings can be conceived as wonderful energy systems. Like any energy system we are continually trying to reach a state of tranquility. (Berne E., Mind In Action, Chapter Two - 1) Over time this energy system achieves a sort of “off centre balance” by getting accustomed with dealing with tensions through a process of adaptation. We seek a path of least resistance to relieve tensions as they arise. A person who has the best suited methods for addressing the causes of tensions is best equipped to live a life at peace with himself, with others and circumstances of life as they arise. (Berne E., Mind In Action). In case we experience difficulties in dealing with the situations of life it is best to relieve the energy system of tension instead of doing something with the person.

Ø Consciousness: Consciousness is an ability in us to experience internal and external processes consciously. Consciously means in a deliberate and intentional way. Our capacity to understand, interpret and evaluate the world in which we live, events that happen in it, the conclusions in many fields of human endeavour - sciences, arts, philosophies, economics, finance and commerce fields, the happenings within us, our perceptions and evaluations is limited by our consciousness.

Ø Psychology is a scientific study of mental processes such as perception, memories, dreams, cognition, emotion, that affect behaviour. Psychology is a science of behaviour and mind including conscious and unconscious phenomena. It helps to understand and interpret the processes that trigger, control and direct thinking, feeling and behaviour It also helps to understand the inter-connectedness between them. The same reality is perceived by us at different times, in different places, under different situations and circumstances, for different reasons in different ways sometimes being mutually contradictory at times. It helps us to review and revise our perceptions, beliefs and understanding of reality over time. Studies in psychology are done in many ways. Some are studying mental experience and consciousness by trained introspection; by making empirical studies; by studying changes in behaviour due to adaptation; or by studying changes that occur due to influence and programming.

Ø Ego is that part of the mind which is in contact with and aware about the outside world on the one hand and also charged with the job to end conflicts between the superintending constituents of personality on the one hand and the unbridled pleasure seeking aspect of personality on the other. The job of the ego is to keep thoughts, judgments, interpretations and behaviour practical and efficient in accordance with the Reality Principle. (Berne E. Mind in Action).

Ø Pathology: Pathology concerns the reactions to injury. Such reactions may be structured as a response structured by real, implanted, imagined or hallucinated perceptions. Pathology constitutes a defence mechanism that helps mentally afflicted persons to remain in reasonable control of their own wellness, responses to others and reality situations and challenges of life. Pathology however manifests as being dysfunctional in nature and therefore  significantly affects others with whom the person comes in contact. Not only that the person is under a limiting spell of living life, dealing with others and responding to reality situations and challenges of life reasonably well.

Ø  Psychopathology: Psychopathology in transactional analysis concerns presenting and understanding the manner in which personality components limit the capacity of the Adult to aid mental wellness. It also concerns offering a plausible model to understand activation of dysfunctional personality components that cause pathology.

Ø Personality: Personality is an organised body of psychic structures based on incorporated ‘beliefs’. These are ‘beliefs’ about oneself, others - particular and generally, the understanding about oneself, others particular and generally, and the quality of life endowments. The activated psychic structures show up as patterns of thinking, feeling and corresponding patterns of manifesting behaviours and responses to reality situations. These psychic structures mostly get activated in an auto mode. TA postulates that these ‘beliefs’ are reached by a process of early life ‘decisions’ people make in response to freedom limiting parenting styles. Thus personality may be said to be an organised psychic mechanisms that structures responses and reactions to reality situations within bounds of compulsions and limitations in contexts of thinking, feeling, experiencing, perceiving, understanding and interpreting reality.

Ø Transactional Analysis: Transactional Analysis is a name coined by a group of early practitioners who were mostly psychiatrists. Berne conducted Weekly Social Psychiatry Seminars at his home in San Francisco to test test the propositions he put forth to implement group therapy. TA represented and still represents a transactional approach in practice of psychotherapy based on observation and interpretation of interactions - called ‘transactions’ in terms of the activated personality structures - called ‘ego states’. Transactional Analysis is therefore a method of practicing psychotherapy in a given way. It aims to offer cure. This ‘cure’ proceeds through six stages of treatment ending in script cure. This script cure is achieved by installation of a new personality structure. Thus the early definition of Transactional Analysis is ‘a systematic individual and social psychiatry’. Berne elaborated this term by saying that it concerned ‘the psychiatric aspects of specific transactions or sets of transactions which take place between two or more particular individuals at a given time and place’(Berne E., Preface to Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy).

Today Transactional Analysis is presented to be a Social Psychology. By social psychology is meant a scientific (empirical) study about how the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of people are formulated by the actual, imagined or implied influences of others.  

It is now some 50 years since Transactional Analysis came to be accepted as a systematic method for professionals from various streams such as clinical, organisational, educational and clergy to practice it in their areas of specialisation. It has been defined in the past as ‘a theory of personality and a systematic psychotherapy for personal growth and personal change’ and ‘a theory of personality providing systematic methods for personal growth and professional development’.

Ø Penfield Experiments: Wilder Penfield is a famous neuro-scientist of the 1950s. He recorded what his conscious patients reported of their recalled experiences when parts of their brain were touched by electric probes. The interesting part was that they not only reported past events in real time but also related their understanding and its meaning. This last meaning part makes his findings important.

Ø Meaning: The Wikipedia says that the word meaning has many meanings. They are existential (the worth of life), linguistic (as communicated through the use of language), non-linguistic (as communicated by the senses of the words independent of its linguistic uses), philosophical, psychological (as it pertains to knowledge and understanding),  semiotics (as signs and symbols with assigned meaning), and pertaining to life.

Ø Meaning in context of script decision: Script Decisions are based on early life experiences. These script decisions are based on what we make out (the meaning of) to be the reason for a style of parenting to which we are subjected. The meanings held to be true by the child for whatever reason has a determining influence on the structuring of life plans. They have‘life long’ effect on one’s perception of oneself, of others and of the quality of life entitlements.