Eric Berne and the Birth of TA — Transactional Analysis 1 (C1)

TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS · LESSON 1

Eric Berne and the Birth of TA

C1 (B2–C2) · 90 minutes

Where do you stand?

Task Give each statement a number. Be ready to defend one of your numbers.

1

strongly agree

2

mostly agree

3

on the fence

4

mostly disagree

5

strongly disagree

Your personality is fixed by the time you are seven.

You can't change other people, only yourself.

Most of what we say isn't really about what we're saying.

You can understand your own mind without an expert's help.

Setting the scene

Task In pairs, list three things that might frustrate a young doctor working inside this system. Then choose the one that would frustrate the patients most.

The United States, early 1950s. In much of psychiatry, psychoanalysis is the prestige treatment. A patient may see an analyst several times a week, for years, at high cost. The analyst listens, then interprets: the real meaning of your words lies in an unconscious mind you cannot see for yourself. The expert knows; the patient is known.

Is there a profession where you live that still works like this today?

A

TEXT A

The Outsider

Task Student A reads this text. Note the key dates and turning points: you will tell your partner the story without showing them the text.

Eric Berne was born Eric Lennard Bernstein in Montreal on 10 May 1910. His father, David, was a family doctor; his mother, Sarah, was a writer and editor. His father died of tuberculosis while Eric was still a boy, and the son followed him into medicine, qualifying as a doctor at McGill University in 1935.

He moved to the United States, trained in psychiatry at Yale and became an American citizen in 1939, later shortening his name to Berne. In 1941 he began

training as a psychoanalyst in New York. His analyst was Paul Federn, a Viennese follower of Freud whose own work used the term "ego states". After serving as an army psychiatrist from 1943 to 1946, Berne settled in Carmel, California, resumed his training at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, and studied under Erik Erikson, best known for his theory of psychosocial development. In 1947 he published The Mind in Action, a guide to psychiatry for general readers.

A

TEXT A · CONTINUED

The Outsider

In 1956, after some fifteen years of psychoanalytic training, Berne applied for full membership of the San Francisco institute. He was told he was not yet ready, and that he might reapply after three or four more years of analysis and training. The institute had not expelled him; it had asked for more time. Berne read the decision as a rejection and walked away from psychoanalysis.

The break proved productive. Before the year was out he had written two papers, both published in 1957, one of

which set out his own model of three ego states: Parent, Adult and Child. In a further paper, presented in 1957, he named his method transactional analysis. Its basic unit was the transaction: one person's remark or gesture (the stimulus) and another person's reply (the response). Instead of interpreting a hidden mind, the therapist could observe what people actually said and did to each other, here and now. And what a therapist could observe, a patient could learn to observe too.

B

TEXT B

The Movement

Task Student B reads this text. Note the key dates and turning points: you will tell your partner the story without showing them the text.

From the early 1950s Berne tested his ideas in evening seminars, first in Carmel and then in San Francisco, where a group of psychiatrists, psychologists and other clinicians met on Tuesday nights. The group became the San Francisco Social Psychiatry Seminars. Its members brought cases, argued over them and sharpened the theory together.

The language was deliberately plain. Where psychoanalysis spoke of the id, the ego and the superego, Berne spoke of Parent, Adult and Child. Repeated, unsatisfying patterns between people he

called games, and he gave them everyday names such as "Why Does This Always Happen to Me?" and "I'm Only Trying to Help You". Supporters saw this as a challenge to the expert jargon that kept patients out of the conversation. Critics would call it oversimplification.

In 1961 Berne published Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy, the first full-length account of the method, and in January 1962 the group launched the Transactional Analysis Bulletin, with Berne as editor.

B

TEXT B · CONTINUED

The Movement

In 1964 the seminars became the International Transactional Analysis Association (ITAA), created to connect practitioners far beyond California.

That same year, Grove Press published Games People Play. Its first printing was a cautious 3,000 copies. Then word spread. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut reviewed it warmly in Life magazine in June 1965, and the book went on to spend more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Over five million copies have since been sold worldwide. Its terms entered everyday speech, and in 1967 Thomas Harris's I'm OK – You're OK carried the ideas to an even wider public.

Berne did not live to see TA's peak. He died of a heart attack in July 1970, aged 60, while finishing his last book, What Do You Say After You Say Hello? Today TA is practised around the world in four main fields: psychotherapy, counselling, education and organisations.

Its popularity has always cut both ways. Fame brought readers, students and practitioners. It also left TA with a reputation, in some academic circles, as pop psychology, and research support for many of its specific claims has been thin.

Rebuild the story

Task Without showing each other your texts, build one timeline of at least ten events from 1910 to 1970, using both texts. Then write one cause-and-effect link: "Because ___, ___."

TEXT A EVENTS

1910

1920

1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

TEXT B EVENTS

Which single event was the real turning point? Agree on one.

Why did it catch on?

Task Give each explanation a number from 1 (strongest) to 6 (weakest) and agree a group ranking. Then link your number 1 to something popular today: an app, a podcast, a social-media trend.

A

Plain words: anyone could use the ideas without training.

B

Speed: it promised change in months, not years on a couch.

C

Recognition: readers saw their own families in the games.

D

Timing: a generation was questioning authority and experts.

E

Network: seminars, a bulletin and an association spread it among professionals.

F

Flattery: it's always other people who play games.

1. Is popularity evidence that a theory is good, or a warning sign?

2. Which psychology ideas are fashionable where you live right now?

READING

Three beliefs and a contract

Behind TA's diagrams sits a philosophy. Its standard textbook, TA Today by Ian Stewart and Vann Joines, sums it up in three assumptions.

People are OK. Everyone has worth, value and dignity. Behaviour can be unacceptable; the person still counts.

Everyone can think. Apart from people with severe brain damage, everyone has the capacity to think, and so everyone is responsible for deciding what they want from life.

People decide their own destiny, and these decisions can be changed. The patterns we live by were not imposed by fate. At some point, often in childhood, we

decided on them, and what was decided can be re-decided.

In practice, these beliefs produce Berne's contract: an explicit agreement between client and practitioner about what the client wants to change and how they will work on it together. The expert does not simply decide what is wrong; the client sets the goal, and responsibility is shared.

Not everyone in TA accepts the beliefs without question. In the 1970s Claude Steiner, one of Berne's early collaborators, and his colleagues argued that many people's troubles start not inside them but in their circumstances: exploitation, oppression, war.

Naïve or true?

Task Alone, give each belief a number on the scale below. Then compare with your partner. For any 4 or 5, say who could be harmed by the belief.

1

obviously true

2

mostly true

3

it depends

4

naïve

5

dangerously naïve

People are OK.

Everyone can think.

People decide their own destiny, and these decisions can be changed.

The contract: the client, not the expert, sets the goal.

1. Is "you decided this" freeing, or a way of blaming people?

2. Which belief would be hardest to defend in a hospital, a prison or a school?

What would TA say?

Task For each card, decide what each of the three beliefs would say to this person. Then decide: is that message helpful, unfair, or both? Be ready to report one card.

Tomás, 44, operations manager, Madrid

Aiko, 19, engineering student, Osaka

Funmi, 47, nurse, Lagos

Tomás shouts at his team when deadlines slip. Afterwards he apologises: "I can't help it. My father was the same. It's just how I'm made."

Aiko is failing first-year maths. "I've never been a maths person," she says. "My teacher told my parents when I was ten. Some brains just aren't built for it."

Funmi's son, 15, has stopped talking at home and is skipping school. "He's exactly like his uncle," she tells a friend. "He'll never change. I've stopped trying."

Private reflection

Task Choose one prompt and write privately. Nobody will read what you write. Sharing afterwards is optional.

Prompt 1

Is there something about yourself you decided long ago could never change? Where did that idea come from?

Prompt 2 (lighter)

Which of the three beliefs is hardest for you to accept, and why?

Has anyone moved?

Task Give each statement a number again. Has your number changed since the start of the lesson?

1

strongly agree

2

mostly agree

3

on the fence

4

mostly disagree

5

strongly disagree

Your personality is fixed by the time you are seven.

You can't change other people, only yourself.

Most of what we say isn't really about what we're saying.

You can understand your own mind without an expert's help.

Before Lesson 2

This week, notice when someone suddenly sounds like a parent, or like a child.

P

Write down one example: who said it, what they said, and what happened next. It could be a colleague, a family member, a character in a film, or you.

A

Next lesson: Parent, Adult, Child. Berne's three ego states, and what your example might reveal.

C

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (1)

REBUILD THE STORY any ten of these; A = Text A, B = Text B

1910 Born Eric Lennard Bernstein in Montreal, 10 May (A)

1935 Qualifies as a doctor at McGill University (A)

1939 Becomes an American citizen; later shortens his name to Berne (A)

1941 Begins psychoanalytic training in New York; his analyst is Paul Federn (A)

1943–1946 Army psychiatrist (A)

1947 Publishes The Mind in Action; after the war, trains in San Francisco and studies under Erik Erikson (A)

Early 1950s Evening seminars begin, in Carmel and then on Tuesday nights in San Francisco (B)

1956 Told he is not yet ready for full membership of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute; leaves psychoanalysis (A)

1957 Papers on the three ego states (Parent, Adult, Child) and on "transactional analysis" (A)

1961 Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy (B)

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (2)

1962 Transactional Analysis Bulletin launched (January), Berne as editor (B)

1964 Games People Play published (first printing 3,000); the seminars become the ITAA (B)

1965 Kurt Vonnegut's review in Life (June) (B)

1967 Thomas Harris, I'm OK – You're OK (B)

1970 Berne dies of a heart attack, July, aged 60 (B)

STRONG CAUSE-AND-EFFECT LINKS examples; pairs need only one

• Because the institute asked him for three or four more years, Berne left psychoanalysis and wrote his own theory (1956 → 1957).

• Because Federn already used the term "ego states", Berne had a starting point for his own three-part model (1941 → 1957).

• Because the seminars gave him a testing ground and a community, there was a bulletin (1962) and an association (1964) ready when the book took off.

• Because the vocabulary was plain and the games had everyday names, a general-reader book could become a long-running bestseller.