What is Transactional Analysis?

Transactional Analysis is one of the many approaches in psychology. It was hugely successful in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and here in Brazil during the 1990s, and continues to be promoted in many circles around the world.

Transaction Definition

Eric Berne, the founder of Transactional Analysis, studied psychoanalysis for many years and, due to what he considered to be its significant flaw (the difficulty of explaining to patients what is happening to them), he created his intervention and treatment methodology .

And the heart of this new model is the Transaction. Transaction is defined as the fundamental unit of social relations. He explains that the transaction is the unit in the same sense that the concept of atom is used in chemistry. Psychotherapy and psychology also need a minimum unit for any analysis or intervention to be carried out.

In the book Games People Play, which we will study in more detail in texts that we will publish below, Eric Berne defines it better:

“The unit of social relation is called transaction. If two or more people meet… sooner or later they will speak or give some indication that they have acknowledged the presence of the other. This is called transactional stimulus. Another person will then say or do something related to the stimulus, and this is called transactional response🇧🇷

What is Transactional Analysis?

Based on the definitions described above, we begin to understand that Transactional Analysis seeks to study the relationships between individuals (two or more), as well as the method that seeks to elucidate the way in which a single individual relates to himself. Thus, Berne also established 3 ego states that are basic: the child, the adult and the parent.

Learn more here – Parent, Adult, Child

Observing the behavior of his patients, individually and in groups, Berne made the case that we all go through all three states (and can go from one to another). In a social situation, an adult man can behave like a child while talking to a 6-year-old boy, and the 6-year-old boy, in turn, can behave like an adult (i.e., rationally), even though he is not the age of 6. an adult.

Therefore, by understanding ego states we understand that it is possible to analyze transactions between people.

life scripts

life scripts, life scripts, are life plans that people live unconsciously or only relatively consciously. Berne says: “a life plan, created in childhood, reinforced by parents, justified by later events, culminating in a choice”.

When we move from analyzing a single interaction between individuals to looking more directly at a period of time, we see that there are pattern transactions. Berne analyzes many such as procedures, rituals, pastimes and games (games).

the center of the book Games People Play are the games, which are very well structured, have a direction (a pay off) and a regularity that is even impressive (in a certain sense, we could make an analogy with the concept of archetype for CG Jung).

For example, an alcoholic – the first game analyzed in this book – enters into relationships with other people in a standard way. There is the alcoholic (1), the person (2) who criticizes and tries to get him out of addiction (usually someone of the opposite sex, such as a girlfriend or wife called a “stalker”), a person (3) who experiences the savior role (perhaps the doctor or professional who has the same problem or a colleague who gives advice – rescuer – the one who rescues), the person (4) who sells or gives the drink (the owner of the bar, for example, who sells “on credit” or perhaps the mother who neither chases nor helps and gives money), and (5), the connector, that is, the individual or group that gets the drink, that is, the colleagues who offer it but have the same problem and therefore cannot stop.

With this example – one of the many games that people play – or, in other words, one of the many plays or performances that people experience, we can see that Transactional Analysis also seeks to investigate existing relationships with a view to a longer term.

Evidently, an alcoholic does not necessarily need to have contact with these 4 types of people (the total script is 5 participants) because in many cases it happens that an individual is in the role of one or the other. In this case, the wife can be the one who pursues and, simultaneously, the one who rescues and tries to help with good advice.

Conclusion

As Transactional Analysis is an extremely interesting approach and, at the same time, little studied in psychology universities, we will soon have a free course on the different games that people play or scripts in which they act.

Questions can be sent to our email – Psicologiamsn@gmail.com

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