Today I would like to talk about the transactional analysis. As this topic is a bit more complex I will split it in two parts. In this part I will give a short overview what the theory claims and what its idea is, whereas in the second part I will show how it works, which conflicts can arise and how you can improve your communication using this theory.
History and studies
The transactional analysis was developed in 1964 by Dr. Eric Berne who was an American doctor and psychologist.
He observed the behavior of different people and realized that the way they behave could change from time to time. A person could be in one moment lovely and kind and within seconds angry and mean.
It seemed like there were many different people living in the body of one single person. The transformation these people performed would manifest within facial expression, gesture, posture, voice and vocabulary.
He claimed that specific reactions would refer to the experiences, emotions and wishes of a certain person.
For his research, he took Freud’s theory of personality as a base, developed it even further and created the following three stages.
Parent
Eric claimed that every human’s psyche has a part of its parents inside as we inevitable have imitated our parents when we were children. Therefore the parent is responsible for correcting, reprimanding, domineering and prejudices but also for mothering and the will to help.
Therefore, this stage is classified between the critical parent and the caring parent. The differentiation is very important as we will see in part 2.
Child
As a contrast of the parent everybody’s psyche also has the child inside. The child is responsible for defying, manipulating and envy but also for playing, creativity, spontaneity and curiosity.
Inside the child is also our self-esteem located which also means abilities like laughing and crying or feeling hurt, sad or happy are located there. We trigger those whenever our self-esteem feels okay or not okay.
Therefore, this stage is classified between the natural child and the crying child. Like in the parent the differentiation is important.
Adult
The adult is responsible for an objective, well thought and respectful communication. It is rational and constructive like everybody would expect from an adult person. This part could mostly be identical to Freud’s ego.
What is a transaction?
The theory claims that every act arises from one of those three stages. This means that every time we communicate, we do this on one of these stages. So, communication persists through the exchange between those stages (action and reaction). Berne called both together a transaction.
This means if we want to achieve an ideal communication we need to know on which stage our counterpart is communicating with us.
Click here for part 2.
Thanks for reading, stay tuned :)
References
BIRKENBIHL, Vera F.: Kommunikationstraining: Zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen erfolgreich gestalten, 37. Auflage 2017
"Transaktionsanalyse erklärt", https://www.soft-skills.com/transaktionsanalyse-erklaert/, 11 January 2018