Transactional Analysis, or “TA,” has been around since the middle of the last century, opening a new chapter of self-understanding for the world of psychology. At the time, the idea that the client was part of the process, rather than being a “patient” who needed to be cured by the doctor / psychiatrist, was revolutionary. Psychiatrist Eric Berne, the founder of TA, popularized the idea that people are OK, i.e., everyone has dignity and worth and everyone without brain damage can think.
Berne also focused on the social aspects of mental health, hence the name of the field, which examined how we interact with each other (transactions), especially when we repeat unsatisfactory patterns that have people feeling that they or others are not OK.
These patterns add up to the long arc of how we live our lives. In the 1970’s, TA became well known. Many of its ideas permeated through popular culture, with the very popular book Games People Play by Berne, I’m OK – You’re OK by Tom and Amy Harris, followed by Born to Win by Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward, What Do You Say After You Say Hello? by Berne, published posthumously, and Scripts People Live, by the radical therapist, Claude Steiner.
There were TA groups and trainings around the US, weekend therapy sessions, weekly seminars, and rapid developments of theory and practice. Educators, business consultants, pastors, and counselors as well as psychotherapists began to learn and apply the principles of TA. OKness was aligned with the social movements of the time, along with Women’s Liberation, Affirmative Action, Equal Employment Opportunity, Nonviolence, and Anti-War activism.
The field of TA has matured since then and is now practiced and taught around the world. The basic principles have been incorporated into other evolving forms of therapy, counseling, education, and coaching, building on ideas such as the Inner Child and personality parts, Strokes (recognition), life scripts, and other contributions.
In North America, TA is less well-known now than it was in the seventies, but there are pockets of practitioners here and there, and a North America TA Association that provides community, connection to the TA world, practitioner certification, and online educational programs.
TA influences how I think, feel, and behave every day. I feel blessed to have been exposed to it early in my career and to have brought it into my psychotherapy practice, the high school classroom where I taught, and to my corporate training company where the course leaders learned how not to get hooked into unproductive exchanges.
I’ve been thinking about how to offer it to others in this fast-moving, media-intensive, politically divided, and relationally-challenged era. While TA is not new, its premises are essential to support our humanness and ability to live together while facing challenges such as climate change, war, and inequality.
I’ll be discussing the principles and practices of TA here in the TA Conversations section of my substack, and from time to time, in online groups and classes. If you want to be informed of upcoming learning programs, please email me at lucy@syntaxforchange.com and feel free to subscribe to this channel.