I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.
- Walt Whitman
Throughout history one impression of human nature has been consistent: that man has a
multiple nature. Most often it has been expressed as a dual nature. It has been expressed
mythologically, philosophically, and religiously. Always it has been seen as a conflict:
the conflict between good and evil, the lower nature and the higher nature, the inner man
and the outer man. 'There are times,' said Somerset Maugham, 'when I look over the
various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several
persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give
place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?'
That man can aspire to and achieve goodness is evident through all of history, however
that goodness may be understood. Moses saw goodness supremely as justice, Plato
essentially as wisdom, and Jesus centrally as love; yet they all agreed that virtue, however
understood, was consistently undermined by something in human nature which was at
war with something else. But what were these somethings?
When Sigmund Freud appeared on the scene in the early twentieth century, the enigma
was subjected to a new probe, the discipline of scientific inquiry. Freud's fundamental
contribution was his theory that the warring factions existed in the unconscious. Tentative
names were given to the combatants: the Superego became thought of as the restrictive,
controlling force over the Id (instinctual drives), with the Ego as a referee operating out
of 'enlightened self-interest'.
We are deeply indebted to Freud for his painstaking and pioneering efforts to establish
the theoretical foundation upon which we build today. Through the years scholars and
clinicians have elaborated, systematized, and added to his theories. Yet the 'persons
within' have remained elusive, and it seems that the hundreds of volumes which collect
dust and the annotations of psychoanalytic thinkers have not provided adequate answers
to the persons they are written about.
I stood in the lobby of a theatre at the end of the showing of the motion picture Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and listened to a number of comments by people who had just
seen the picture: 'I'm exhausted!' 'And I come to movies to get away from home.' 'Why do
they want to show something like that?' 'I didn't get it; I guess you have to be a
psychologist.' I got the impression that many of these people left the theatre wondering
what was really going on, sure there must have been a message, but unable to find
anything relevant to them or liberating in terms of how to end 'fun and games' in their
own lives.
We are dutifully impressed by formulations such as Freud's definition of psychoanalysis
as a 'dynamic conception which reduces mental life to an interplay of reciprocally urging
and checking forces'. Such a definition and its countless elaborations may be useful to
'the professionals', but how useful are these formulations to people who hurt? George and
Martha in Edward Albee's play used red-hot, gutsy, four-letter words that were precise
and to the point. The question is, As therapists can we speak with George and Martha as
precisely and pointedly about why they act as they do and hurt as they do? Can what we
say be not only true but also helpful, because we are understood? 'Speak English! I can't
understand a word you're saying' is not an uncommonly held attitude towards persons
who claim to be experts in the psychological fields. Restating esoteric psychoanalytic
ideas in even more esoteric terms does not reach people where they live. As a
consequence the reflections of ordinary folk are often expressed in pitiful redundancies
and in superficial conversations with such summary comments as, 'Well, isn't that always
the way?' with no understanding of how it can be different.
In a sense, one of the estranging factors of the present day is the lag between
specialization and communication, which continues to widen the gulf between specialists
and non-specialists. Space belongs to the astronauts, understanding human behaviour
belongs to the psychologists and psychiatrists, legislation belongs to the congressmen,
and whether or not we should have a baby belongs to the theologians. This is an
understandable development; yet the problems of non-understanding and
noncommunication are so great that means must be devised whereby language can keep
up with the developments of research.
In the field of mathematics an answer to this dilemma was attempted in the development
of the 'new mathematics', now being taught in elementary schools throughout the country.
The new mathematics is not so much a new form of computation as of communication of
mathematical ideas, answering questions not only of what, but also of why, so that the
excitement of going to the moon or using a computer will not remain exclusively in the
realm of scientists but can also exist in comprehensible form for the student. The science
of mathematics is not new, but the way it is talked about is new. We would find ourselves
handicapped if we were still to use the Babylonian, Mayan, Egyptian, or Roman number
systems. The desire to use mathematics creatively brought about new ways of
systematizing numbering concepts. The new mathematics of today has continued this
creative growth. We recognize and appreciate the creative thinking which the earlier
systems represented, but we do not encumber today's work with those now less-effective
methods.
This is my position with regard to Transactional Analysis. I respect the devoted effort of
the psychoanalytic theorists of the past. What I hope to demonstrate in this book is a new
way to state old ideas and a clear way to present new ones, not as an inimical or
deprecating assault on the work of the past, but rather as a means of meeting the
undeniable evidence that the old methods do not seem to be working very well.
Once, an old farmer, tinkering with a rusty harrow on a country road, was approached by
an earnest young man from the University Extension Service who was making farm-tofarm calls for the purpose of selling a new manual on soil conservation and new farming
techniques. After a polite and polished speech the young man asked the farmer if he
would like to buy this new book, to which the old man replied,
'Son, I don't farm half as good as I know how already.'
The purpose of this book is not only the presentation of new data but also an answer to
the question of why people do not live as good as they know how already. They may
know that the experts have had a lot to say about human behaviour, but this knowledge
does not seem to have the slightest effect on their hangover, their splintering marriage, or
their cranky children. They may turn to agony columns for help or find themselves
delightfully portrayed in 'Peanuts', but is there anything both profound and simple related
to the dynamics of behaviour which will help them find new answers to old problems? Is
there any information available which is both true and helpful?
Our search for answers has until recent years been limited by the fact that we have known
relatively little about how the human brain stores memory and how this memory is
evoked to produce the tyranny - as well as the treasure - of the past in current living.
The Brain Surgeon with the Probe
Any hypothesis must depend for its verification on observable evidence. Until recently
there has been little evidence about how the brain functions in cognition, precisely how
and which of the 12 billion cells within the brain store memory. How much memory is
retained? Can it disappear? Is memory generalized or specific? Why are some memories
more available for recall than others?
One noted explorer in this field is Dr Wilder Penfield, a neurosurgeon from McGill
University in Montreal, who in 1951 began to produce exciting evidence to confirm and
modify theoretical concepts which had been formulated in answer to these questions. {1}
During the course of brain surgery, in treating patients suffering from focal epilepsy,
Penfield conducted a series of experiments during which he touched the temporal cortex
of the brain of the patient with a weak electric current transmitted through a galvanic
probe. His observations of the responses to these stimulations were accumulated over a
period of several years. In each case the patient under local anesthesia was fully
conscious during the exploration of the cerebral cortex and was able to talk with Penfield.
In the course of these experiments he heard some amazing things.
(Inasmuch as this book is meant to be a practical guide to Transactional Analysis and not
a technical scientific treatise, I wish to clarify that the following material from Penfield's
research - the only material in this book which might be seen as technical - is included in
the first chapter because I believe it is essential to the establishment of the scientific basis
of all that follows. The evidence seems to indicate that everything which has been in our
conscious awareness is recorded in detail and stored in the brain and is capable of being
'played back' in the present. The following material may warrant more than a single
reading for a full appreciation of the implications of Penfield's findings.)
Penfield found that the stimulating electrode could force recollections clearly derived
from the patient's memory. Penfield reported, 'The psychical experience, thus produced,
stops when the electrode is withdrawn and may repeat itself when the electrode is
reapplied.' He gave the following examples:
First is the case of S.B. Stimulation at Point 19 in the first convolution of the right
temporal lobe caused him to say: There was a piano there and someone was playing. I
could hear the song, you know.' When the point was stimulated again without warning,
he said: 'Someone speaking to another,' and he mentioned a name, but I could not
understand it... it was just like a dream. The point was stimulated a third time, also
without warning. He then observed spontaneously, 'Yes, Oh Marie, Oh Marie! - Someone
is singing it.' When the point was stimulated a fourth time, he heard the same song and
explained that it was the theme song of a certain radio programme.
When Point 16 was stimulated, he said, while the electrode was being held in place,
'Something brings back a memory. I can see Seven-Up Bottling Company ... Harrison
Bakery.' He was then warned that he was being stimulated, but the electrode was not
applied. He replied, "Nothing.'
When, in another case, that of D.F., a point on the superior surface of the right temporal
lobe was stimulated within the fissure of Sylvius, the patient heard a specific popular
song being played as though by an orchestra. Repeated stimulations reproduced the same
music. While the electrode was kept in place, she hummed the tune, chorus and verse,
thus accompanying the music she heard.
The patient, L.G., was caused to experience 'something', he said, that had happened to
him before. Stimulation at another temporal point caused him to see a man and a dog
walking along a road near his home in the country. Another woman heard a voice which
she did not quite understand when the first temporal convolution was stimulated initially.
When the electrode was reapplied to approximately the same point, she heard a voice
distinctly calling, 'Jimmie, Jimmie' - Jimmie was the nickname of the young husband to
whom she had been married recently.
One of Penfield's significant conclusions was that the electrode evoked a single
recollection, not a mixture of memories or a generalization.
Another of his conclusions was that the response to the electrode was involuntary:
Under the compelling influence of the probe a familiar experience appeared in the
patient's consciousness whether he desired to focus his attention upon it or not. A song
went through his mind, probably as he had heard it on a certain occasion: he found
himself a part of a specific situation that progressed and evolved just as the original
situation did. It was, to him, the act of a familiar play, and he was himself both an actor
and the audience.
Perhaps the most significant discovery was that not only past events are recorded in
detail but also the feelings that were associated with those events. An event and the
feeling which was produced by the event are inextricably locked together in the brain so
that one cannot be evoked without the other. Penfield reported:
The subject feels again the emotion which the situation originally produced in him, and
he is aware of the same interpretations, true or false, which he himself gave to the
experience in the first place. Thus, evoked recollection is not the exact photographic or
phonographic reproduction of past scenes or events. It is reproduction of what the patient
saw and heard and felt and understood.
Recollections are evoked by the stimuli of day-to-day experience in much the same way
that they were evoked artificially by Penfield's probe. In either case the evoked
recollection can be more accurately described as a reliving than a recalling. In response to
a stimulus a person is momentarily displaced into the past. I am there! This reality may
last only a fraction of a second, or it may last many days. Following the experience a
person may then consciously remember he was there. The sequence in involuntary
recollections is: (1) reliving (spontaneous, involuntary feeling), and (2) remembering
(conscious, voluntary thinking about the past events thus relived). Much of what we
relive we cannot remember!
The following reports of two patients illustrate the way in which stimulations in the
present evoke past feelings.
A forty-year-old female patient reported she was walking down the street one morning
and, as she passed a music store, she heard a strain of music that produced an
overwhelming melancholy. She felt herself in the grip of a sadness she could not
understand, the intensity of which was 'almost unbearable'. Nothing in her conscious
thought could explain this. After she described the feeling to me, I asked her if there was
anything in her early life that this song reminded her of. She said she could not make any
connexion between the song and her sadness. Later in the week she phoned to tell me that,
as she continued to hum the song over and over, she suddenly had a flash of recollection
in which she 'saw her mother sitting at the piano and heard her playing this song'. The
mother had died when the patient was five years old. At that time the mother's death had
produced a severe depression, which had persisted over an extended period of time,
despite all the efforts of the family to help her transfer her affection to an aunt who had
assumed the mother role. She had never recalled hearing this song or remembering her
mother's playing it until the day she walked by the music store. I asked her if the recall of
this early memory had relieved her of the depression. She said it had changed the nature
of her feelings; there was still a melancholy feeling in recalling the death of her mother,
but it was not the initial overwhelming despair she felt at first. It would seem she was
now consciously remembering a feeling which initially was the reliving of a feeling. In
the second instance, she remembered how it was to feel that way; but in the first instance,
the feeling was precisely the same feeling which was recorded when her mother died. She
was at that moment five years old.
Good feelings are evoked in much the same way. We are all aware of how an odour, a
sound, or a fleeting glimpse can produce an ineffable joy, sometimes so momentary it
almost goes unnoticed. Unless we put our minds to it, we cannot remember where we had
experienced the smell, sound, or sight before. But the feeling is real.
Another patient reported this incident. He was walking along L Street by Sacramento's
Capitol Park and, upon smelling the odour of lime and sulphur, generally thought to be
putrid, being used as a spray for the trees, he was aware of a glorious carefree feeling of
joy. Uncovering the original situation was easier for him since the feeling was a good one.
This was the kind of spray that had been used in the early spring in his father's apple
orchard and, for the patient as a little boy, this smell was synchronous with the coming of
spring, the 'greening' of the trees, and all the joys experienced by a little boy emancipated
to the outdoors after the long winter. As in the case of the first patient, the conscious
remembering of the feeling was slightly different from the burst of the original feeling
that he experienced. He could not quite recapture the glorious, spontaneous transference
into the past as he did for that fleeting moment. It was as if he now had a feeling about
his feeling rather than the feeling itself.
This illustrates another of Penfield's conclusions: the memory record continues intact
even after the subject's ability to recall it disappears:
Recollection evoked from the temporal cortex retains the detailed character of the
original experience. When it is thus introduced into the patient's consciousness, the
experience seems to be in the present, possibly because it forces itself so irresistibly upon
his attention. Only when it is over can he recognize it as a vivid memory of the past.
Another conclusion we may make from these findings is that the brain functions as a
high-fidelity recorder, putting on tape, as it were, every experience from the time of birth,
possibly even before birth. (The process of information storage in the brain is
undoubtedly a chemical process, involving data reduction and coding, which is not fully
understood. Perhaps over simple, the tape recorder analogy nevertheless has proved
useful in explaining the memory process. The important point is that, however the
recording is done, the playback is high fidelity.)
Whenever a normal person is paying conscious attention to something [says Penfield], he
simultaneously is recording it in the temporal cortex of each hemisphere.
These recordings are in sequence and continuous.
When the electrode is applied to the memory cortex it may produce a picture, but the
picture is not usually static. It changes, as it did when it was originally seen and the
subject perhaps altered the direction of his gaze. It follows the originally observed events
of succeeding seconds or minutes. The song produced by cortical stimulation progresses
slowly, from one phrase to another and from verse to chorus.
Penfield further concludes that the thread of continuity in evoked recollections seems to
be time. The original pattern was laid down in temporal succession.
The thread of temporal succession seems to link the elements of evoked recollection
together. It also appears that only those sensory elements to which the individual was
paying attention are recorded, not all the sensory impulses which are forever bombarding
the central nervous system.
The evoking of complicated memory sequences makes it seem plausible that each of the
memories we can recall has a separate neurone pathway.
Particularly significant to our understanding of how the past influences the present is the
observation that the temporal cortex is obviously utilized in the interpretation of current
experience.
Illusions ... may be produced by stimulation of the temporal cortex ... and the disturbance
produced is one of judgement in regard to present experience - a judgement that the
experience is familiar, or strange, or absurd; that distances and sizes are altered, and even
that the present situation is terrifying.
These are illusions of perception, and a consideration of them leads one to believe that a
new experience is somehow immediately classified together with records of former
similar experience so that judgement of differences and similarities is possible. For
example, after a period of time it may be difficult for a man to conjure up an accurate,
detailed memory of an old friend as he appeared years ago, and yet when the friend is met,
however unexpectedly, it is possible to perceive at once the change that time has wrought.
One knows it all too well - new lines in his face, change in hair, stoop of shoulder. [Italics
mine]
Penfield concludes:
The demonstration of the existence of cortical 'patterns' that preserve the detail of current
experience, as though in a library of many volumes, is one of the first steps towards a
physiology of the mind. The nature of the pattern, the mechanism of its formation, the
mechanism of its subsequent utilization, and the integrative processes that form the
substratum of consciousness - these will one day be translated into physiological
formulas.
Dr Lawrence S. Kubie of Baltimore, one of the nation's prominent psychoanalysts who
was among the discussants of Penfield's paper, said, at the conclusion of the presentation:
I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity to discuss Doctor Penfield's paper ...
because of the enormous stimulation which the paper itself has given to my imagination.
Indeed it has kept me in a state of ferment for the last two weeks, watching pieces of a
jigsaw puzzle fit into place and a picture emerge to throw some light on some of the work
which I have been doing in recent years. I can sense the shades of Harvey Cushing and
Sigmund Freud shaking hands over this long-deferred meeting between psychoanalysis
and modern neurosurgery through the experimental work which Doctor Penfield has
reported.
In summary we may conclude:
1. The brain functions as a high-fidelity tape recorder.
2. The feelings which were associated with past experiences also are recorded and are
inextricably locked to those experiences.
3. Persons can exist in two states at the same time. The patient knew he was on the
operating table talking with Penfield; he equally knew he was seeing the 'Seven-Up
Bottling Company ... and Harrison Bakery'. He was dual in that he was at the same time
in the experience and outside of it, observing it.
4. These recorded experiences and feelings associated with them are available for replay
today in as vivid a form as when they happened and provide much of the data which
determines the nature of today's transactions. These experiences not only can be recalled
but also relived. I not only remember how I felt. I feel the same way now.
Penfield's experiments demonstrate that the memory function, which is most often
thought of in psychological terms, is biological also. We are not able to answer the ageold question of how the mind is attached to the body. It is pertinent, however, to refer to
the rapid progress being made in the field of genetic research as to how heredity is
programmed within the RNA molecule. Sweden's Dr Holgar Hyden has reflected:
The capacity to recall the past to consciousness can certainly be expected to reside in a
primary mechanism of general biological validity. A firm link to the genetic mechanism
is important, and in this respect especially, the RNA molecule, with its many possibilities,
would fulfill many requirements. {2}
The observable evidence produced by these biological studies supports and helps to
explain the observable evidence in human behaviour. How do we apply the scientific
method to behaviour in such a way that our findings constitute as accurate and as useful a
body of 'knowns' as Penfield's findings?
A Basic Scientific Unit: The Transaction
One of the reasons for the criticism that the psycho-therapeutic sciences are unscientific,
and for much of the disagreement evident in this field, is that there has been no basic unit
for study and observation. It is the same kind of difficulty as that which confronted
physicists before the molecular theory and physicians before the discovery of bacteria.
Eric Berne, the originator of Transactional Analysis, has isolated and defined this basic
scientific unit:
The unit of social intercourse is called a transaction. If two or more people encounter
each other ... sooner or later one of them will speak, or give some other indication of
acknowledging the presence of the others. This is called the transactional stimulus.
Another person will then say or do something which is in some way related to the
stimulus. and that is called the transactional response. {3}
Transactional Analysis is the method of examining this one transaction wherein 'I do
something to you and you do something back' and determining which part of the
multiple-natured individual is being activated. In the next chapter, 'Parent, Adult, and
Child', the three parts of this multiple nature are identified and described.
Transactional Analysis also is the method of systematizing the information derived from
analysing these transactions in words which have the same meaning, by definition, for
everyone who is using them. This language is clearly one of the most important
developments of the system. Agreement on the meanings of words plus agreement on
what to examine are the two keys which have unlocked the door to the 'mysteries of why
people do as they do'. This is no small accomplishment.
In February 1960 I had the opportunity of hearing a fascinating, day-long dissertation by
Dr Timothy Leary, who had then just joined the Department of Social Relations at
Harvard University. He spoke to the staff of DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, California,
where I was Director of Professional Education. Despite the controversial responses he
now evokes by his devotion to the use of drugs in the pursuit of psychedelic experience, I
wish to use some of his comments here, inasmuch as they express the problem
dramatically and may explain what he called his own 'zigzag course of sequential
disillusionment'. He stated that one of his greatest frustrations as a psychotherapist was
the inability to discover a way to standardize language and observation about human
behaviour: {4}
I would like to share with you some of the historical background of my immobilization as
a psychological scientist. As I look back I can see that there were three stages of my own
ignorance, The first, which was by far the most happy, you could call the stage of
innocent ignorance when I was possessed with the notion that there were some secrets of
human nature, there were some laws and regularities, some cause and effect relationships,
and that through study, through experiences, through reading, some day I would share
these secrets and be able to apply my knowledge of these regularities of human behaviour
to help other people.
In the second stage, which might be called the period of illusion of non-ignorance, came
the disturbing discovery that, although on the one hand I knew that I didn't know what the
secret was, suddenly I discovered that on the other hand people were looking to me as
though they thought I might know the secret or be closer to the secret than they ... None
of the research that I did worked nor did any of my activities provide any secret, but
again I could always say, 'Well, we didn't have enough cases', or 'we must improve the
methodology', and there were many other statements which I am sure you are familiar
with. One can postpone the moment of painful discovery but eventually the unhappy truth
finally becomes apparent - that although many people may be looking to you and
listening to you - you have patients and students and you're going to PTA meetings and
they are looking to you for the secret - still eventually you begin to think maybe, maybe
you don't know what you're talking about.
After this rare and revealing admission of doubts that few psychotherapists dare state but
many have felt, Leary continued at length in describing the various types of research in
testing and cataloguing and systematizing which had occupied him and his staff. But in
this endeavour he was confronted with the problems of no common language and no
common unit for observation:
Which natural events are we going to get in permanent form that we can then count?
Rather than studying natural free behaviour, I have been experimenting with the
possibility of developing standardized languages for the analysis of any natural
transaction. Of all the poetic notions and musical notes and lyric strains that we use,
words like 'progress', 'help', and 'improvement' are the most far out. We operate with too
little information about ourselves and about the other guy. I don't have any theory about
new variables in psychology, no new words or language of psychology. I am simply
trying to develop new ways of feeding back to human beings what they are doing and the
noises they are making. The most exciting thing in the world to me right now is to get at
the discrepancies between people involved in the same interaction. Because once you've
got that you have a question, 'How come?'
He deplored the absence of standardized language in human behaviour, noting that
stockbrokers, automobile salesmen, and baseball players do better:
Even automobile salesmen have their little blue books and they've really done much
better in behavioural science than we people who claim to be the experts. In sports, every
baseball player, his natural behaviour, is recorded in the form of indices, like his RunsBatted-In or his Earned-Run-Average. To understand and to make predictions about
baseball, if you decide you're going to sell your first baseman to get a right-handed
pitcher, you have a raft of behavioural indices. They don't use poetic language like, 'He
runs after a flyball like a deer', or 'He's an obsessive fielder'. They tend to use behaviours.
I had been pursuing a myth in trying to find the secret. I wanted to grow up and be a
clever therapist and a clever diagnostician. All these hopes of mine were based on the
assumption that there are laws, there are regularities, there are secrets, there are
techniques which can be applied, and that study and research can bring these secrets to us.
Transactional Analysts claim to have found some of these regularities. We claim to have
found a new language of psychology, which Leary felt such a need of, and we claim to be
a great deal closer to the secret of human behaviour than we have ever been before.
In this chapter I have presented some of the basic information that has proved useful to a
great many people who have been treated in my groups, using Transactional Analysis as
an intellectual tool to understand the basis of behaviour and feelings. A tool often works
better and has more meaning if we have some idea how it was developed, how it is
different. Is it derived from authentic data or is it just another theory? Was Berne's book
Games People Play a best seller because of a fad, or does it offer people some easily
understood and authentic ideas about themselves as they reveal their past in the present
games they play? In the next chapter we begin the description of this tool, by the
definitions of Parent, Adult, and Child. Because these three words have specific and
comprehensive meanings different from their usual meanings, Parent, Adult, and Child
will be capitalized throughout the book. As you will discover in the next chapter, Parent
is not the same as mother or father, Adult means something quite different from a grownup, and Child is not the same as a little person.
