Thinking Beyond Science

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.

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 behavior belongs to the psychologists and psychiatrists, legislation belongs to the congressmen, and whether or not we should have a baby belongs to the theologians.

Good and bad feelings are evoked in much the same way. We are all aware of how an odor, 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 But the feeling is real where we had experienced the smell, sound, or sight before.

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.

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.

The Parent is a huge collection of recordings in the brain of unquestioned or imposed external events perceived by a person in his early years, a period which we have designated roughly as the first five years of life. This is the period before the social birth of the individual, before he leaves home in response to the demands of society and enters school.

In the Parent are recorded all the admonitions and rules and laws that the child heard from his parents and saw in their living. They range all the way from the earliest parental communications, interpreted nonverbally through tone of voice, facial expression, cuddling, or non cuddling, to the more elaborate verbal rules and regulations espoused by the parents as the little person became able to understand words. In this set of recordings are the thousands of ‘no’s’ directed at the toddler, the repeated “don’ts’ that bombarded him, the looks of pain and horror in mother’s face when his clumsiness brought shame on the family in the form of Aunt Ethel’s broken antique vase.

When we realize that thousands of these simple rules of living are recorded in the brain of every person, we begin to appreciate what a comprehensive vast store of data the Parent includes. Many of these edicts are fortified with such additional imperatives as ‘never’ and always’ and ‘never forget that and, we may assume, pre-empt certain primary neurone pathways that supply ready data for today’s transactions. These rules are the origins of compulsions and quirks and eccentricities that appear in later behavior.

While external events are being recorded as that body of data we call the Parent, there is another recording being made simultaneously. This is the recording of internal events, the responses of the little person to what he sees and hears.

It is this ‘seeing and hearing and feeling and understanding’ body of data which we define as the Child. Since the little person has no vocabulary during the most critical of his early experiences, most of his reactions are feelings.

As in the case of the Parent, the Child is a state into which a person may be transferred at almost any time in his current transactions. There are many things that can happen to us today which recreate the situation of childhood and bring on the same feelings we felt then. Frequently we may find ourselves in situations where we are faced with impossible alternatives, where we find ourselves in a corner, either actually, or in the way we see it. These ‘hook the Child”, as we say, and cause a replay of the original feelings of frustration, rejection, or abandonment, and we relive a latter-day version of the small child’s primary depression. Therefore, when a person is in the grip of feelings, we say his Child has taken over. When his anger dominates his reason, we say his Child is in command.

Source : I am OK-you are OK by Thomas A. Harris

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/150265240-i-am-ok-you-are-ok

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