50 Psychology Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon

Author:Tom Butler-Bowdon
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Published: 2007-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

Final comments

Though Berne’s work on transactional analysis may be the better book, Harris’s I’m OK—You’re OK became a huge bestseller, and a major reason has to be his use of the easy-to-understand Parent, Adult, and Child framework. The terms may seem a little goofy, but in fact parallel Freud’s original trinity of superego, ego, and id, the basic elements that Freud put forward for understanding human behavior. Although this is a work of popular psychology, Harris did not try to dumb it down to appeal to everyone. He freely quotes from the likes of Emerson, Whitman, Plato, and Freud, assuming that if readers do not know about such figures they certainly should.

Though it will never be a household term, transactional analysis does have real value in making us aware of our negative and normally unconscious behavior patterns. Given its “do-it-yourself” nature, the mainstream psychiatric profession never made much room for its way of seeing, but it has nevertheless become part of the tool bag of psychologists and counselors who need workable techniques to bring about change.

Transactional analysis has even found its way into fiction. James Redfield acknowledged Harris and Berne as crucial influences in writing one of the biggest-selling books of the 1990s, The Celestine Prophecy. The “control dramas” that his characters engage in, and seek to be free of, are squarely based on the games and positions of transactional analysis; the survival of the book’s characters—and indeed the evolution of the human race—is made dependent on their ability to see beyond these automatic reactions.

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