Transactional Analysis

Transactional Analysis

Transactional Analysis

Introduction

“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours” (Berne, 1964).

This quote by Berne, clearly explains that how important it is for one's life to be structured. Mostly the problems that are associated in any individual's life are linked with walking over wrong paths and spending an unplanned life. This life plan needs a thorough analysis which involves transactional theory of personality and human relations based mainly on the analysis of ego states, transactions, the psychological games and life scripts. The purpose of this study is the analysis of how life script influence over the process of counselling and why is it important to know one's personal view about own life. The study also highlights the analysis of my own life script and further defines various aspects that are needed to be altered.

Discussion

TA adheres to the principles of humanistic philosophy and currently applies to psychotherapy, growth along with personal as well as organizational change in diverse fields. Berne's concepts are expressed by means of a simple and original vocabulary primarily seeking the understanding of phenomena by all (professional clients). Their models are the crucial element descriptive analysis. His explanations are intentionally simple and close to the people who have recent experiences in life.

Transactional Analysis is considered to be the most accessible theories in the modern psychology. These analyses are being found by Eric Berne, however, the famous theory of 'parent adult child' is in the developing stage today. There are extensive applications in transactional analysis. These analyses involve the clinical, organizational, therapeutic and the personal development which encompass communications, management personalities, behaviours and the relationships.

Life-script and Counselling

Beginning with the early childhood, every other person keeps a plan for their life. This plan is called life-script (Berne, 1972). This life-script has its construction in such a way which appears to others as a drama, having a clear beginning, middle and the end of life- drama. However, the closing scene of this life-script is known as the script- payoff. Berne (1972) has defined script pay off as the ultimate destiny which marks the end of one's life plan.

Each of us writes our own story in childhood and describes our own life story. We write basic plots on life and with our growing ages we usually get no awareness of our life story. Yet we follow it unconsciously. We set our lives in a way that we move to the final scene which is decided as infants. This story analysis of life is known as transactional analysis. While doing the script analysis we use the concept of our life scripts in order to get the idea that how people set problems for themselves and how we planned in solving those problems (Berne, 1964).

A deep level, seeks to facilitate the abandonment of psychological script we decided in childhood under the influence of parental and authority figures, but it was necessary to survive which we can still be following unconsciously. By leaving the script, we also play games ...