Transactional Analysis

Transactional Analysis (TA) has been enjoying an increase in interest ever since its inception, now more than sixty years ago, by the Canadian-American psychiatrist Dr. Eric Berne. TA has a thriving international community made up of a dynamic body of practitioners who are developing their theory and innovating in practice. TA has developed into a therapy that is now proudly psychodynamic, and yet also fiercely humanistic. TA therapists consider many of their methods to be similar to those of cognitive-behavioural therapy. TA is also viewed as being an existential psychotherapy .

Berne’s original theories put relationship at the heart of psychological life. TA is a theory of personality and relationships based on the study of specific ego states, a theory of social interaction or interpersonal communication, used as a tool for personal growth and personal change. It involves four methods of analysis – structural, transactional, games and script.   In essence, TA offers a way of inquiring into what goes on between people and inside people in order to help them make changes. 

The transactional aspect is exactly what it says: a two-way communication, an exchange, a transaction.  Although this word can sound unattractively businesslike, the concept actually captures a wealth of understanding and meaning about the way human beings relate. A transaction may be of spoken words, expressed feelings, physical behaviours, shared thoughts, stated opinions or beliefs and so on.  A transaction may be a raised eyebrow that is responded to with a smile. It may be a comforting hug when another is crying, or it may be a silence at the other end of the telephone following some unexpected news. We may look at and analyse what goes on between people in terms of the words that they are using or the gestures they are making or the beliefs they are expressing and learn something of each of these people. 

But how does this apply ‘inside’ people?  

When we hold an internal dialogue between different parts of ourself, we are transacting internally.   TA provides a model which defines these parts of oneself as different ego states. Whether it is thoughts, feelings or behaviours that are being exchanged externally or internally – usually it is all three, whether we are aware of this or not – they will be coming from one of three types of ego state: the Parent, the Adult or the Child ego state -   these ego states are the building-blocks of TA theory.  

TA lays stress on personal responsibility for one’s experience and in so doing puts the client in a central, proactive and therefore potentially powerful role in his or her situation. In this respect, TA is referred to as a decisional model. If we are personally responsible for our own experience, we must be responsible for the choices and decisions that we make about how we behave, how we feel, how we think and what we believe, even though many of these decisions may not be made in awareness, but at a pre- or non-conscious, somatic and emotional level. 

Hope lies in the fact that as we become aware of the meaning we have made of ourselves and the world, and the patterns we are enacting, new and reparative decisions can be made in the present to replace the now dysfunctional and maladaptive decisions of the past. The appeal of TA to some may also be due to its embracing and integrating the three main streams of psychology within its theoretical model: the psychoanalytic, the behavioural and the humanistic/existential. 

TA began with Eric Berne, and his ideas still form the core of TA theory. Yet in the five decades since Berne’s death, transactional analysts have continued to innovate. Much – probably most – of what TA practitioners do today depends on new theory and practice developed after Berne.  

While the area of innovation in TA in the 1990s was principally concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of specific client groups, the first decade of the twenty-first century has so far seen a shift in emphasis toward new thinking on the philosophy and meta-theory of transactional analysis. Much of this new literature has centred around what has come to be called the ‘relational approach’ to TA.