BERNES THEORY: TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS

Eric Berne is a Canadian doctor who worked many years with Freuds ideas
about psychological health and healing. Berne decided that Freuds ideas
were just too complicated and set out to make these ideas simpler to
understand. He suggested that all people have 3 fundamental ego states.
Berne called these 3 states as follows:

The child ego state

The parent ego state
The adult ego state

Because we all have parents or people who have played the role of parents,
we all have a parent ego state. Because we have all been children, we also
have a child ego state. We also have an adult ego state, characterized by
cool and clear thinking. These ego states have nothing to do with age.
We ALL have the capacity to think differently at different moments from a
very young age. For example, have you ever seen a child of 3 years angrily
wag a finger at her brother? This 3 year old child is in a parent ego state.
The parent ego state has 2 forms- critical parent and nurturing parent.
1. Critical Parent: scolds, criticizes, and warns.
2. Nurturing Parent: with another tone of voice, shows concern, warns in a
loving way and reprimands gently.
The person in the parent ego state can hook the child ego state in another
person. That is say, he or she can provoke the other person to react in that
persons child ego state.
The child ego state has 2 forms:
1. Adapted child: adapts his behavior to conform to the demands of the
ego of the other state.
2. Free child: spontaneous
The Adult ego state is available to all of us: thinking, cool, reasonable,
sensible.
We can change ego states quickly. In a moment of conflict, for example,
when one person in the critical parent ego state is shouting at another, and
the other responds in tears from the adapted child ego state, either one of

them can ask a question form his/her adult ego state and transform the
situation.
Berne called these encounters transactions and he named the science of
understanding such encounters as Transactional Analysis.
Now we will review the My husband story and identify the ego state in
each transaction.
Reflections

Can you describe an experience where you acted in your ego state of
parent, child or adult? What did you do or say? How did others react?
Can you describe a situation in which you were provoked to act in your
ego state of adapted child by someone in a critical parent or nurturing
parent ego state or vice versa?
What have you done to promote transactions of Adult-Adult ego states?