I'm Ok, You're Ok: A Practical Approach to Human Psychology

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When the adult is in charge, the outcome is not always predictable. There is the possibility of failure. Or of success. But it’s only the adult that gives us the opportunity of changing and developing. If the parents were very intense in their rules, it might be harder for the adult to question and abandon those rules later in life. The adult has the power to examine the child to see whether or not the feelings are appropriate to the present or if they don’t serve him well anymore and are simply responses to archaic Parent data.

In life, you might cross your path with people who are trying to take a parent role over you, to make you feel guilty or make you act as they wish and please. When we're looking at the world from an 'I'm OK, you're OK' perspective, we treat ourselves and others fairly, with kindness, tolerance and respect. We have a great capacity for compassion and empathy; we recognise the value of life - our own life, the lives of other people, other species of animals and plants, and the value of planet Earth itself. We recognise that these lives are all interconnected and dependent upon one another. We appreciate the transience and fragility of life. We might feel a deep sense of awe and wonder about life on the planet and humility at our place in the world. When we see the world from this position, life truly is an amazing gift to be embraced and enjoyed; we are glad to be alive. Berne had developed something called ‘Transactional Analysis’. It was a boring term for an exciting concept, reversing the Freudian tradition that saw the world as ‘I’ or ‘me’-centred. For Freud, other people were not important as people – they were merely one’s ‘object relations’. Berne reacted against this, elevating relationships to the high table of study. He believed that an encounter between two or more people, a ‘transaction’, was psychotherapy’s elusive unit of analysis. Instead of asking a subject about themselves (as in psychoanalysis), one could determine the problem simply by being a witness to what is actually said or done in the course of a transaction. Berne (as well as Harris) would perform psychotherapy sessions based almost entirely on observations of what his subjects were doing, saying, and engaging in. This is not a healthy perspective. Although we might have some sense of feeling 'OK' about ourselves, it isn't an enduring or sustainable sense of being 'OK'. Indeed, we are constantly having to do things and work very hard to maintain a false sense of being 'OK', usually at the expense of others.We're likely to look down on other people, to speak unkindly to them, de-value their opinions and detract from them.Indeed, it's likely that we will do whatever is necessary to maintain our own spurious sense of being 'OK' and to make sure our needs are met above those of anyone else.When parents are dominated by their children, they can end up into struggles with their own children. When we have no idea about our inner Adult, Child, and Parent, the result is a “contaminated adult” and we often resort to substandard behavior that does nothing good for us and for the people around.

The book makes some obvious mistakes that, in light of more recent development, we know not to be true. But the author says that normal psychoanalysis is slow while Transaction Analysis skips both transference and resistance.Without listing all the pros and even considering its important limitations, transaction analysis and this book, in particular, are enlightening.