Transactional Analysis

Eric Berne, the founder of Transactional Analysis, found that we each have within our personality:

Parent—the foundation of our values, attitudes, beliefs about what life needs to be—our “oughts” and “shoulds” are in our parent. We have an inner nurturing parent as well as an inner judging parent.

Adult—our logical ego state which has our autonomous attitudes and our clear thinking patterns where we make decisions based on facts is our adult.

Child—is our internal state of our remembered thoughts, feelings, and attitudes from our childhood. Our child state is experienced inwardly and expressed outwardly. We have an adapted inner child (conditioned responses) as well as a natural inner child (self-indulgence).

Identify the ego state for each of the following responses.

Choose one of the following 3 responses:

Jim’s response to staying home from work tomorrow:

A. I’m going to play sick for a few days.

B. Mommy’s boy should stay home if he doesn’t feel good.

C. I could get away with it, but I’d have to work harder to make up for it. No point in staying home.

References for transactional analysis:

The ITAA (The International Transactional Analysis Association) has several books and articles available.

TA: The Handbook of Transactional Analysis by Stan Woolams and Michael Brown.