What's it about? It's oddly hard to tell from the cover.
Hah, fair.
It was written on 1967 I believe, so it's got some dated language but the last time I read it, it made a lot of sense to me. Especially since I read it right around the time I was figuring out that I'm on the spectrum and such.
The first bit is trying to define a common language through which to talk about interactions with other people, and what goes into that. It defines "Transactional Analysis" and how to try to reduce psychology into measurable units to which you can apply scientific method, etc. So a transaction is an interaction between two people, and transactions can provide "strokes" which are units of recognition/affirmation, which humans need to be happy.
I'll try to explain the core parts of it as I've understood (and read through) so far...
It starts with some research someone did while performing brain surgery, where they didn't tell the patient they were doing it but stimulated parts of their brain with a probe. It made the patient immediately recall something in their past, though they wouldn't immediately know why. They might hear a part of a song, or think of a scent, etc. Continued probing of the same region made them think of more lines of the song, or whatever, and was entirely involuntary. Even after they were told what was being done, they couldn't
stop recalling those things when probed.
Kind of core to it all then is that from birth (perhaps even before) our brains are recording everything in essentially two channels, one that's recording what you're seeing, being told, rules, learned attitudes, etc. Things you pick up from your parents and other authority figures. Thus therefore called "The Parent".
There's also a simultaneous recording of everything you feel, emotions, impulses, etc. called "The Child".
These don't mean literally the same as you'd normally use "parent" and "child".
It poses that during the first 3 years of life, you're recording everything to both the Parent and Child, and throughout life when we encounter situations, the brain is essentially playing back from those recordings. The Parent is imposing what rules or attitudes you learned, and the child is imposing the emotions you first felt. You cannot stop them from replaying, it's involuntary and the recordings can never be erased.
It might present as a (literal) parent yelling at their kids not to put coats/hats on the table as a rule, without really knowing why, but it tracks back to during the grandmother's time some neighborhood kids had lice so they didn't want the coats/hats on the table if they came around, and it'd just been passed down as a learned behavior through The Parent. Likewise, another patient was described as hearing a song and feeling a great sense of melancholy not knowing why, but it tracked back to her mother who died when she was 5 playing that song on the piano. She heard the song and immediately felt like she was an alone 5 year old again.
But that's where the third "Adult" comes in. Not literally a grown up person, but it's the state of being conscious about the Parent and Child and being able to chose whether replaying those first responses that you had to something is appropriate. The Adult is basically the computer taking those two feeds of data and processing it through a filter of "is this useful for the present situation?"
Going back to the concept of "stroking", with "a stroke" being the unit of recognition/affirmation someone could receive from another individual. These can be positive or negative, but people need to receive that validation. Initially, the mother is providing all those sources of stroking, cooing over the child, feeding it, etc. That's what breeds the initial "I'm not OK - You're OK", because they're getting strokes. And negatives strokes are sometimes preferred to no strokes at all, like a child acting badly just to get
some attention.
Theeeeeeeeeeeeeen it moves on to talking about four emotional states that everyone occupies. It starts out with "I'm not OK-You're OK" for everyone as an infant, regardless of whether they're showered with love or not provided it adequately. It stems from the human just being smaller than everyone, helpless without them, unable to communicate what they feel, etc. I'm not OK but you are.
So with a position of I'm not OK - You are, there's at least a source of stroking and the "adult" gets to work on finding ways to increase those strokes. I think most people stay in that state, though it could change to one of two other states depending on how the child is treated.
I'm not OK - You're not OK, which is when the parent becomes distant after the infancy and stops providing those strokes they did before. The child concludes that something changed and they aren't OK anymore. The "babying" days are over. And it might not even be that there aren't people in the future who could provide that stroking, it's that once the position is set in someone they can't change it. Any future experiences will be framed in a way that supports that core position of I'm not OK, you're not OK. This likely leads to the person 'giving up' and feeling like there's no hope, extreme withdrawal from others, showing regressive behavior that's vaguely trying to get back to the days of infancy when they did receive those strokes. The extreme expression would be
suicide.
I'm OK - you're not OK, is the result of children who suffer severe physical abuse. It's framed like, if a child is beaten to where they've broken bones, had concussions, etc. there may come a belief that they are OK by themselves, but everyone external is not OK and causes pain. In a way, the act of 'licking their own wounds' is a source of self-strokes, and they come to think that they're the only one who can make themselves feel OK. They might overcompensate for that in later life by trying to make themselves feel superior to others, have other control issues or not really be able to recognize their own flaws. The extreme expression here would be homicide.
There's more about how we write scripts for ourselves based off of those positions, and play 'games' that help us prove those things as being true. I've not got back into that part yet, nor the real bulk of the inter-track transactions, like when a Parent persona is addressing a Child persona, or Adult to Adult conversation which is healthy and productive, etc.
EDIT: The ultimate goal of it is obviously being aware of those two recordings, being able to employ the Adult effectively, and finding "I'm OK-You're OK." I haven't quite got there yet, either in the book, or in my head.
I'm sure I explained that
perfectly.
