Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy
The theory before the bestseller. Ego states set out as a clinical system.
In technical language, an ego state may be described phenomenologically as a coherent system of feelings, and operationally as a set of coherent behavior patterns.
The book gives psychotherapists a structural account of personality built from three ego states: Parent, Adult, and Child. Berne treats these not as metaphors but as observable states a clinician can identify from a patient's voice, posture, vocabulary, and affect in the room. Structural analysis maps which state a patient occupies; transactional analysis then reads the exchanges between two people as moves between states, so that the source of a stuck or repeating interaction becomes visible.
Berne wrote it in 1961 as a clinical text for practitioners, three years before Games People Play carried the ideas to a general readership. It sets out the diagnostic vocabulary in full: the analysis of transactions, games, and scripts, with case material drawn from group and individual sessions.
For the consulting room it offers a way to name what is happening between therapist and patient in the moment, and a shared language a patient can learn and use.
About the author
Eric Berne
Eric Berne (1910-1970) was a Canadian-born psychiatrist who trained in psychoanalysis and later practised in the United States. He founded transactional analysis, a model that describes personality through three ego states, Parent, Adult, and Child, and reads behaviour through the recurring social exchanges he called games and the longer patterns he named life scripts. His work gave clinicians an accessible vocabulary for interpersonal dynamics, drawing on psychodynamic ideas while attending to the observable transactions between people.
Details
- 1961
- English
- Souvenir Press
- Souvenir Press, 1961
- 272
- 9780285647763