T.A.: Doing OK

In the 1960s it was encounter groups. In the 1970s it is transactional analysis, or T.A., the pop-psychological path to happiness charted by Sacramento Psychiatrist Thomas A. Harris in his bestseller I'm OK--You're OK. T.A., or close facsimiles of it, is now practiced by some 3,000 psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and ministers in the U.S. and 14 foreign countries. In fact, it may be the most widely used and fastest-growing form of treatment for emotional distress in the world. Says Boston's J. Allyn Bradford, a Congregational minister who runs a T.A. training institute called OK World, Inc.: "Tom Harris has done for psychotherapy the same thing Henry Ford did for the automobile: made it available to the average person."

The central thesis of T.A., as Harris teaches it, stems from Psychiatrist Alfred Adler's concept of a universal "inferiority feeling." Most people, Harris says, never stop thinking of themselves as helpless children overwhelmed by the power of adults. For that reason they go through life believing that they are inferior, or "not OK," while they view everyone else as superior, or "OK." The aim of T.A. therapy is to instill the conviction that "I'm OK--you're OK," meaning that no one is really a threat to anyone else and that in the end everything comes up roses.

More specifically, transactional analysts believe that what makes a person unhappy is an unbalanced relationship between the three parts that constitute every human personality: Parent, Adult and Child. Harris rejects any suggestion that these are the equivalent of Freud's superego, ego and id. "The Parent, Adult and Child are real things that can be validated," he insists. "We're talking about real people, real times and real events, as recorded in the brain." Be that as it may, the theory is that unless the mature, rational Adult dominates the personality, or, in the language of T.A., is "plugged in," the overly restrictive Parent and the primitive, self-depreciating Child will foul up most "transactions," or relationships with others.

To put his Adult in charge, Harris says, the troubled person must "learn the language of transactional analysis and use it in examining his everyday transactions." He must also learn to diagram these transactions, using three circles to represent the personality components of each person and drawing arrows to show how two people interact. Parallel lines depict "complementary transactions," which occur, for instance, when a husband's Adult speaks to his wife's Adult and gets a response in kind. In that type of exchange, the husband might ask, "Where are my cuff links?" and his wife might reply, "In your top left dresser drawer"--or, perhaps, "I'm not sure, but I'll help you find them."

Crossed lines like this denote uncomplementary transactions, and bode trouble. For example, the Adult-to-Adult question about the cuff links might be answered with a sharp "Where you left them," a reproof that comes from the wife's Parent and is addressed to what she sees as the inept Child in her husband's personality.

T.A. therapy sessions usually involve eight to 15 participants and often begin with one member trying to describe why "I'm not OK." The group responds by giving him all the reasons that he should be OK. Therapist and group members alike try to help each member analyze, and change, his "life script" --the blueprint that, according to T.A., a child unconsciously draws up to shape his whole life. Bad scripts may include self-defeating "games" such as "Kick Me," a gambit of the self-pitying, and "Blemish," the ploy of people who compensate for inferiority feelings by pointing out the failings of others.

All Adults. As a way of inspiring group members, T.A. therapists usually make "contracts" with them to achieve specific goals like giving up alcohol or such amorphous ones as "to get more OK," "to be able to give myself to others" or "to exercise more control over my Parent." One far-out leader shouts, "You're OK!" to his groups, and another asks members to clasp hands in a circle dance while singing Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead. Harris, who now does more teaching and training than therapy, usually begins his lectures with a few jokes to loosen things up. Sometimes he asks a listener to come forward and stand at the foot of the speaker's platform, thus demonstrating what it is like to have to look up at a parent and feel like a "not OK" child. Often, members of Harris' staff surprise the audience by interrupting him with comments of their own. The purpose is to suggest that Harris and his listeners are all adults together, and that he is no parent proclaiming infallible truths to obedient children. Occasionally, he writes out advice on a prescription pad: "I want you, John, to smile and greet ten new people every day."

Harris was trained in medicine, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, but soon became dissatisfied with the results of traditional treatment. "After about five years in psychoanalysis, you get a ton of garbage and an ounce of usable material," he says. "In T.A., we go after that usable material right away." Harris stumbled onto T.A. when he heard a lecture by the late Eric Berne, originator of transactional analysis, author of the 1964 bestseller Games People Play, and a self-described "cowboy therapist" whose advice to patients was, "Get well first and analyze later." Before long, Harris had evolved his own brand of T.A. and embodied it in I'm OK--You're OK.

Much of the book's success is due to its remarkable popularity among religious groups. The apparent reason: I'm OK reveals Harris--a practicing Presbyterian -- as a cross between Norman Vincent Peale and Billy Graham. A cheerful mass evangelist, he preaches a gospel of original sin and carries, as he himself puts it, a "message of hope" to an ever increasing flock of converts. "We simply cannot argue with the endemic 'cussedness' of man," he says, in a characteristic mixture of everyday and evangelical language.

In fact, Harris is convinced that only those who believe the "truth" of transactional analysis can win the battle against neurosis. "You have to have absolute faith that T.A. is true; otherwise you'll lose," Harris once told a group he was leading. Speaking more than half seriously, he told one patient who had not read I'm OK -- You're OK that "the only thing standing between you and a cure is my book." The book itself goes so far as to suggest that it may be able to save man and civilization from extinction. Harris writes: "We trust it may be a volume of Hope and an important page of the manual for the survival of mankind."

Eugene Carson Blake, former general secretary of the World Council of Churches, finds the values and assumptions of I'm OK to be "basically Christian ideas," and an increasing number of mainline Protestant denominations are using T.A. for individual and group counseling. Educators are trying it, too. Last spring Harris and his staff taught 1,000 teachers at the N.E.A. convention in Portland, Ore., how to create "the OK classroom." Business firms (General Foods and Digital Equipment Corp., among others) have experimented with the method, and so have NASA, the Civil Service Commission and the U.S. Naval depot in Oakland, Calif. (A depot contract: "We must move more boxes onto more ships with happier men.") In Berkeley, Calif., Psychologist Claude Steiner has reported success in treating alcoholics with T.A., and in Sacramento, Calif., Pediatrician Dennis Marks says he has helped retarded patients.

Sharp Critic. In the midst of his success, Harris has one regret: "My readers and my patients seem to understand me better than other psychiatrists do." Indeed, President Burness Moore of the American Psychoanalytic Association finds transactional analysis "superficial," and Psychiatrist James Gordon of Washington, D.C., calls it "a hermetic system, defensively, self-righteously complete, dangerously closed to outside criticism and change."

Although he has been a sharp critic of T.A. in the past, Boston Psychiatrist Robert Coles takes a more charitable view. "There is some wisdom in it -- of a limited kind," he says. "I don't think it has the depth or breadth of vision of either Christianity or Judaism, let alone of a Freud or a Jung. But neither Freud nor Jung offers the ordinary individual any creeds to live by. T.A. is terribly reassuring. I think worse has been done by people who pretended to more."

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