Transactional Analysis (TA) was something of a fad in the 1960s. I read my mom's copy of
I'm OK You're OK, by Thomas Harris, not realizing that it drew principles from an earlier book on TA:
The Games People Play by his colleague Eric Berne. In
The Games People Play, Berne theorized that each of us may switch between three ego-states: the Parent, the Adult and the Child (PAC) - revisions of Freud's Superego, Ego and Id that emphasize interactions with others.
If you think about it, some TPM posters generally post in a superior Parent voice, while others are emotionally or playfully Child-like, and others are rational and Adult. Most of us switch voices depending on the topic and correspondent.
I'm OK You're OK featured a few examples of flawed interaction, in which one person attempts an adult-to-adult interaction, but the other responds as parent or child, thus confounding effective communication.
One example went something like this:
Adult Husband: Where are my socks?
Parent Wife: Where you left them!
Adult Wife: In the dryer.
Child Wife: (big eyes) Socks?
A TPM example might be:
Adult Poster: Obama just released another video.
Parent Commenter: He thinks he's Roosevelt.
Adult Commenter: These videos are a great way to communicate ideas.
Child Commenter: Everything he does is perfect.
The point that an Adult would have trouble obtaining usable information from someone stuck in Parent or Child mode made sense to me, but the more I read of
I'm OK, You're OK, the more forced his examples seemed. Apparently a lot of practitioners dismissed it as pop psychology, while even many TA adherents thought
I'm OK You're OK oversimplified Berne's ideas.
Applying PAC to TPM posts would be amusing, but I had the thought of trying to classify media and blogger's reactions to new realities. I propose three ego states describing how we react to stress and crises. In place of PAC, we'll have DRC:
* Doomer ("exteroapocalyptic"): a state in which people accept and regurgitate the predictions of prominent doomsayers with little or no critical examination.
* Realist ("neopragmatic"): a state in which people behave, feel, and think in response to what is going on in the "here-and-now," using all of their resources as an adult human being with many years of life experience to guide them. While a person is in the Adult ego state, he/she is directed towards an objective appraisal of reality.
* Cornucopian ("archaeoromantic"): a state in which people revert to behaving, feeling and thinking similarly to how they did when oil and gasoline was cheap, home prices were always rising and the stock market was a safe investment. For example, a person may respond to higher gas and food prices by assuming that new technologies will enable a virtually identical lifestyle. Again, with little or no critical examination.
So under DRC, the questioning might go like this:
Adult Wife: Honey, would you take out the trash?
Doomer Husband: OK, cover me.
Realist Husband: Couldn't we recycle most of that?
Cornucopian Husband: We can't afford trash pickups but there's a dumpster at the mall.
Adult Husband: What's for dinner?
Doomer Wife: Fido
Realist Wife: A nice salad from our garden.
Cornucopian Wife: If only those pizza guys drove EVs, we could afford to order one.
Adult Poster: Food and energy costs are rising.
Doomer Commenter: Nostradamus and Roubini say we're doomed.
Adult commenter: We have to start addressing these problems.
Cornucopian Commenter: T Boone Pickens will solve it for us.
It's too easy to fall into parody, but I've been following energy depletion for several years now, and find that some people who have stated the problem well, are stuck at that point. I have gravitated towards people, like Sharon Astyk, and groups, like the Passiv Haus folk, that are proposing actions and solutions.
Posts
