During a conversation with someone, the person starting the communication will give the “transaction stimulus”, then the person receiving the stimulus will give the “transaction response”.
Transactional analysis is the method used to analyze the process of transactions in communication with others. It requires us to be aware of how we feel, think and behave during interactions with others.
TA recognized that the human personality is made up of three “ego states”, each of which is an entire system of thought, feeling, and behavior from which we interact with each other.
The parent, Adult, and Child ego states and the interaction between them from the foundation of transactional analysis theory.
Eric Berne founded TA in the late 1950s. His ideas for developed TA developed from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory that childhood experiences greatly impact our lives as adults and are the basis for the development of our personalities and psychological or emotional issues that we suffer.
Berne believed that childhood experiences, particularly how we are parented, affect the developmental formation of our three ego states (Parent, Adult, Child).
This can then unconsciously cause use to replay the same attitudes and behaviors that our parents had towards us to someone else during a conversation, or to respond to communication and interactions with past childhood anxieties and emotions.
This dysfunctional behavior is the result of self-limiting decisions made in childhood. Such decisions culminate in what Berne called the “life script”, the pre-conscious life plan that governs the way we live out our lives.
Changing this life script is the aim of transactional analysis psychotherapy. This is done by replacing violent organizational or societal scripting with cooperative nonviolent behavior.