I'm Ok, You're Ok: A Practical Approach to Human Psychology

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I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another.

I’m OK-You’re OK is a thought-provoking and hope-inspiring book on how transactional analysis approaches can improve life and relationships. One difficulty with many psychoanalytic words is that they do not have the same meanings for everybody. Transactional Analysis instead has simpler and more clearly defined concepts, works quicker, and holds the patient responsible for what happens in the future no matter what’s happened in the past. Evidence from transactional analysis tells us that our emotional reactions regularly cause us to unconsciously relive our earliest childhood experiences, even if we can’t remember them. Berne’s brand of psychotherapy involved asking the client what he or she wanted ‘fixed’ and proceeding to fix it.It is a teaching and learning device rather than a confessional or an archeological exploration of the psychic cellars. The child has no way to understand what causes approval or disapproval, which frustrates him and leads him to conclude: “I’m not OK”, which is hardwired in our brains and cannot be canceled. Though limiting and destructive, they were also a sort of comfort, absolving us of the need to really confront unresolved psychological issues. I’m OK – You’re OK is the place you want to end up (“a mature adult, at peace with themselves and others”).

In the preface, Harris praises the then-new procedure of transactional analysis (TA, or as Harris often refers to it, P-A-C) as a major innovation addressing the slow process and limited results that he and other psychiatric practitioners believed was characteristic of conventional psychiatry. When we blame and find fault, we replay the early blaming and fault-finding which is recorded in the Parent, and this makes us feel ok, because the Parent is ok, and we are coming on Parent. B. Stimulation at Point 19 in the first convolution of the right temporal lobe caused him to say: There was a piano there and someone was playing. Having described such a structured method of dealing with the challenges of human psychology, the final two chapters of the book discuss the question of improving morality and society.A song went through his mind, probably as he had heard it on a certain occasion: he found himself a part of a specific situation that progressed and evolved just as the original situation did. Preface In recent years there have been many reports of a growing impatience with psychiatry, with its seeming foreverness, its high cost, its debatable results, and its vague, esoteric terms. And the more we separate the three, the more we develop and strengthen our adult and we free ourselves up.