(Quite) a while back, there was a small synchronicity here regarding Transactional Analysis, and, for a long time, TA sat in my pile of “important things to look into”. I finally got around to it recently and it got my mind going in all kinds of directions. I began with the wikipedia entry and found, as I often do, that it offered a great breakdown of the basics. At it’s core, TA is a system that analyzes our interactions with the world, in order to help us to become aware of how our unconscious assumptions about reality (called scripts) are shaping are lives. An analogous relationship would be between html code and a website as seen through a browser. You examine how things looks at the browser level, and then go back into the code if something’s not appearing as you want it to. It was developed by Eric Berne as a “Neo-Freudian” method of psychoanalysis, and as such, it has its own language and models for talking about the functioning (and dysfunctioning) of the psyche. It was TA’s basic models of interaction, known as “ego states” that really drew my attention.
The 3 ego states are as follows (from wikipedia):
- Parent (”exteropsyche”)
- Adult (”neopsyche”)
- Child (”archaeopsyche”)
Some of TA’s language is a bit hippie-fied for my taste (it’s the origin of the term “the warm fuzzies”), but that’s just a product of the time in which this system was developed. The underlying ideas are well worth looking into, regardless of the words used to describe them, and I highly recommend exploring further if you’re interested.
But it was these three ego states that really caught my attention. I saw them as having a kind of yin/yang relationship with Freud’s id/ego/superego formations, and, while thinking about them in that context, I stumbled on a flaw in (what I think of as) some of the basic assumptions behind psychoanalysis. Now, I may not be interpreting everything entirely correctly here, but my understanding of these things did point toward some interesting conclusions. Before I get to those conclusions though, let me explain what I mean about the yin/yang relationship between TA and Freud.
On the one hand, Freud’s psychic formations (id, ego, and superego) simply are. They exist as objective parts of the psyche, functioning almost as organs within the mind, so that one could say, “oh, my id wants this, but my superego doesn’t,” just as easily as saying, “oh, my stomach’s too full, no more pie!”. They are forces that wield influence from within the self, while the self scrambles around trying to create an equilibrium of libido between their different needs. By contrast, Transactional Analysis’ ego states are ones through which the self can interact with the external world. The states are masks, forms that the self assumes in order to embody what it considers to be the best possible role in any given situation. Basically, the difference here is that TA focuses on the inter-personal nature of the self, while Freud focuses on the intra-personal nature of the self. Their concepts of “self” can be seen as inversions of each other, different sides of the same coin, the north and south face of the same mountain. Because in the end, what is being described is the “self” in it’s passive and active states.
But if both systems are examining the”self” from within a different context, can a similar parallel be found between the individual formations and ego states? That is, can each be seen as an active/passive version of some aspect of the self? It was in trying to fit these pieces fit together that the entire basis for both models fell apart for me in a really interesting way.
I’ll begin with the id/child state. In both cases, what’s described is the aspect of the self that wants, that desires, that craves instant gratification or the release of emotional energy. It’s the creative part of the self but it’s also the unpredictable part of the self. For Freud, the id “is regarded as the reservoir of the libido or ‘instinctive drive to create’“, while in TA, the child state is the source of emotions, creation, recreation, spontaneity and intimacy. In both, what we have is the part of the self that reacts to reality before conscious decision making comes into play. They come into consciousness already in motion and reach outward into the world. Freud’s id is a drive within the self, while TA’s child state is the self acting spontaneously in the world, so we do find that same internal/external dichotomy at the individual formation/state level as well. And this formation/state seems to be based mainly on creating a future state of being. Although it’s a bit counter-intuitive at first, any emotional response is something created in anticipation of some future state. I do not mean the experience of the emotion, I mean the source of the emotion. According to this understanding of the child/id as the source of the emotion, the emotion is created by that source to be experienced by the consciousness in the future. The emotion comes into being before we are aware of it’s presence. I think that this way of looking at it makes the “child” label particularly appropriate, because if children have an abundance of anything, it’s “future”. This ties in with creativity quite well too, because creativity is all about “seeing” something that hasn’t yet come into being and making it real.
The obvious retort to this is that children are always so wonderfully present, but that, I would say, is confusing the “child” label with an actual child. In fact, I think children can often be a lot more in touch with their ego/adult state than most adults are, and I disagree with TA’s notion that the child state is merely a re-creation of childhood experiences. As I hope I will be able to clarify here, I think that the id/child state might be better understood as something created during childhood, rather than as something inherent since birth.
Before we get to that though, I’d like to point to a similar pattern in the ego/adult state: that the base here is on the present moment. As TA puts it, the adult is “directed towards an objective appraisal of reality”, and for Freud, “the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.“ It is the seat of the conscious awareness, mainly because it is the part that is still in direct contact with both the circumstances of the exterior world and the drives of inner world.
And finally, in case you haven’t already figured it out, the superego/parent is the part of the self that seems most based in the past. Without the past, the parent/superego has no basis upon which to make its pronouncements. If there were no previous bad results to watch out for, on what grounds can we be scolded for our current actions? TA’s parent state is one where we “behave, feel, and think in response to an unconscious mimicking of how (our) parents (or other parental figures) acted.“ That is, it is the part of the self that has internalized the actions of the parental figure in order to please that figure. Freud pretty much agrees, saying “the super-ego retains the character of the father“, (of course, Freud’s word choice here, as with TA’s slightly hippy-fied sentimentality, is best understood as a product of its time, not as anything inherent to the argument here). Again, the inner/outer dichotomy is obvious: TA has us “mimicking actions”, while Freud has us “retaining character”.
That’s all well and good, but to me, there’s something profoundly wrong about all of this. Because really (and here’s where the bottom fell out of the bucket for me) the past of the future don’t exist experientially. As the Sensei at my zen temple has said, “we can experience a sense of the past or future, but that sense is still in the present moment”. We are always in the present, and it’s only in the present that we can have any influence on the unfolding of things. From that perspective, focusing on either the future or the past at the expense of the present is a waste of time. But then, from what we looked at above, being “in the present moment” only leaves us with the ego/adult, the “rational observer”, with the emotions and creativity of the child/id completely cut off from reality. And that, I think, points a problem inherent in psychoanalysis since Freud.
For Freud, “the id stands in direct opposition to the super-ego”, but I know that, for me, the ideal state of being is not one where the internal parts of my psyche are in direct opposition to each other. Why carry around a description of the self that has such an insolvable conflict within it? For Transactional Analysis, “learning to strengthen the Adult is a goal of TA“, yet the adult state is described as “most like a computer processing information and making predictions absent of major emotions that cloud its operation.” Is that the goal we should be striving for? A telling quote from Joseph Campbell sheds some light on the matter. It comes from his journals from his trip to Japan: “Christianity and Freud, by the way, have something in common, inasmuch as for both, man’s rational consciousness is absolutely sealed away from the unknown root of his soul.”
And I say fuck that. Why should my ideal consciousness be purely rational, and why should that rational consciousness be absolutely sealed away from the “root of my soul?” What causes someone to create a system of “mind” like that, and how might these models look if they sprang from a different understanding of the mind-in-reality? I don’t doubt that there are many analysts who make good use of the tools offered by TA (as well as those offered by Freud) to achieve excellent results with their clients, but I think a re-examination of some of the key assumptions is in order if we ever want to use these tools to their full extent. The conclusion I came to through my understanding of the id/child as future-based and superego/parent as past-based is that both these aspects are created out of the self at the precise moment when the ‘root of the soul’ is mistakenly thought to be separated from the present moment. That is, the id/child can only be seen as the source of emotions and creativity if these things are seen as not already belonging to the fully present adult/ego. Once that happens, the superego/parent is needed to balance out the time lag of the no-longer-present-source. The parental figure needs to become internalized as the superego because the inner source is no longer trusted to touch reality directly; a mediator is needed. What is being described in both systems is a fundamentally damaged understanding of what the “self” actually is, and it is being described as if this were the normal way to be. What we’re left with is a case of double vision. Take a look at this handy little visual metaphor:
To the left there is clearly part of a face. And the same is true to the right. But they both have an extremely unreal quality about them. You can see through them, as if they weren’t really there, and neither side is complete in itself. Both fade into a middle part that is clearly there. The middle part seems real and concrete, but it is a chaotic mess of features. Clearly it’s real, but what is it? No conclusions about the real face can be drawn until the blurred vision is cleared. You have to sit and stare at the part that feels real, and wait for the true face to come into focus.
So too, focusing only on the child/id, as something separate from the present moment, is to be caught in the illusory future. To focus only on the parent/superego, as something separate from the present moment, is to be caught in the past. Only when the two are seen as existing both together at the same time, naturally balanced in the present moment, can reality be fully experienced. Check out this quote from Douglas Harding (and the accompanying exercise)
You know, six hundred years before Christ they were saying in India that there is one Seer in all beings. One Seer. The Sufis said it, the Buddhists said it. Hui Hai, a great Buddhist Zen master, said, ‘Do we see with our eyes? No we see with our Buddha Nature.’ We see with a Single Eye say the Sufi masters, later. One Seer. This is the Eye you’re looking out of. I find this absolutely extraordinary. See what you’re looking out of! And this is a strange thing—this agrees with modern science. Eyes do not see. Eyes condition, are part of the conditioning apparatus of what we see. They help to determine what we see, but the seeing doesn’t go on at the eye level. It really has to go back, via the optic nerves and so on, to a region of the brain where the story is taken up. It starts off there with the sun, the light comes down, is filtered through the atmosphere of the Earth, strikes the object and hits your eye, and is then conveyed to a region of the visual cortex in the brain, where the story is taken up by atoms, particles and so on. It’s not until that terminus is reached that you say, ‘Hi! I see you.’ The thing that starts with the galaxy, with the light of the sun out there, ends with the agitation or whatever of particles here. And it’s only where the All is reduced to No-thing here that seeing takes place.
This is the key to the whole thing. At some point in our childhood, we push away that root of the soul, our honest emotional involvement with the world, in favor of a more removed, rational approach. This is what all the “get in touch with your emotions” and “increase the amount of ‘play’ in your life” kinds of therapies are attempting to overcome. Even “be here now” and “be one with everything” point to the same way out. What is needed is a resurrection of that emotional source into the present moment, so that there is a flowing back and forth of energy and information between the inner and outer experiences. The sense of any barrier between the two is the “self” that needs to be gotten rid of, the gateless gate through which we must pass. We create this boundary at some point in our childhood, in response to some external circumstances that teach us that our inner drives are not to be trusted, and then we take this self-created boundary as real. We wall off our drives, instead of allowing them to interact with and learn from reality. This is not in and of itself a bad thing, but we seem to forget that we’ve done it to ourselves. We hold onto that barrier as a part of our true self, when it’s actually only a mental tool we’ve created. The true self is simply the space within which this flow of energy/information takes place between our inner and outer aspects.
This is why I said earlier that I think children are more in touch with there adult/ego self, because the true self-in-the-present moment understands that is no separation between the “root of the soul” and the rational consciousness. They are like two ends of a magnet that can never touch, but which meet quite easily in the middle.
Recently, there have been some studies pointing to a major shift in our understanding of what’s going on in a child’s mind. Conveniently enough, a few articles on these were published while I was trying to put this piece together, and they greatly contributed to my understanding of just what it was that I was trying to say:
The finding that infants can distinguish between solids and liquids at such an early age builds upon a growing body of research that strongly suggests that babies are not blank slates who primarily depend on others for acquiring knowledge. That’s a common assumption of researchers in the not too distant past.
“Rather, our research shows that babies are amazing little experimenters with innate knowledge,” Susan Hespos said. “They’re collecting data all the time.”
The infants who in their first trials observed the blue water in the glass looked significantly longer at the blue solid, compared to the liquid test trials. The longer stares indicated the babies were having an “Aha!” moment, noticing the solid substance’s difference from the liquid. The infants who in their first trials observed the blue solid in the glass showed the opposite pattern. They looked longer at the liquid, compared to the solid test trials.
“As capricious as it may sound, how long a baby looks at something is a strong indicator of what they know,” Hespos said. “They are looking longer because they detect a change and want to know what is going on.”
“Our research on babies strongly suggests that right from the beginning babies are active learners,” Hespos said. “It shows that we perceive the world in pretty much the same way from infancy throughout life, making fine adjustments along the way.”
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Both Piaget and Freud thought that the reason children produced so much fantastic, unreal play was that they couldn’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. But a lot of the more recent work in children’s theory of mind has shown quite the contrary. Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It’s just they are equally interested in exploring both. The picture we used to have of children was that they spent all of this time doing pretend play because they had these very limited minds, but in fact what we’ve now discovered is that children have more powerful learning abilities than we do as adults. A lot of their characteristic traits, like their pretend play, are signs of how powerful their imaginative abilities are.
Two-and-a-half-year-olds already recognize the difference between moral principles and conventional principles. You can ask them if it would be okay to hit someone at daycare if everyone said it would be okay, versus asking them whether it would be okay to not hang up your coat in the cubby if everyone said it would be okay. These children say it’s never okay to hit someone, but whether or not you have to put your clothes in the cubby could change from daycare to daycare. They already seem to appreciate the difference between the kinds of morality that comes from empathy and the kind that comes from our conventional rules. From the time they are two, they recognize both are important but in different ways.
So then, what’s the solution to all this? Should we just let loose, do whatever we want? Let our emotions run rampant? No, of course not. On the one hand, our emotions don’t naturally run rampant. They are communications from our unconscious, and our unconscious is designed to make the best decision possible based on the information available to it. Telling ourselves that they’re unmanagable is often just a way to maintain that false boundary that we think of as an inherent part of our self. Argue for your limitations and they’re yours, as they say.
On the other hand, yes, there are people with really violent emotions and urges, but think of it this way. If you take a hose, and block the end of it, when you move your finger away there is a sudden spray of water. And if you only move your finger partially, there is a contant stream of water under pressure. What we have to learn is how to remove the blocks that create emotional pressure, but without the sudden outpouring of what was blocked. People can be damaged, perhaps permanently, by such emotional blockages, but we, as a society, would be best served by having as many people as possible making attempts to integrate these parts of themselves without the need to lash out with these blocked emotions. We have to retrain our mind and our emotions to better exist together again, because right now, they have forgotten how to. The more people who can learn to safely let the inner fountain bubble up, the less we, as a society, will have to worry about violent emotions. “What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job? If you don’t understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you are. It is the great secret.”
What we have to do is learn to sit with our emotions, become aware of them as they are. Reconnect our conscioussness with the root of our soul. As a species, we had the chance to explore both extremes, the emotional and the rational, and now it’s time to head back toward the center, to level things out so to speak. It is definitely not an easy road, but the end result is one worth traveling to. And what is that result? Love. A consciously aware participation mystique. And the realization that this state has been completely available within our being all along.
Bonsai
Kundalini
Cold Mountain
IChing
Mandala
Rock Garden Zen
