I few months ago I found a copy of Staying OK, the sequel to I’m OK—You’re OK (the book that probably did the most to popularize transactional analysis), on the street near my home in Berkeley. Since I had previously read Games People Play and had not thought about transactional analysis much since, I scooped it up. I’ve just gotten around to reading it.
My recollection of Games People Play is that it’s the better book (based on what I’ve read of Staying OK so far). Also, transactional analysis is kind of in the water in ways that are hard to notice so you are probably already kind of familiar with some of the ideas in it, but probably not explicitly in a way you could use to build new models (for example, as far as I can tell notions of strokes and life scripts were popularized by if not fully originated within transactional analysis). So if you aren’t familiar with transactional analysis I recommend learning a bit about it since although it’s a bit dated and we arguably have better models now, it’s still pretty useful to read about to help notice patterns of ways people interact with others and themselves, sort of like the way the most interesting thing about Metaphors We Live By is just pointing out the metaphors and recognizing their presence in speech rather than whether the general theory is maximally good or not.
One things that struck me as I’m reading Staying OK is its discussion of the trackback technique. I can’t find anything detailed online about it beyond a very brief summary. It’s essentially a multi-step process for dealing with conflicts in internal dialogue, “conflict” here being a technical term referring to crossed communication in the transactional analysis model of the psyche. Or at least that’s how it’s presented. Looking at it a little closer and reading through examples in the book that are not available online, it’s really just poorly explained memory reconsolidation. To the extent it’s working as a method in transactional analysis therapy, it seems to be working because it’s tapping into the same mechanisms as Unlocking the Emotional Brain.
I think this is interesting both because it shows how we’ve made progress and because it shows that transactional analysis (along with a lot of other things), were also getting at stuff that works, but less effectively because they had weaker evidence to build on that was more confounded with other possible mechanisms. To me this counts as evidence that building theory based on phenomenological evidence can work and is better than nothing, but will be supplanted by work that manages to tie in “objective” evidence.
I few months ago I found a copy of Staying OK, the sequel to I’m OK—You’re OK (the book that probably did the most to popularize transactional analysis), on the street near my home in Berkeley. Since I had previously read Games People Play and had not thought about transactional analysis much since, I scooped it up. I’ve just gotten around to reading it.
My recollection of Games People Play is that it’s the better book (based on what I’ve read of Staying OK so far). Also, transactional analysis is kind of in the water in ways that are hard to notice so you are probably already kind of familiar with some of the ideas in it, but probably not explicitly in a way you could use to build new models (for example, as far as I can tell notions of strokes and life scripts were popularized by if not fully originated within transactional analysis). So if you aren’t familiar with transactional analysis I recommend learning a bit about it since although it’s a bit dated and we arguably have better models now, it’s still pretty useful to read about to help notice patterns of ways people interact with others and themselves, sort of like the way the most interesting thing about Metaphors We Live By is just pointing out the metaphors and recognizing their presence in speech rather than whether the general theory is maximally good or not.
One things that struck me as I’m reading Staying OK is its discussion of the trackback technique. I can’t find anything detailed online about it beyond a very brief summary. It’s essentially a multi-step process for dealing with conflicts in internal dialogue, “conflict” here being a technical term referring to crossed communication in the transactional analysis model of the psyche. Or at least that’s how it’s presented. Looking at it a little closer and reading through examples in the book that are not available online, it’s really just poorly explained memory reconsolidation. To the extent it’s working as a method in transactional analysis therapy, it seems to be working because it’s tapping into the same mechanisms as Unlocking the Emotional Brain.
I think this is interesting both because it shows how we’ve made progress and because it shows that transactional analysis (along with a lot of other things), were also getting at stuff that works, but less effectively because they had weaker evidence to build on that was more confounded with other possible mechanisms. To me this counts as evidence that building theory based on phenomenological evidence can work and is better than nothing, but will be supplanted by work that manages to tie in “objective” evidence.