“The purpose of this book is not only the presentation of new data but also an answer to the question of why people do not live as good as they know how already. They may know that the experts have had a lot to say about human behavior, but this knowledge does not seem to have had the slightest effect on their hangover, their splintering marriage or their cranky children.”
“Once we understand positions and games, freedom of response begins to emerge as a real possibility.”
In a nutshell
If we become more conscious of our ingrained reactions and behavior patterns, our life can begin to be genuinely free.
In a similar vein
Eric Berne Games People Play (p 26)
Anna Freud The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (p 104)
Karen Horney Our Inner Conflicts (p 156)
You know that a book has become a classic when you see it featured in sitcoms. In an episode of Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld opens the door of his apartment to find all-time hopeless case George Costanza spread out on the couch reading I’m OK—You’re OK. For Jerry, reading a self-help book with a silly title is just one more piece of proof of his friend’s loser status.
I’m OK—You’re OK was indeed an icon of the pop psychology boom of the 1960s and 1970s. Demand for the book was tremendous, and today it sits comfortably in the pantheon of titles that have sold over 10 million copies. But what do sales figures indicate? A lot of tacky books sold by the truckload in that era. What is different about I’m OK—You’re OK is that it is still read and used.
To understand the success of Harris’s book, we must look at the trail blazed by his mentor, Eric Berne, in Games People Play (see commentary on p 26). Harris used Berne’s work as a basis for his own, but instead of analyzing the games people play, he focused on Berne’s concept of the three internal voices that speak to us all the time in the form of archetypal characters: the Parent, the Adult, and the Child. All of us have Parent, Adult, or Child “data” guiding our thoughts and decisions, and Harris believed that transactional analysis would free up the Adult, the reasoning voice.
The Adult prevents us being hijacked by unthinking obedience (Child), or by ingrained habit or prejudice (Parent), leaving us a vestige of free will. The Adult represents the objectivity that inspired Socrates’ statement, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” It is the reasoning, moral voice that lets us grow, checking Child or Parent data to see if it is appropriate for a given situation. We might feel like throwing a tantrum when a hotel desk mixes up our booking, but instead we choose to accept it for the moment, figuring it is better to stay calm if we want a positive solution.
Harris includes many examples of conversations that display people caught up in Child or Parent patterns, showing how difficult it is to remove racism or any type of prejudice when one has no awareness of the patterns under which one is operating.
What does the title phrase “I’m OK—You’re OK” actually mean? Harris observed that children, by virtue of their inferior power in an adult world, learn that “I’m not OK, whereas you, being an adult, are OK.” Every child learns this, even if they have a happy childhood, and many adults only overturn this basic decision after their parents pass on, and then perpetuate it in reverse fashion with their own children. Yet the good news is that, once we are aware that it was a decision, we can decide to replace it with a relaxed, selfliking mode of being.
We do not drift into the “I’m OK—You’re OK” position. We may experience it on occasion, but for it to become more or less ingrained it has to be a conscious decision (not merely a feeling), based on faith in people in general. It is a little like the Christian concept of grace; that is, total acceptance of ourselves and of others. From this position we are also better able to see beyond another person’s Parent or Child behavior, even if that behavior would normally cause offense. We reach a level where we don’t expect every transaction to make us happy, knowing that “I’m OK—You’re OK” is true even when we don’t see evidence of it.
Whether you name it the Superego, the Adult, or, in New Age parlance, the “Higher Self,” a willingness to allow our grown-up internal voice to come to the fore is part of any human being’s development. I’m OK—You’re OK provides a key for letting us out of a mental prison that we may not even have known we inhabit. Often it is more satisfying, and certainly easier, to play games or be defensive or rest on prejudices, and in our society we can be considered a success while essentially remaining in Child mode all our life; in doing so we consider other people as objects who will either help or stand in the way of our aims. Genuinely successful people, in contrast, assume that others are equals from whom they can learn valuable things.
Though Berne’s work on transactional analysis may be the better book, Harris’s I’m OK—You’re OK became a huge bestseller, and a major reason has to be his use of the easy-to-understand Parent, Adult, and Child framework. The terms may seem a little goofy, but in fact parallel Freud’s original trinity of superego, ego, and id, the basic elements that Freud put forward for understanding human behavior. Although this is a work of popular psychology, Harris did not try to dumb it down to appeal to everyone. He freely quotes from the likes of Emerson, Whitman, Plato, and Freud, assuming that if readers do not know about such figures they certainly should.
Though it will never be a household term, transactional analysis does have real value in making us aware of our negative and normally unconscious behavior patterns. Given its “do-it-yourself” nature, the mainstream psychiatric profession never made much room for its way of seeing, but it has nevertheless become part of the tool bag of psychologists and counselors who need workable techniques to bring about change.
Transactional analysis has even found its way into fiction. James Redfield acknowledged Harris and Berne as crucial influences in writing one of the biggest-selling books of the 1990s, The Celestine Prophecy. The “control dramas” that his characters engage in, and seek to be free of, are squarely based on the games and positions of transactional analysis; the survival of the book’s characters—and indeed the evolution of the human race—is made dependent on their ability to see beyond these automatic reactions.
Harris was born in Texas. He went to medical school at Temple University in Philadelphia, and in 1942 he began his psychiatry training in Washington DC at St Elizabeth Hospital. He was a US Navy psychiatrist for several years, and was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked. He became chief of the Navy’s Psychiatry Branch.
After the war Harris held a teaching post at the University of Arkansas, and for a period was a senior mental health bureaucrat. He entered private practice as a psychiatrist in Sacramento, California, in 1956, and was a director of the International Transactional Analysis Association.