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...1960s it was encounter groups. In the 1970s it is transactional analysis, or T.A., the pop-psychological path to happiness charted by Sacramento Psychiatrist Thomas A. Harris in his bestseller I'm OK-You're OK. T.A., or close facsimiles of it, is now practiced by some 3,000 psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and ministers in the U.S. and 14 foreign countries. In fact, it may be the most widely used and fastest-growing form of treatment for emotional distress in the world. Says Boston's J. Allyn Bradford, a Congregational minister who runs a T.A. training...
...Harris teaches it, stems from Psychiatrist Alfred Adler's concept of a universal "inferiority feeling." Most people, Harris says, never stop thinking of themselves as helpless children overwhelmed by the power of adults. For that reason they go through life believing that they are inferior, or "not OK," while they view everyone else as superior, or "OK." The aim of T.A. therapy is to instill the conviction that "I'm OK-you're OK," meaning that no one is really a threat to anyone else and that in the end everything comes up roses...
...therapy sessions usually involve eight to 15 participants and often begin with one member trying to describe why "I'm not OK." The group responds by giving him all the reasons that he should be OK. Therapist and group members alike try to help each member analyze, and change, his "life script" -the blueprint that, according to T.A., a child unconsciously draws up to shape his whole life. Bad scripts may include self-defeating "games" such as "Kick Me," a gambit of the self-pitying, and "Blemish," the ploy of people who compensate for inferiority feelings by pointing...
...Adults. As a way of inspiring group members, T.A. therapists usually make "contracts" with them to achieve specific goals like giving up alcohol or such amorphous ones as "to get more OK," "to be able to give myself to others" or "to exercise more control over my Parent." One far-out leader shouts, "You're OK!" to his groups, and another asks members to clasp hands in a circle dance while singing Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead. Harris, who now does more teaching and training than therapy, usually begins his lectures with a few jokes to loosen things...
...late Eric Berne, originator of transactional analysis, author of the 1964 bestseller Games People Play, and a self-described "cowboy therapist" whose advice to patients was, "Get well first and analyze later." Before long, Harris had evolved his own brand of T.A. and embodied it in I'm OK-You're OK...