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Ego states are a consistent pattern of thinking, feeling and behaviour. It is the concept that each person has the potential for three fully functioning ego states that separates TA. from other approaches. There are two basic models of ego states, these are the STRUCTURAL MODEL and the FUNCTIONAL MODEL. There has been and still continues to be much debate regarding the relative merits of these two models and much of this debate has been of the nature “What did Berne really mean?” The functional model is the one widely known in a simplified form and is often used as an explanation of what TA. is. These simplistic explanations are often misleading, but it is worth mentioning however that both models have value. In order to differentiate between the two, remember the following: STRUCTURE ..... Refers to the building, i.e. what is in the ego states, what are they? And how are they made up? STRUCTURE = CONTENT FUNCTION ..... This is a description of their function and of their respective ways of behaving. FUNCTION = PROCESS Also remember that both these models are often talked about as if they are real entities, whereas they are both models used in order to explain and to facilitate our understanding of people. THE STRUCTURAL MODEL
DIAGNOSING EGO STATES Berne described four ways of diagnosing which ego state a person is in:
ADULT EGO STATES Your Adult ego state is you thinking, feeling and behaving in the here and now appropriately to any stimulus. E.g.: Feeling angry with a person who deliberately is blocking your view of a film, then assertively asking him to move, and if he refuses asking the steward to deal with the matter. When we are in our Adult ego state we are in full contact with and are responding to the here and now. For example happily and excitedly creating new ways of enjoying being with our partner. Berne called this state of the self the neo-psyche, the new self... however he also used the simple term of Adult!
When I am responding in the here and now, and it is appropriate to be parent like or child like or grown up like then it can be seen that we may behave from one of the three ego states in the here and now. When we do this it might well be that we are deliberately drawing on material we have within our archaic Parent or Child ego states. CHILD EGO STATES Whenever we are in a situation we may re-experience feelings or thinking and behave in ways which are similar to how we have responded in the past to similar situations. By responding in this way to the here and now we are using archaic internal experiences to determine our current thinking, feeling and behaviours, this is a Child ego state. It is as if we are being an echo of ourselves form an early period of time.
Berne (Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy - 1961) describes each day as an ego state unit and that we build a series of Child ego states. He described a stack of pennies to illustrate how these can build up. I prefer to think of the rings of a tree, each day a new ego state is developed and tomorrow that ego state will be the latest child ego state to have been developed. Transactional Analysts therefore analyse people's Child ego states by the way a person responds to the here and now as if it were an event from the past. E.g: A man becomes fearful when his wife is late home from work and after ten minutes is feeling scared, just like he did when he was a child of four and his mother failed to arrive on time to pick him up from school. The man is not aware of the connection unless it is pointed out to him. Berne called the Child ego state the archeo - psyche. PARENT EGO STATES These are borrowed archaic relics from our past, however these are not internal experiences as the Child ego states are. These are introjected relics. When we were little we introjected (swallowed whole an image of our parent figures. Now in some situations we may respond as if we were the parent figure rather than responding directly to the situation. E.g. The mother of the man in the above example shouted at him and told him he was silly, she was frequently late. He now has a child at school and he frequently turns up late to pick the child up from school telling him he is silly if he is worried. When we are responding as if we were one of our parent figures then we are in a Parent ego state we are borrowing their old way of being.
This picture shows the second order structure of the parent ego state. Within our Parent ego states there remains the Parent, Adult, and Child of our introjected parents... These are represented as three ego states within the Parent ego state.
Contaminated Adult... This is a popular model, and yet does not really fit accurately with the structural model of TA... the ego states are drawn overelapping, and the person believes they are functioning in their Adult, whereas they are acting out of their Child or Parent.... Usually there is a double contamination... with both Parent and Child beliefs distorting Adult reality. FUNCTIONAL MODEL = ‘Behaving like a ... ' This is a very simplistic behavioural description which looses many significant aspects of ego state theory. Nurturing Parent warm, loving, comforting, caring, and stroking giving permissions. This is the OK Nurturing Parent. CAN BE: over protective, rescuing, and smothering. i.e.; the not-OK Nurturing Parent. Critical or Controlling Parent: protective, setting limits, defining values and reality. (The OK Controlling Parent.) CAN BE: critical, punishing, discounting and persecutory. (The not-OK Controlling Parent.) CHILD: Functionally the child is split between the Adapted and Free Child or Natural Child. The Free Child is the source of energy for creativity, spontaneity, and intuition. The Free Child is being as I want to be. This can be both OK and in some situations not OK. The Adapted Child is the learned adapted ways of surviving, the best the child could develop in order to survive. Adapting either by conforming or by rebelling against the Parent rules and expectations. Adapted Child can also be OK or not OK, e.g. saying thank you for a present is an OK Adapted Child response. TRANSFERENCE Reacting in the here and now as if to archaic events. This is an attempt to resolve the uncompleted business from the past and so heal the hurt child, not a simple desire to replay old events in order to get kicked yet again. One of the great things Berne did for psychotherapy is make it simple to understand and analyse transference relationships in the here and now.
The process is:- As a child, the child introjected his/her parent figures, in there here and now those introjects are projected out onto a screen in front of the transferential object (in therapy the therapist or other group member) and the client then responds as if this projected image is the reality. Berne clearly states that games and scripts are a transference phenomena. (See the pages on scripts and games). TYPES OF TRANSFERENCE: CONCORDANT: in which the therapist feels how the client feels. COMPLIMENTARY: in which the therapist responds in a complimentary way to the client's transference.
EGO GRAMS An Ego gram depicts the amount of energy spent in each of the functional ego states. Jack Dusay hypothesized that there was always a consistent amount of energy available to an individual, and if you increased the amount of energy used in one ego state then the amount of energy used in the other ego states was reduced. He uses the functional model of ego states to draw this in chart form in ego grams. 1 ) Look at the whole of your life. 2) This will demonstrate are as which need to be worked on during therapy. This can be done with a group of people who know you well and then their Ego gram of you can be compared with your own. For further articles on TA visit Introduction to TA by Dave Spnceley TSTA Contact: denise@halifax-psychotherapy.co.uk |
This diagram shows the second order structure of the Adult, called by Berne the Integrated Adult... this is sometimes used to describe the functional model...
This diagram shows the second order structure of the Child ego state, in which the early echo of ourselves already has an early version of an introjected Parent, (P1), and also an echo of an even earlier version of the self (C1). The early Child also had an Adult ego state... this often gets referred to as the little professor!
