Scripts People Live

by Claude Steiner

  The Parent in the Child (P1) seems to be a fixated ego state not amenable to change or worth changing. Unlike the Parent (P2) which, as was explained previously, changes over time, P1 in C2 is best dealt with by decommissioning it. In therapy this implies that the P1in C2 is decathected and not allowed to exert its influence on the rest of the personality.

  Figure 4

  The Adult in the Child (A1) is called the Little Professor because this part of the personality, intuition, is thought to have an extremely accurate grasp and understanding of the major variables that enter into interpersonal relationships (Figure 3). This grasp is manifested in the capacity to detect the “real” (covert) meaning of transactions. The Little Professor is able to understand that which the second-order Adult (A2) misses. However, in matters other than psychological transactions, the Professor operates with limited information. A good analogy to clarify this point can be found in a very shrewd peasant who is able to hold his own in any personal situation in his hometown, but who when he goes to the big city is simply not able to cope with the much more complex situation requiring a great deal of information not available to him.

  Egograms

  One more concept is of great usefulness in transactional analysis: the egogram.1 The egogram is a simple diagram showing the relative strength of the Pig Parent, Nurturing Parent, Adult, Natural Child, and Adapted Child (Figure 4). This diagram is useful in showing, at a glance, which ego states dominate the personality. It can also be used to show changes in personality as well as the way in which two persons in a relationship compare.2

  SECTION 2

  SCRIPT ANALYSIS

  3

  Oedipus Revisited

  A script is essentially the blueprint for a life course. Like theatrical tragedy, the life scripts follow Aristotle’s principles of drama. According to Aristotle, the plot of a good tragedy contains three parts: prologue, climax, and catastrophe. To use the example of depression ending in suicide, the prologue in the person’s life is his childhood, and its protagonists are he and his two parents. The climax is the period in adulthood during which the person struggles against the script and appears to be escaping his destiny or catastrophe (suicide) by achieving a measure of happiness. The climax is a highly unstable situation, however. It represents the battle between two forces: the script or self-destructive tendency, and the wish to avoid the catastrophe. The climax in the form of a happy relationship or a period of prosperity suddenly yields to the catastrophe when the person relaxes his battle against the script and destiny takes its course, depression wins, despair takes over, and the person kills himself.

  In addition to this three-part requirement for the plot of good tragic drama, Aristotle postulates that the tragic hero is a good man who commits a tragic error (hamartia).1 The tragic error in tragic drama is walking in blindness2 so that the tragic hero who intends to accomplish a certain result with his actions accomplished the exact opposite (peripeteia). After the hero works in blindness to his own defeat he suddenly comes to “the realization of the truth, the opening of the eyes, the sudden lightning flash in the darkness” (anagnorisis)3 as he recognizes what he has done to himself.

  Certain persons’ lives follow the same path that Aristotle prescribes for “good” tragedy, and that is why their scripts are called hamartic. Their lives are walked in blindness, following someone else’s dictates which lead them to destruction. Some have an awakening, when it is too late or as they are dying, in which they see what has happened to them. Some die never knowing what life could have held for them.1 Their audience watches in horror, unable to avert the tragic ending; and to those who can see what is happening the protagonist seems to be destroying himself willingly. Alcoholism and other drug abuse, lifelong depression ending in suicide, madness, all have the qualities of hamartic scripts.

  Once the similarity between modern life courses and ancient Greek tragedies is seen, it is possible to better understand human afflictions by looking into the thoughts which Aristotle and, subsequently, Freud had on the subject of tragedy.

  In all tragic scripts, and in the Oedipus Rex cycle in particular, a hero, well-known to all, does something that is known to all beforehand, and does it in a relentless, predictable, fatal way, as if walking blindfolded off a precipice’s edge. From the outset, the audience knows of the hero’s eventual demise or change of fortune, yet is fascinated not only by the similarity between events occurring in the tragedy and the events in their own lives, but also by the manner in which the script unfolds in a predictable and relentless manner.

  The tragic deeds and outcome of Sophocles’ Oedipus are not only known by most audiences before viewing, but within the tragedy itself, three different oracles concur that Oedipus will commit patricide and incest. In addition, Tiresias predicts the events of the play when he says:

  But it will be shown that [Laius’ murderer] is a Theban

  A revelation that will fail to please a blind man

  Who has his eyes now; a penniless man who is rich now.2

  All predictions of the tragedy come true, and this inevitability adds to the fascination of the Oedipus cycle.

  In scripts, too, a prediction is made of what is to come. For instance, a forty-five-year-old alcoholic man reported to me that he believed that his alcoholism was the result of a prediction made by a Siamese sage fifteen years before we met. He explained that as a young man on leave from his aircraft carrier, he had visited Siam and been to a soothsayer. The old man predicted, after a few words with him, that he would die an alcoholic. Fifteen years later he found himself irresistibly driven to drink and fearing that he would indeed die an alcoholic. He realized (his Adult knew) that it does not make sense to believe his alcoholism was caused by the old man’s prediction, but he nevertheless felt (his Child believed) that it was, and that he was powerless in the face of the apparently inevitable outcome. This man was like the spectator of a tragedy on the stage. For him, the events of his life unfolded according to the prophesies of an oracle, just as Oedipus unbelievingly saw Tiresias’ prediction come to pass.

  A script is a life plan, containing within its lines what of significance will happen to the person; a plan not decided upon by the gods, but finding its origin early in life, in a premature decision by the youngster. It could be speculated that, with the above alcoholic, the wise old man was able to see the patient’s self-destructive bent, which was later to unfold; it is common for persons like clinic intake workers, who interview large numbers of people, to see self-destructive life paths long before the protagonist himself recognizes them. The script guides the person’s behavior from late childhood throughout life, determining its general but most basic outlines, and the trained observer is often able to detect and predict the course of a person’s life quite accurately.

  The concept of childhood life decisions is hardly surprising to anyone who has heard the life plans made by young children who later become engineers, lawyers, or doctors. In the area of successful achievement, it is understood that the young child often makes a decision about his life career, but the statement is much more startling when used without prejudice on all life careers, the alcoholic and the suicidal as well as the engineer and lawyer.

  Until Freud wrote about Oedipus Rex, judging from his comments in The Interpretation of Dreams,1 the myth was seen as a tragedy of destiny, one “… whose tragic effect is said to lie in the contrast between the supreme will of the gods and the vain attempts of mankind to escape the evils that threaten them.” This destiny view has its origin in Aristotle’s Poetics;2 Freud rejected it in favor of his hypothesis that it is the incestuous content of the tragedy which moves audiences rather than the tragedy-of-destiny content.

  Freud postulated that the frequent wish of his male patients to kill their fathers and bed down with their mothers had its counterparts in the Oedipus tale.3 According to Freud, the Oedipus cycle is a source of vicarious fear and pity because it reflects a basic household drama experienced by all children who grow
up with their parents.

  However, a script analysis of the Oedipus complex would focus rather on the fated, predicted, ongoing destiny-aspect of Oedipus Rex. It would bid the reader to observe and reconsider the theory rejected by Freud that the message which spectators glean from the tragedy and the experience which deeply moves them is the realization of, and submission to, divine will and the realization of their own impotence in the face of fate.

  The Child in the spectator is moved both by the similarity of the Oedipus tragedy and the events in his own household, and by the manner in which certain specified destinies unfold in what seems an irrevocable manner. The psychologist as a spectator, both of the Greek tragedies and of present-day human tragedy, learns, or should learn, that human beings are deeply affected by and submissive to the will of the specific divinities of their household—their parents—whose injunctions they are impotent against as they blindly follow them through life, sometimes to their self-destruction.

  4

  The Existential Predicament of Children

  Each succeeding generation of human beings produces the raw material—an O.K. child. Children are, therefore, born automatically into a great predicament because there is always a discrepancy between the possibilities of what they could become and what they are permitted to achieve. The discrepancy can be enormous—some children are born and their potential is immediately snuffed. Other children may be allowed quite a wide range of development.

  The script is based on a decision made by the Adult in the young person who, with all of the information at her disposal at the time, decides that a certain position, expectations, and life course are a reasonable solution to the existential predicament in which she finds herself. Her predicament comes from the conflict between her own autonomous tendencies and the injunction received from her primary family group.

  The most important influence or pressure impinging upon the youngster originates from the parental Child (Figure 5A). That is, the Child ego states of the parents of the person are the main determining factors in the formation of scripts.

  Witches, Ogres, and Curses

  The world of fairy tales provides us with useful clues to personality. Fairy tales tend to include a bad witch or an ogre as well as a good witch or fairy mother or male protector,1 a fact which—as in the case of the Oedipus tragedy—is an intuitive bull’s-eye. The household parallel corresponding to witches is, of course, mothers and fathers. That is, some children are affected by their mothers or fathers as if by witches, good and bad, and this view of them can become an important factor in the make-up of their personality.

  Every person has three ego states, and in trying to understand a person, the three ego states of both his mother and father have to be understood as well (Figure 5A). For persons with self-destructive scripts, the Child ego state in father or mother (CF or C M)) has essentially all the features of a bad witch. This witch, also known as the parent’s “crazy Child,” has a most profound influence on the offspring. In these cases, the young three- or four-year-old is under the unquestioned and unquestionable rule of a confused, scared, often wanton, and always irrational Child ego state.

  Crossman1 points out that the child in a good household is nurtured, protected, and raised by the Parent ego state of his parents, with their Adult and Child playing lesser roles. These lesser roles, however, are not unimportant since the Adult in the parent encourages the offspring to learn the rules of logic and the Child ego state of the parent plays an extremely important part in exciting and encouraging the Natural Child. Nevertheless, the Nurturing Parent ego state of the parents is the one that carries the burden of child-rearing and neither the Child nor the Adult is allowed to take full command in the situation.

  The Nurturing Parent has as its main interest to support, to keep going, to take care of, to protect the Child. The reaction of the Nurturing Parent to the newborn is, “I’ll take care of you no matter what.” This nurturing response is both instinctive and learned. A woman, for instance, when her baby is born, has a set of instinctive behaviors such as nursing which start out by guaranteeing basic protection. But the amount of Nurturing that is instinctive isn’t sufficient for the years which are required for a child to grow up. Additional, learned nurturing behaviors are required in a fully protective household. In a home in which the Nurturing Parent is doing an adequate job of protecting, the parental nurturing supersedes the needs of the Child in mother or father. The Nurturing Parent will let the child be itself; speak and move freely, explore, and be largely free of constraints.

  On the other hand, if the parents themselves are in an oppressive situation—say, both parents have to work eight hours a day, or maybe there are eight other children in the house and there is only one room —then there may be no place, no possibility for the child to express itself; the Child in father and mother will say, “Don’t! Don’t make noise, don’t bang around, don’t laugh, sing, or be happy.” While the Nurturing Parent would take a great deal of pleasure in that kind of activity, the Child in father or mother rebels against it, and supersedes the Nurturing Parent. As the youngster develops her three ego states, what she sees coming from the parents is what becomes her Parent. She records the parental responses—not Nurturing Parent responses but competitive, angry, scared Child responses. In this case the Parent ego state in the youngster comes from the Child in mother or father and we call it the bad witch, the electrode, the Crazy Child, or the Pig Parent.

  Figure 5

  In a hamartia-genic household, then, it is not the Parent of father or mother (PF or P M)) who is in charge of bringing up the offspring, but a pseudo-Parent which is in reality a Child ego state (CF or C M)). This Child ego state is basically incapable of performing the necessary function of a father or mother, and where the Child becomes a pseudo-Parent, the offspring generally develops a significant script.

  The child’s predicament in a hamartia-genic household is illustrated in Figure 5B. In this example, the father of a four-year-old, who later became Little Orphan Annie, allowed his own Child (CF)) to become a pseudo-Parent. This man’s Child was annoyed by his daughter’s needs. He also believed that the best way to build character in a little girl and to avoid spoiling her was to deny her everything she wanted, and to give her something else in its place. If the little girl wanted a teddy bear for Christmas and he knew it, he would get her an equally lovely toy that she didn’t want, believing that this would be “good for her.” The little girl soon saw that her wishes never came true.

  Her predicament, then, was that circumstances completely beyond her control made everything she allowed herself to desire automatically unobtainable. She learned that if she did not express her wishes, the chance they might come true was enhanced. She also observed that even if she kept her wishes secret, she might unwittingly reveal what she wanted by crying when she was disappointed. As a consequence, in order to keep her father from noticing or deducing what her wishes were, she decided that crying was undesirable. Her father basically and consistently enjoined her not to want anything, not to ask for anything, and not to cry when disappointed. This injunction coming from father’s Child (CF)) became the little girl’s Parent (P1). This little girl became a grown woman, but until she gave up her script she carried inside her Child her father’s injunction, “Don’t ask for anything.” It became a relentless influence which guided every one of her significant actions for years.

  Restrictive injunctions and attributions are passed on to children in order to satisfy or comfort the parents. In another example, the mother of a boy was very scared of aggressive males because her husband, an aggressive male, had beaten her and left her. When her son was born she did not want him to be an aggressive, masculine man. So she used injunctions “don’t be aggressive,” “don’t be assertive,” and attributions “you are gentle,” “you are quiet,” to affect his behavior, and he grew up to be non-masculine with many female role characteristics. He developed being different from other little boys, and the other l
ittle boys made fun of him, so that sooner or later someone called him “queer,” and he connected the word queer with being a homosexual. He looked up “homosexual” in the dictionary and found that a homosexual is a man who has sexual relations with another man. One day he was walking through the park and was approached by a man and had a homosexual experience which he enjoyed, and at that point decided that he was a homosexual and proceeded to pursue a homosexual life course. Thus, he went from getting a set of injunctions and attributions to deciding that he was something that he didn’t have to be, with very little choice in the matter. He did not freely choose to be a homosexual; the pressures of his household plus other circumstances forced that choice on him. He was, for instance, not free to have sexual relations with women: script analysis eventually freed him to be able to choose to have sexual and loving relationships with women as well as men.

  This is how household pressures, over a period of years, combine with a set of circumstances so that people make life decisions. Other children are pressured to be unhappy, stupid, or clumsy for similar reasons.

  It might be interesting to speculate why a parent would want his child to be clumsy or stupid. Imagine a child is born that is not wanted. Mother, who had had three children and didn’t want to have any more, got pregnant one night when her husband came home drunk and raped her, forcing her to have intercourse against her will. Her husband didn’t believe in abortions so the baby was born, and it was a difficult birth. The child was an annoyance from the start. It took fifteen stitches to sew mother up—clumsy from the very beginning. This kid was seen as a clumsy kid; he started all wrong and he reminded mother of her brother who is clumsy, too. So she often thought and said: “This kid is just like Uncle Charlie, who is a clumsy man.” Soon mother and father started calling him “Clums” in jest whenever he made mistakes. It suited these parents’ needs to think of this particular son as a clumsy boy, because it gave them a place to vent their anger and an excuse for not taking good care of him.