Injunctions
The injunction, or in fairy-tale language, the “curse,” is a prohibition, or an inhibition of the free behavior of the child. It is always the negation of an activity. The injunction reflects the fears, wishes, anger, and desires of the Child in the parent (CF or C M)). Injunctions vary in range, intensity, area of restriction, and malignancy. Some injunctions affect a very small range of behavior, such as “don’t sing,” or “don’t laugh loudly,” or “don’t eat too many sweets.” Others are extremely comprehensive in range, such as “don’t be happy,” “don’t think,” or “don’t do anything.”
The intensity of injunctions varies in proportion to the consequences of disobedience. Thus, the injunction “don’t be happy” can be given with great intensity, in which case the least expression of happiness can bring severe repercussions; or it can be given with minimal intensity, in which case only minor disapproval is expressed when the injunction is broken. The area of behavior that the injunction restricts depends upon the witch mother’s or ogre’s specific and delineated focus: the injunction might be “don’t think,” “don’t be happy,” “don’t enjoy sex,” “don’t show anger,” “don’t be healthy,” or “don’t accept strokes,” “don’t reject strokes,” “don’t give strokes.”
As to malignancy, some injunctions have destructive long-range effects, while others do not. They can be classified like games in terms of degrees. For instance, the third-degree injunction of Mr. Bruto, an alcoholic man, was “never be idle.” This was not only a long-range injunction, but one so malignant that he eventually found himself unable to avoid a job he intensely disliked except by knocking himself out through drinking.
On the other hand, many parental injunctions are neither destructive nor long-range in their effects. For instance, mother may say to child, “never touch the electrical outlet on the wall!” This first-degree injunction may be quite effective in controlling the child’s behavior but it hardly seems malignant. Unless it is part of a larger injunction such as “don’t touch anything,” or “don’t play with anything electrical or mechanical (it’s men’s work),” it will probably only last as long as it takes the child to learn how to use electrical wall outlets safely.
Attributions
Tragic scripts tend to be based on negative injunctions, accompanied by severe punishments. But children are also powerfully affected by attributions. The concept of attributions, developed by Ronald Laing, serves to explain how parents affect children to do rather than not do things. In Laing’s words:
One way to get someone to do what one wants, is to give an order. To get someone to be what one wants him to be, or supposes he is or is afraid he is (whether or not this is what one wants), that is, to get him to embody one’s projection, is another matter. In a hypnotic (or similar) context, one does not tell him what to be, but tells him what he is. Such attributions, in context, are many times more powerful than orders (or other forms of coercion or persuasion). An instruction need not be defined as an instruction. It is my impression that we receive most of our earliest and most lasting instructions in the form of attributions. We are told such and such is the case. One is, say, told one is a good or a bad boy or girl, not only instructed to be a good or bad boy or girl. One may be subject to both, but if one is (this or that), it is not necessary to be told to be what one has already been “given to understand” one is. The key medium for communication of this kind is probably not verbal language. When attributions have the function of instructions or injunctions, this function may be denied, giving rise to one type of mystification, akin to, or identical with, hypnotic suggestion …
One may tell someone to feel something and not to remember he has been told. Simply tell him he feels it. Better still, tell a third party, in front of him, that he feels it.
Under hypnosis, he feels it; and does not know that he has been hypnotized to feel it. How much of what we ordinarily feel, is what we have all been hypnotized to feel? How much of who we are, is what we have been hypnotized to be?
Your word is my command. A relationship of one to another may be of such power that you become what I take you to be, at my glance, at my touch, at my cough. I do not need to say anything. An attribution, as I am using the term, may be kinetic, tactile, olfactory, visual Such an attribution is equivalent to an instruction to be obeyed “implicitly.”
So, if I hypnotize you, I do not say, “I order you to feel cold.” I indicate it is cold. You immediately feel cold. I think many children begin in a state like this.
We indicate to them how it is: they take up their positions in the space we define. They may then choose to become a fragment of that fragment of their possibilities we indicate they are.
What we explicitly tell them is, I suspect, of less account.
What we indicate they are, is, in effect, an instruction for a drama: a scenario …
The clinical hypnotist knows what he is doing; the family hypnotist almost never. A few parents have described this technique to me as a deliberate stratagem.
More often parents are themselves confused by a child who does x, when they tell him to do y and indicate he is x.
“I’m always trying to get him to make more friends, but he is so self-conscious. Isn’t that right, dear?
“I keep telling him to be more careful, but he’s so careless, aren’t you?”
I quote Laing at length to show the eloquence of his writing and the brilliance of his thinking. I consider his book The Politics of the Family1—from which the above is taken—essential to the understanding of scripts.
Attributions, then, tell the child what she must do and injunctions tell what she must not do in order to remain in the parent’s favor. They are the age-old behavior modification program of the nuclear family. Attributions when followed are reinforced, injunctions when disobeyed are punished. Familial reinforcement schedules control children’s behavior in the same manner in which psychologists control the behavior of rats by selective rewards and punishments.
Parental attributions, like curses, are often introduced into a person’s life at the day of birth. For example, parents often predict that a certain child is going to be healthy, unhealthy, smart, stupid, lucky, or unlucky. One alcholic’s mother read his future alcoholism in the stars, a finding which she often repeated to him in his childhood. Myths containing the elements of what the parents would like the child to do in life are often passed down to children. One man, who prides himself on being extremely perceptive of other’s feelings, was told that as soon as he emerged from the womb he opened his eyes and looked around. Whenever something bad happened to another, he was reminded that he was born on Friday the thirteenth, and could expect bad luck all his life. Characteristically, the grown person believes that his state is fated rather than produced by the parental prediction. The effect of a prediction of this sort has been amply explored in the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy.1 In general, expected behavior is likely to occur simply because it is expected.
Names often subtly suggest to the child what parents expect of him: John, Jr. is expected to follow in his father’s footsteps; Jesse is expected to raise hell; Gigi is expected to be sexy; and Alfred is expected to be well-ordered and neat. Berne provides an excellent discussion of the ways in which a forename can be the source of script programming in What Do You Say After You Say Hello? He also speaks of the relevance of two main birth scripts—The Foundling Script and The Torn Mother Script—which he has observed, and which play an important part in people’s lives. The former is a belief of being a foundling, therefore not really a blood relation of the parents; the latter is a belief that the person severely hurt, invalided, or crippled his mother at birth. These birth scripts, real or imagined, can have a lasting effect. I have found that the Foundling Script can have two forms: “daughter (or son) of a King (or Queen)” or “son (or daughter) of A Whore (or Bum).” I have found the latter when it is present, especially “daughter of a Whore,” to be an extremely compelling f
orce; and Berne points out that “’Mother died at childbirth’ (mine) is almost too much for anyone to bear without good help.”
Witchcraft
Transactional analysis and script analysis are concerned with the understanding and analysis of transactions at two levels: the social level (the audible, visible, and obviously perceptible level of transactions between people) and the psychological level (the hidden, covert, non-explicit communication that may accompany the social level of transactions).
The accurate understanding and prediction of people’s behavior depends on an acuity of perception of the psychological level of transactions; without it only the most superficial aspects of people’s transactions will be understood. In the analysis of games the social level, which is clearly explicit, is easily understood by the observer; but the psychological level is understood only through intuitive, perceptual powers which are neither easily explained nor taught.
Script analysis, which is the study of people’s decisions early in life based on the injunctions and attributions of their parents, requires an understanding of the way in which parents transmit information to their children about what it is they want them and do not want them to do. It is seldom found that a parent said to his child something as explicit as “I want you to die,” or “I don’t want you to think,” or “You are absolutely no good.” Rather, one finds that those kinds of statements are given to children in the form of veiled communication which is at times very crude but is often extremely subtle. In any case, whatever the subtlety of such attributions and injunctions, they are known as witch messages; messages which affect these children for the rest of their lives with magical, uncanny powers.
The power of parents to influence their children—the power to mold them, the power to make them do things and prevent them from doing things—according to their wishes is an aspect of a more general capacity which all human beings have, the capacity for witchcraft. The analysis of witchcraft is a subheading of transactional analysis in that it deals with the analysis of covert or ulterior messages and their effect and power.
People can be influenced for better or for worse and the power to do either may be called good magic or bad magic. The two faculties which are involved in good and bad magic are the Nurturing Parent and the Pig Parent.
Good Magic
The Nurturing Parent can instill people with power, cause them to feel and be intelligent, good, perceptive, beautiful, healthy.
Two, three, or more persons can be involved. The Witch or sender, It or the receiver, and a Third Person or transmitter. Witch messages can be given directly from the Witch to It or indirectly from the Witch to It through the Third Person. It is also possible that Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Persons are involved as well; in fact, a whole group can become a transmitter of messages of this sort.
Good witch messages function as encouragement and attributions of intelligence, goodness, perceptiveness, beauty, health, etc. Thus, the Witch can say to It: “I love how smart you are,” or “You are sooo beautiful,” or “You are very healthy,” or, through a Third Person, “Isn’t she smart?” or “Jill has beautiful eyes,” or “The doctor says Jack is really healthy.” Third Person messages have the same or even larger effect on It as if said directly to It. For instance, Jack, above, is affected in two ways: 1) because he hears, and believes, the statement (“Jack is healthy”) addressed at the Third Person; and 2) through the effect that the statement has on the Third Person who eventually comes to think and believe the same as the Witch does. This latter process can occur in the absence of It, so that if the Witch speaks to a Third Person about Jill’s intelligence, beauty, or health, the message will be transmitted from the Third Person to Jill whenever they come together.
A property of witch messages is that their power does not necessarily depend on the words used. The words themselves are only a vehicle. “I love how smart you are” could actually be a bad message about being too smart; while “I love how smart you are” means quite something else. Certain parts of the statement are energized and some are de-energized; and these fluctuations of energy have important meanings, more important, at times, than the words.
The origin of good magic is the Nurturing Parent, which is a faculty or ego state of human beings geared to the protection and nurturing of other people. The net effect of the nurturing magic messages is to increase the power of people and to liberate them from their own oppressive influences (the Pig Parent) as well as to give them power to liberate themselves from the oppressive influence of others. It has been known to people as the Guardian Angel, the good fairy, or fairy godmother who protects them from Evil.
Nurturing messages can be stored by a person in her or his own Nurturing Parent and can be used for self-nurturing, which is also a powerful source of O.K. feelings. Self-nurturing, however, depends on the nurturing of others and eventually loses power if it isn’t reinforced by external nurturing messages.
Bad Magic
Everything that has been said about good magic is true about bad magic except that the source and purpose of bad magic are different. Good magic can be distinguished from bad magic by the effect that it has on its recipient. If it has the effect of adding power to the recipient it is good; if it decreases power it is bad.
It is important to realize that bad witchcraft in the form of attribution is often used for the recipient’s “own good” as judged by the witch; any attribution, no matter how good it looks or sounds, can be bad for the recipient. For instance, the attribution of beauty may be harmful to a woman who is a “media beauty” because it stands in the way of being seen as and becoming intelligent or powerful.
Thus, while bad witchcraft is usually clearly bad, some witchcraft that appears to be good may in fact be bad because it is not wanted by the recipient, or because even though wanted it diminishes her power in some way.
The exercise of power over people for the purpose of harming them seems to have two basic sources. The first source is scarcity. When scarcity of something needed exists so that there is less of it than would be necessary to satisfy all of the people in a situation, then it is inevitable that certain people who have more power will use that power against other people to take away their fair share. The power used can be crude physical force, as when one kills people and takes their food or land; but it also can take the form of psychic force where the powerful person creates a situation in the powerless person so that the powerless person will give up his fair share without resistance, thus not needing to be coerced. This is what is called “mystified oppression,”1 a situation where people allow others to oppress them because they accept the deceptions which justify the oppression.
The second reason why people use power over other people is what has been aptly called by Fanita English2 the “hot potato.” It is done as a defense against accusations of worthlessness from within oneself or from the outside. That is to say, in a situation in which one feels worthless or not O.K., this feeling can be passed on to another person as in a game of “hot potato” so that proving that another person is not O.K. relieves one of the feeling. Also, a person will often feel stronger, more vital, and powerful if he can control and influence others. In other words, if he can make another person feel less O.K. than he does, then, relatively speaking, he is O.K.
The two situations of bad magic which have been described above are best understood in the context of a child entering a family. Let us assume a child is born into a family living in a ghetto. The family consists of a mother, a father and a grandfather, as well as two boys and two girls ages 10, 8, 6, and 4, all living in a three-room apartment. The family lives on welfare, the grandfather is an alcoholic, and the two older children are in trouble with the law. At this point, a new child, Ultimo, is born into the family.
Clearly, the essential ingredients for physical comfort are not available in this situation. There is not enough space, not enough food, not enough strokes, not enough time, not enough energy, to take care of Ultimo. Everyone in the
family is aware of the fact that this newborn child is going to diminish their share of space, food, energy, strokes; and while every newborn child is given a period of respite in which it is offered a plenitude of what it needs, a day comes, usually around the first birthday, when the scarcity of the situation begins to affect Ultimo. The situation quickly becomes a dog-eat-dog affair in which everyone fends for himself, and the devil take the hindmost. Direct physical force will be applied on Ultimo to prevent him from getting his fair share of what he needs, as well as psychic force in the form of messages such as “You’re stupid,” “You move around too much,” “You make too much noise,” “Get out of here,” “Go play in the freeway (haha),” “You’re a bad boy,” etc., all of which are designed to diminish his range of power and prevent him from making a claim to what is rightfully his. This is an example of scarcity witchcraft.
At the same time that there is physical scarcity which calls for both physical and psychic oppression, there may also exist a situation in which the grownups in the family have various degrees of feelings of worthlessness. For example, father has not been able to get a decent job and feels that he is a failure. His wife called him a “no-good bum” this morning. During an afternoon in which father feels that he is supposed to go looking for work but is instead watching television, Ultimo, on vacation from school, might be hanging around listening to records. Father, who feels not O.K. and ashamed about his own behavior, becomes annoyed at his son and demands that he do the dishes. When his son, following his father’s example, refuses, father calls him “a no-good, lazy bum.” At that particular point he is passing the “hot potato” from himself to his son, and he enjoys a short period of relief from worthlessness. At another time, when mother sets the food on the table while feeling that she is a bad provider because there is nothing but starches for dinner, Ultimo says, “Mom, I learned in school that you’re supposed to eat meat at least once a day.” At this point, mother looks at him angrily, “Shut your smart mouth, boy.” Again the “hot potato,” the feeling of not O.K. in mother, is passed on to the son. For a brief period mother feels freedom from guilt, which has been replaced by self-righteous indignation at Ultimo’s insolence. Ultimo feels he has done something very bad. He feels not O.K. and comes away from the situation feeling guilty, selfish, and bad. All of these feelings become part of his Pig Parent and could plague him as long as he lives.
Scripts People Live Page 8