Scripts People Live

by Claude Steiner

  Bad witchcraft is known elsewhere as curses, voodoo, or the pox. The power of witchcraft is enormous, especially if a group of people all apply it to one person. Voodoo death is a case in point, in which a person is killed when all of the members of his village give him the “evil eye.” Madness, or so-called schizophrenia, is our “civilized” counterpart of voodoo death—the psychic murder of people by collective bad witchcraft.

  It is very important to realize the basic defenselessness of the offspring in the face of the bad witch’s curse. Household situations where the Child ego state (PF or P M)operates as a pseudo-Parent can be compared, in more severe cases, with a concentration camp in which a pair of hundred-and-fifty-pound prison guards physically and psychologically terrorize a forty-pound three-year-old into submission. The severity of some of the injunctions found in hamartic scripts cannot be minimized. This point will be discussed further in the chapter on therapy.

  The script, then, is a decision the young person makes by choosing between his own autonomous needs and expectations, and the pressures of injunctions he encounters in his primary family group. The script matrix (Figure 5) is extremely useful to visualize the different forces which influence the child to make its decision. The diagram implies that the effect of the parents (or their substitutes) is paramount in the kind of decision that will be made, the more so in early life when others have little access to or influence on the child. This view stands somewhere between the extreme sociological one that sees a person’s behavior as the result of cultural influences only, and the view that regards behavior as strictly the consequence of forces and dynamics inside of the child.

  5

  Decisions

  When a youngster’s inborn expectations of protection to develop as he will aren’t met, adoption of a script occurs. To the Child it is as if alien forces were applying pressure against his growth; unless he yields to these pressures life becomes extremely difficult. Thus, the Child is forced to abdicate his birthright, and he does this by readjusting his expectations and wishes to fit the situation. This process is a crucial point in the development of scripts and is called the decision.

  The script decision is made when the youngster, applying all her adaptive resources, modifies her expectations and tries to align them with the realities of the home situation.

  Time of The Decision

  The age at which the decision is made varies from person to person. In a life course which develops normally, a decision of such importance as what one’s identity is to be and what goals one will pursue should be made late enough in life so that a certain measure of knowledge informs the choice. In a situation where a youngster is under no unreasonable pressure, important decisions about life will occur no earlier than adolescence.

  A script results from a decision which is both premature and forced, because it is made under pressure and therefore long before a decision can be properly made.

  Emotional disturbances can be graded on a list by degree of malignancy. Psychosis, whether “schizophrenic” or depressive, as well as tissue self-destruction, such as alcoholism, are third-degree, tragic scripts; they are based on third-degree injunction and the decisions they are based on come early in life. So-called “neurotic” disturbances and just plain common ordinary unhappiness are first- and second-degree banal scripts1 and they are based on first- and second-degree injunctions and/or attributions; their decisions may come as late as late adolescence.

  The decision is as good and as viable as the skills of the Little Professor at the time of the decision. The Little Professor operates at a different level of logic, perception, and cognition than the Adult of the grownup. In addition, the Little Professor is forced to operate with incomplete data because of its limited sources of information. In general, the younger the person making the decision, the more likely that the Little Professor operated on incomplete data and imperfect logic.

  Making the decision eases pressure and increases short-term satisfaction. For example, the young man mentioned on page 59 recalls that when he was a little boy his mother showed great discomfort when he played with the rough children in the neighborhood. He also noticed that if he imitated those rough boys, his mother expressed considerable disapproval. He found no support for any boyish behavior from his father who acquiesced in his mother’s dislike of “manliness” and vigorous activity. He wanted to be “one of the boys,” but this wish encountered so much resistance and pressure that he recalled deciding on a specific day of a specific week of a specific year that he would be his “mother’s good little boy,” a decision which very obviously made life easier for him. When he presented himself for therapy at age thirty-five, he was indeed mother’s good little boy—neatly dressed, clean, polite, well-groomed, considerate, and respectful. Unfortunately, the decisions which had been adaptive and comfortable at age ten were now completely outdated and responsible for much discomfort. The decision had affected his sex life, in that he practiced a sort of depersonalized sex, voyeurism, and masturbation, which was an adaptation to his mother’s wishes that he be a good, quiet, little boy. His decision also affected his work because he saw all work as an acquiescence to a motherly demand. This resulted in a childlike approach to his endeavors, always tainted by acquiescence, mixed with bitterness. The bitterness came from the fact that even though he had decided to be mother’s good little boy, the decision had been made with considerable anger and resentment.

  It might be noted here that what psychoanalysts call traumatic neuroses—neurosis caused by a traumatic event—are situations in which the pressures on the youngster making the decision are sudden rather than extending over a long period of time. Here the crux of the script is still the decision, but one made in response to an acutely uncomfortable situation as opposed to one made as a result of long-standing and enduring pressures.

  A very important set of injunctions and attributions which affect children from the earliest day on causing premature script decisions is the gender-linked programming called sex roles. According to these, boys and girls are separated into two human camps which are expected to be different along a number of extremely important dimensions. Sex role scripting can have, in my opinion, severely damaging, malignant, and far-reaching consequences, as will be shown in the section on Men and Women’s Banal Scripts.

  “Good” scripts, or life plans which have socially redeeming qualities (such as the script of a martyr or hero, an engineer, doctor, politician, or priest), can be premature and forced decisions as well; their outcome may seem to be generally positive, but the decision is often made without necessary information and autonomy.

  Decisions which lead to healthy personality development must be both timely and autonomous. Thus, in proper script-free ego formation, the date of decision is such that it provides for sufficient information, lack of pressure, and autonomy.

  Form of The Decision

  Erik Erikson1 speaks of the position with which children are born into the world as one of basic trust As he describes it, basic trust comes from a state of affairs in which the infant feels that she is at one with the world and that everything is at one with her. It is clearest when mother and child are interacting most basically, as when feeding or nursing at the breast; even more basic is the mutuality of mother and offspring in utero.

  Transactional analysis would describe this feeling of basic trust as the first of four possible existential positions a person can assume. The four positions are “I’m O.K., you’re O.K.,” “I’m not O.K., you’re O.K.,” “I’m O.K., you’re not O.K.,” and “I’m not O.K., you’re not O.K.”

  The original position, “I’m O.K., you’re O.K.,” is rooted in the biological mutuality of mother and child which provides for the unconditional response of the mother to the child’s needs. How a mother responds unconditionally to the demands of a child can be clearly understood by observing a cat and her kittens in the act of feeding. When a hungry kitten meows the mother cat will seek out the kitten and try to start the nurs
ing process. This can be interpreted as an expression of a mothering instinct, but it can also be seen as an automatic, stimulus-bound behavior pattern: the unpleasant meowing of the kitten produces an urge in the mother cat to offer herself for nursing in order to stop the unpleasant stimulus. This example is given to emphasize that there is a biologically given responsiveness in the mother to a hungry offspring, and that this universal biological responsiveness almost guarantees a primary mutuality which, in human beings, generates a basic trust or a position of “I’m O.K., you’re O.K.”

  This basic trust position, “I’m O.K., you’re O.K.,” categorizes what we call the position of the “prince” or “princess,” and this position is one that the infant tends to adhere to.1 The only reason a youngster gives up this position for either “I’m not O.K.,” or “You’re not O.K.,” or both, is that the original, primary mutuality is interrupted, and that the protection which at first was given unconditionally (in utero at the very least) is withdrawn. The insecurity of uncertain protection with conditions brings the youngster to the conclusion that either he is not O.K., mother is not O.K., or both are not O.K. Needless to say, this decision is not reached without a struggle. It requires considerable pressure to convince the prince that he is not, after all, a prince and to cause him to believe that he is, instead, a frog.2 It is important to note the difference between a youngster who still feels that he is O.K., though he is uncomfortable because of the circumstances in which he finds himself, and the youngster who adapts to the discomfort of his surroundings by deciding that he is not O.K., and thereby becomes comfortable. In a situation of this nature, the choice seems to be whether to remain an uncomfortable prince or to become a comfortable frog.

  Becoming a frog requires not only a transition from “I’m O.K.” to “I’m not O.K.,” but also the adoption of a conscious fantasy about the kind of frog the youngster finds he is.

  Frogs, Princes, and Princesses

  Scripts cause the person to act as if he were someone other than himself. This is much more than mere acting or surface masking. The youngster who finds himself unable to make sense of the pressures under which he lives needs to synthesize his decision in terms of a consciously understood model. This model is usually based on a person in fiction, mythology, comic books, movies, television, or possibly real life. The mythical person embodies a solution to the dilemma in which the youngster finds herself. For example, one man, Mr. Salvador, consciously thought he was Jesus Christ, and recalls that as a young boy his parents had accused him of killing his younger brother. Their exact reasons for doing this are not clear, and whether they meant it as a joke or seriously was never understood. However, Mr. Salvador as a youngster found himself having to make sense of this accusation. Reared as a Catholic he knew his catechism, and he decided that he was like Jesus Christ and would redeem himself of his original sin by living a pure life, such as that lived by Him. Thus, Mr. Salvador’s script was based on the life of Jesus Christ, a good example of the way youngsters synthesize and make comprehensible their home situation by way of a commonly available myth or fairy tale. This identity was consciously maintained throughout his life, and Mr. Salvador reported that three or four times during any one day he would have conscious thoughts about his Christlike identity. As an example, when he was once seeking an overnight sleeping place at a friend’s house and was turned down, he thought, “No room at the inn.” On another occasion, at a particularly unhappy time in his life, he severely hurt his forehead which drew blood above his eyes, and he formed a vision of the crown of thorns; once again this was a conscious identification. Incidents like this, in which the script’s mythical character becomes a consciously understood identity, are commonplace phenomena in scripts.

  The character chosen for imitation can be a highly stylized, completely mythical individual at one extreme, or a live, flesh-and-blood person at the other. Thus, Mr. Junior’s mythical character was his father, who had died when he was seven years old. Mr. Junior knew his father partially through his own dim recollections and partially through the bittersweet memories of his mother. By contrast, Mr. Niet chose as his mythical character Captain Marvel, as understood by him at age twelve, through his reading of comic books. Mr. Junior, when behaving as he thought his dead father behaved, had a human, flesh-and-blood appearance; Mr. Niet, on the other hand, had an extremely unreal, rigid, and almost robotlike appearance.

  The mythical character chosen can also vary in complexity. For example, recall Mr. Salvador, who chose Jesus Christ as his mythical character. His view of Jesus was a fairly complex elaboration of what he knew about Him at the time he made his decision. He gained his understanding of the personality of Jesus Christ by reading the catechism and the Bible, but his extensive elaboration made his portrayal considerably different from what anyone might expect. For example, as a boy he had come to the conclusion that Jesus “was making it with Mary Magdalene” and that,, in general, He was not chaste, but a sexually active rescuer who got involved with females in distress and tended to protect and care for them. Mr. Salvador’s particular understanding of the mythical character was later turned into action and he was therefore quite sexually active with females who required him to protect them.

  On the other hand, Mr. Bruto based his choice of a mythical character on a painting, The Man with a Hoe, which represented simply an overwhelmingly burdened, almost subhuman male. Mr. Bruto consequently lived a life of hard work, which he never questioned or rebelled against.

  It should be noted at this point that youngsters choosing a mythical character always elaborate the available material and adapt it to fit their own circumstances, needs, and information. Because of this, it is important in diagnosing a script to know how to retrieve the person’s interpretation of the character she has adopted, and not to make the mistake of assuming the well-known, popular version.

  Parents are often shocked by their children’s script behavior and have trouble seeing the part they play in it. Parents want their children to behave in a certain way, but when the children follow the injunctions, modified by their own elaborations, the parents often are horrified at the results. A classic example is the case of Buddy, an eighteen-year-old boy, who decided that “I ain’t taking nothing from nobody.” This decision translated itself into such extreme sensitivity and violent reaction to pressure from parental figures that he would fly into uncontrollable rages when pushed beyond his limits. These rages were so extreme that he had been hospitalized or confined from age fourteen on. Buddy recalls that as a six-year-old, while chasing his older sister with a butcher knife, his mother reprimanded him by saying indignantly, and in an injured tone, “Buddy, you are too young to be chasing your sister with a meat cleaver!” It is clear in this situation that mother, who would consider this kind of behavior appropriate at age eighteen, yelled “Foul!” when Buddy, a precocious young man, engaged in it at age six. Similarly, a man who is sexually attracted to his daughter may urge her to dress and act sexy and then be sexually suggestive toward her. When he finds himself with a thirteen-year-old pregnant child on his hands, he has difficulty recognizing that the girl had simply followed his instructions, with only minor variations. The same situation is found over and over again in the case histories of alcoholics and other drug abusers who describe their parents’ dismay when they discover their offsprings’ drug abuse after years of encouraging the use of alcohol or other drugs to deal with stress, and of condoning drug abuse in themselves and others.

  6

  Transactional Analysis of Scripts

  Scripts are being studied by a growing number of investigators, each one of which (or each group of which) may have a different emphasis.

  I intend to pursue a certain line of investigation which I call “transactional analysis of life scripts” in order to emphasize the transactional focus of my interest. This should distinguish it from, among others, the structural analysis of scripts—which, in my mind, is closer to psychoanalysis than it is to transactional analys
is.

  A great deal has been written recently about the structural analysis of scripts. This line of research focused in detail on the script matrix, investigating the sources and content of injunctions; interested readers can find many articles on that subject in the last three years’ issues of the Transactional Analysis Journal

  My interest in script theory derives from my wish to help people gain autonomy from harmful parental and societal programming. Script analysis, to me, is meant to provide information and suggest strategies for change. The extremely detailed study of historical and structural aspects of the script strikes me as distractions from that task. Some structural information is necessary for good problem solving work and a certain additional amount has esthetic value in that it provides elegant explanations for past and present events. But, as I see it, the most important fact in transactional script analysis is “here and now” transactions.