I'm Nobody--Who Are You?
by Richard Todd
Beware of all enterprises that require new words. Such terms as “Transactional Analysis” (or “the nonstroking mother” or “the contaminated Adult”) cause an inward chill. But that’s a poor reason not to look into the ideas of Dr. Thomas A. Harris, author of I’M OK—YOU’RE OK: A Practical Guide to Transactional Analysis (Harper & Row, $5.95), a book that has spent months on the best-seller list, and of which there are, remarkably, more than a million hard-cover copies in print.
Harris, as most readers may already know, is a California psychiatrist with a purportedly pragmatic system for treating neurotics, and for helping less troubled people toward self-realization. If you and Harris were sitting here and you were behaving, let us say, churlishly, Harris might say, “That seems to be your Child speaking. Why don’t you stay in your Adult?” If the conversation took a turn for the better, you and Harris might end up looking rather deeply at one another and saying, “I’m OK—You’re OK.”
As this exchange suggests, Transactional Analysis depends on some highly charged redefinition of some ordinary language. It is Harris’ idea that we all harbor three separate personalities to which he gives commonplace names: the Child, who is a collection of those impressions and emotions we experienced in childhood, predominantly feelings of inferiority; the Parent, who represents the unexamined views, prejudices, and habits of our parents or their surrogates; the Adult, the autonomous creature of reason who is able to mediate among the various claims of the Child and the Parent, to test their fixed ideas against the situation, to be flexible, to change. It is the Adult—Harris, by the way, uses these capital letters throughout his book—who is capable of achieving the hoped-for condition in Harris’ world, the state he calls “I’m OK—You’re OK,” which signifies self-esteem and trust.
Harris maintains that most of us, most of the time, live in the condition, “I’m Not OK—You’re OK,” the self-doubting posture of the Child, which leads to varieties of mean or defensive behavior. In particular, Harris says, it leads to the playing of games. We spend all too much of our time dealing with one another superficially, one-uping. If this sounds familiar, it is not only because this sense of everyday life has pervaded our consciousness but also because Harris is a follower of a writer who did a great deal to promote these terms, the pop psychiatrist Eric Berne, author of Games People Play.
You could, of course, trace influences on Harris somewhat further back. His three personalities bear some obvious resemblance, as is acknowledged, to the Id, Superego, and Ego. Much else in “transactional analysis” consists of commonplaces of psychiatric thought (not to mention common sense). A crucial ingredient is the concept of the self-destructive but perversely gratifying repetitiveness of neurotic behavior. Harris, though, has mostly patronizing words for Freud, and for conventional psychiatric treatment. The virtue of the many redefinitions, the homely terminology, is, he asserts, that the psychiatrist becomes demystified; his efforts are made accessible to the patient. Furthermore, transactional analysis promises earlier results by not dwelling on the past.
How well it succeeds, as against the myriad other therapies with which it has something in common, is not easy to judge on the evidence of this book. Harris is ungenerous with detailed case histories (though he recounts the pleasure of seeing patients begin to get well in the first session); he is vague on the limits of the method; and he is less than satisfying on how change occurs, perhaps because the crucial event, the decision to be OK, is essentially an act of faith. As it’s explained, a great deal seems to depend on accepting the proper nomenclature.
We probably should, with layman-like deference, withhold judgment about the psychotherapeutic benefits of transactional analysis, but it’s fair to assess Harris as an everyday guru. He doesn’t inspire confidence. For one thing, I think I’d feel uncomfortable at his breakfast table: “ . . . My seven-year-old daughter, Heidi . . . one morning at breakfast said, ‘Daddy, when I have an OK Daddy and an OK Mama, how come I’m not OK?’ ” And there is a certain unsettling missionary impulse in this man. Like a marketing manager who can explain the world in terms of selling, Harris can subsume all under I’m OK — You’re OK. Christ’s lessons were . . a central historical example of I’M OK —YOU’RE OK.” Hubris, barely trammeled most of the way, sets itself free toward the end of the book. If transactional analysis works for individuals, for groups, why not for nations? It is easily translatable, after all.
Now that we have a concept for understanding human behavior that all persons can comprehend, one which can be put into simple words and translated into any language, we may be arriving at a point where we can discard our archaic fears, based on tragedies of the past, and begin talking with one another in the only way agreement on anything will be possible: Adult to Adult.
There is something almost touching about this naïveté.
Some of Harris’ sentences would delight the late Bruce Barton, and it may be that what we have in this book is simply another old-time self-help manual: How to Become a More Effective Salesman, How to Win Friends and Influence People, How to Shed Ugly Pounds, How to Be OK. Surely the one theme crucial to such books is present here: you can change your life. You can liberate that Adult, escape the hectoring voices of your Child or your Parent, the voices of your past.
But there is another theme just beneath the surface, which says, in effect: you don’t have to change much at all. No small part of the appeal of I’m OK—You’re OK derives, I suspect, from a certain stroking (as they say) that the book performs on the reader, a quiet invitation to self-love that goes like this: You’re too tough on yourself . . . relax . . . You’ve always thought you weren’t OK, haven’t you . . . but you see, you are.
You might have thought that in the ecology of our emotions selflove was not an endangered species. But the idea that it is seems to be enjoying a vogue. I’m OK—You’re OK is slipping off the best-seller charts now, but it appears to have a replacement in a little book—fifty-six bulked-out pages—called How TO BE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND by Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz (Random House, $4.95). The authors are husband and wife, and both are psychoanalysts. Their book on the surface has little in common with Harris’. It makes lesser claims for itself (at least in terms of global politics), offers no system, and is refreshingly free from special terminology. The Berkowitzes had the services of a graceful ghost, Jean Owen, who writes modestly and literately.
But the essential lesson of How to Be Your Own Best Friend is one we’ve heard before. The reader is addressed as a guilt-stricken, self-contemptuous, tragically self-limiting fellow, who needs only to cast an eye on his native virtue in order to begin living a fulfilled life. A beguiling paradox here is that the authors implicitly congratulate the reader on the sins they seek to cure. We must rid you of this appalling notion of your worthlessness. (But how appealing of you to have suffered it.)
How to Be Your Own Best Friend is written in the form of a dialogue between a willing student (“You’re convincing me; it sounds better and better”) who asks life-questions, and a teacherly voice who answers them. The role of the student is not only to elicit knowledge but to disarm the reader’s doubts. The Berkowitzes are more aware than is Harris that they participate in a long and notso-noble tradition of American inspirational literature. The student at one point protests mildly, “That sounds like positive thinking, perhaps with a bit of Coué thrown in.” The teacher reasonably responds that positive thinking has some truth to it, but that it depends too much on imposing solutions from without, not giving one’s inner self credit for the capacity to grow. The student asks if the teacher’s emphasis on gratification isn’t a sanction for self-indulgence. The voice says: Doing what makes you feel good about yourself is really the opposite of self-indulgence. It doesn’t mean gratifying an isolated part of you; it means satisfying your whole self, and this includes the feelings and ties and responsibilities you have to others, too. . . . The Bible says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” not “better than,” or “instead of” thyself. If we cannot love ourselves, where will we draw our love for anyone else?
Well, sure. And, no. This advice is laden with partial wisdom. It makes sense only in a context. We can all imagine the situation and the person for whom it would be just the thing to say. And no one would deny that love proceeds more easily from a heart at peace with itself. But how to achieve that? Don’t most of us need to do more out there, with other people, need to escape, for say fifteen or twenty seconds a day, our cell of self-concern in order to come back to find an improved self? Isn’t that the fairly humble psychological point of the biblical injunction?
A Delphic vagueness prevails in How to Be Your Own Best Friend, and I guess it is essential to the book’s effect. There is an anecdote, though —perhaps apocryphal; it doesn’t matter—that sticks in the mind. The teacherly voice describes an encounter with a man in mourning. “You look as if you had lost your best friend,” says the voice. (The next remark is firmly in mind.) The man assents. “Don’t you know who your best friend is?” the voice inquires. A modest little tale, but it’s infected, it seems to me, with a kind of meanness of spirit. The assumption is that you can grieve for no one else. Often true enough; but a nasty assumption.
The effect of How to Be Your Own Best Friend and of Fm OK— You’re OK is to trivialize all that they touch. In their assurances that we create our future, they denature the conflict between our need to change and to create a life whose narrative makes some sense. And they advance a notion of the self that is small and hermetic.
It is possible to read along in both these books, aware of the inadequacies but tranquilized by the cheerful half-truths, and to forget what it is that is wholly absent from these pages. What’s missing is only some adequate acknowledgment of the life that confronts us each morning. The constraints of class, custom, and institutional hierarchy are scarcely alluded to. There is little sense of the endlessly fluid circumstance that makes up a day, the thousand situations in which we assert and defer, define or make a fool of ourselves, perceive or misperceive others. Gesture, tone, ritual, manners are treated dismissively.
The ultimate, dubious promise of these books seems to be an escape from all that mundaneness. The transcendence that is offered may itself be mundane—conceive of going through a week with that refrain, “I’m OK—You’re OK,” in your head—but it holds out hope of relief from the sticky intricacies of the moment. It’s a desire that we all have felt, and one with which our culture is oversupplied.
There is a book, though, appearing this fall, treating matters of selfhood, that doesn’t shrink from the encounter with ordinary, niggling events. I have in mind THE PRESENTATION OF SELF IN EVERYDAY LIFE, by Erving Goffman, which was first published in paper in 1959, and is being reissued now in hard-cover (Overlook, $10.00).
Since The Presentation of Self first appeared, Goffman has written seven books (Asylums, Encounters, Interaction Ritual, Behavior in Public Places, Stigma, Relations in Public, and Strategic Interaction), all sociological studies that concentrate on the visible social relations, on exterior life. They have earned him a considerable following. A characteristic way of praising Goffman is to compare him to a novelist, for the fineness of his perceptions. This is a mistake. Sociologists are not novelists, as Goffman is wise enough to know. He makes no effort to render his ideas dramatically. He is often hard to read, dry (sometimes dryly witty), open to charges of obviousness. But there is this to be said for him: he appears always to be right. I mean not only that he speaks the truth but that he has an implicit awareness of the limits of his argument. And he has a respect for the density of life in its smallest units that a novelist or any other writer needs.
Goffman has written about such topics as keeping and losing face, embarrassment, the intricacies of presenting and interpreting “normal appearances.” He describes the relationships of con men to connees, and the gravity of emotion that accompanies such acts as going out of one’s way to avoid greeting an acquaintance. He knows that social concerns can inhabit the most extreme situation. From his book, Relations in Public: “A person with carcinoma of the bladder can, if he wants, die with more social grace and propriety, more apparent inner social normalcy, than a man with a harelip can order a piece of apple pie.”
In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman advances a governing idea, that we can learn something about the idea of selfhood simply by observing what happens (to quote the book’s unobtrusive first phrase) “when an individual enters the presence of others”—what he looks for, what he attempts to display. Goffman suggests that a commonplace metaphor can serve to describe much of what we call social life: the stage.
Goffman is blessed with a singular patience, which the elaboration of this metaphor demands. He covers a great deal of seemingly unpromising ground, delineating the ways in which we arrange impressions that we seek to convey, create masks, ally ourselves with other performers with whom we share secrets “backstage.” All of this is rather common knowledge in the abstract (though it is enlivened by Goffman’s hungry love of social detail; he has searched sociological literature for examples of faux pas, vanity, and deceit). But however unsurprising Goffman’s work may seem at a single moment, it demonstrates an idea that is by no means trivial.
He is reminding the reader that much of what we refer to as “self" is not tangible and permanent but evanescent. What is more, it is not purely the creation of an individual: all social situations are “collusive”— they depend on a shared agreement of their definition by audience and performer. Goffman remarks toward the close of the book:
A correctly staged and performed scene leads the audience to impute a self to a performed character, but this imputation—this self—is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited.
It is important to note what Goffman is not saying: he is not denying the existence of individual difference, of character or neurosis, of the distinct continuity a life maintains. He is insisting, however, that much of what we take for character or personality or self is chimerical, and that a great deal of our life consists of the creation of these fleeting selves.
How to respond to this idea? If you are Dr. Thomas A. Harris, I expect you say: how true, and what a pity. Games. But the “games people play”—the index to I’m OK—You’re OK lists tidily about two dozen of them—are an impossibly reductive way of viewing what is the substance of much of our life. To listen to those who subscribe to this notion, you would think that we are children in a ring who need only step back, grow up, become ourselves. But try it, and you discover that you have joined another ring, and that this playground stretches beyond the horizon.