You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dr. Giovacchini presents two cases which could well serve as paradigms, for an introductory course in transactional analysis.
The first case illustrates two well-known transactional principles. First, all intimate relationships (parent-child, marriage, love, friendship) are sustained by a set of games which holds the partners together by warding off endogenous and exogenous anxiety, structuring time, reinforcing an existential position, and providing a specific way for the partners to “stroke” each other. If one partner breaks up the game by moving to a new position (“getting well”), the other is left psychologically destitute and has six alternatives: he can get well, run away, get sick, kill himself, kill the partner, or find a new partner to play the same game.
In this case, the husband first tried running away, then getting (mentally) sick, and finally found a new partner with whom to continue his game.
The second principle is that the function of an excluding Parental ego state (e.g., a “mature” tender bully) is to mask and protect a confused Child ego state (“paranoid schizophrenia”). In order to maintain this kind of an equilibrium, it is necessary for the excluding Parent to find a companion who comes on Child (e.g., helpless and inadequate) and who will accept the Parental “maturity,” tenderness, and bullying. If this Child person gets permission to switch into an Adult ego state (“gets better”), the Parent becomes infuriated, disorganized, and finally decommissioned, so that his underlying confused Child is laid bare with no protection—clinically, a psychosis.