Old Roots Revisited: Reassessing the Architecture of Transactional Analysis

Abstract

This article assumes that the concepts of ego states and script are the central ideas in transactional analytic theory and that reconsidering them will facilitate a new view of transactional analysis. It describes the psychoanalytic foundation on which transactional analysis is based and demonstrates that various transactional analysis concepts either amplify or explain one of these two central concepts. The author's goal is to show transactional analysis as a theoretical construction rather than as simply a group of pragmatic methods.