Urban India is undergoing a socio-cultural transformation that has impacted the aspirations, priorities, and life pathways of women. This has resulted in a slow transition away from the traditional ‘marriage-first’ orientation to a more ‘career-first’ orientation (Kumar & Kumari, 2023; Pautunthang, 2024). Historically, marriage was the most important life script for women, while education and employment were secondary to domestic and family roles (Roy & Mukherjee 2013). Despite this, women have received access to higher education, urbanization, globalization, opportunities, and digital exposure have redefined their perception of success, independence, and identity (Bhosale, 2026). In this context, the present study looks at how family pressure, peer networks and generational cohort differences shape evolving life priorities of urban Indian women. This research employed a quantitative and exploratory approach and collected data through a structured questionnaire from 368 urban Indian women belonging to the Millennial and Generation Z cohorts. The research tries to find out how traditionalism and modernism influence women’s decision on marriage and career prioritization in the Indian context. Data analysis was performed using SPSS applying descriptive analysis, reliability analysis, correlation analysis, regression analysis and ANOVA to check the relationship among various variables and test the hypothesis. Women’s perception towards marriage and employment opportunity has undergone a significant change. The majority of respondents were in favour of having financial independence, establishing a career, and personal development before marriage. The analysis shows that family pressure has a negative influence on women’s career-first orientation while peer networks and social exposure encourage independent decision-making and acceptance of late marriage positively. There was also a major difference across generations, as the respondents of Generation Z exhibited comparatively greater support for autonomy, self-development, and career firstness than the respondents of the Millenials. Regression analysis revealed that peer networks were the strongest positive predictor of career-first orientation while the family traditional expectations remained as constraining social effects. The study shows that urban Indian women are gradually reconstructing conventional gender roles and life scripts with respect to altering socio-economic realities. This emerging career-first orientation reflects not just the economic aspirations of women but also the transformation that is happening in the identity, autonomy and consciousness of women in contemporary urban India. The study adds to the discussion on growing female autonomy, modernity, and transformation of family structure by showing how urban women negotiate traditional expectations and emerging job aspirations.

ABSTRACT The present study investigated whether remembering the distant versus the recent personal past influences self-continuity levels and expected future event characteristics in a sample of immigrants. Seventy-three Turkish immigrants living in Denmark participated in three sessions involving questionnaires and life story interviews. In the first session, participants completed baseline measures of self-continuity, psychological wellbeing, acculturation, and demographics. In the second and third sessions, they recalled significant events and narrated life stories from pre-migration (distant past) and post-migration (recent past), followed by measures of self-continuity and wellbeing. After each memory recall, participants described three expected future events and rated them on phenomenological characteristics such as vividness and emotional valence. We analyzed differences in self-continuity and future event characteristics between the pre- and post-migration conditions, as well as the relationships among the variables, thematic content of future events, and their resemblance to cultural life scripts. Results revealed no significant differences in future event characteristics between the conditions. However, a small difference emerged in self-continuity levels: contrary to expectations, participants reported slightly higher self-continuity in the pre-migration condition than in the post-migration condition. These findings contribute to understanding of how autobiographical memory relate to future thinking and self in the context of migration.

ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of the digitally intimate everyday to examine how young women in Singapore negotiate intimacy, subjectivity, and gendered life transitions within a highly digitised, policy-driven society. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic interviews with thirty women aged 18–24, the study situates everyday digital practices within Singapore’s postcolonial digital ecosystem and heteronormative life scripts organised around employment, marriage, and reproduction. Bringing together the sociology of intimacy, media ecology, and feminist affect studies, the article conceptualises digital intimacy as a materially embodied and ambivalent site of self-making rather than merely a realm of individual choice or technological affordance. The analysis identifies three dynamics shaping young women’s digitally mediated lives. First, participants engage in boundary drawing and networked privacy through the strategic use of multiple platforms and accounts to manage trust, disclosure, and vulnerability. Second, everyday digital creativity—including photo-sharing, meme circulation, emojis, stickers, and casual content production—functions as an affective register through which intimacy, care, humour, and belonging are expressed in indirect yet meaningful ways. Third, these practices intersect with, and at times unsettle, normative life scripts surrounding marriage, sexuality, and adulthood, even as many participants continue to aspire to state-sanctioned milestones such as home ownership and family formation. By foregrounding affect, embodiment, and ambivalence, the article extends existing scholarship on digital intimacy in Singapore beyond policy and ideology to lived experience. It argues that digital intimacy enables agency and reproduces constraint, offering young women tools to negotiate insecurity, desire, and aspiration amid neoliberal precarity and gendered expectations.

Delayed marriage has become increasingly common in China, yet social responses to this phenomenon remain unevenly distributed between men and women. This paper examines how delayed marriage is evaluated through a gendered lens, focusing on the unequal tolerance extended to men and women who postpone marriage. Rather than treating delayed marriage as a neutral demographic outcome, the study conceptualizes it as a socially constructed category shaped by normative expectations, moral judgments, and everyday interaction. Drawing on a sociological and gender-oriented perspective, the paper analyzes how gendered life scripts, family expectations, public discourse, and informal social sanctions work together to regulate marriage timing. It argues that marriage timing functions as a key mechanism of gender regulation, granting men greater temporal flexibility while subjecting women to heightened scrutiny and moral pressure. Through the cumulative effects of labeling, media narratives, peer comparison, and familial negotiation, unequal tolerance is internalized and incorporated into individual life planning. By shifting attention from marriage behavior to social evaluation, this study contributes to understanding how gender inequality is reproduced through ordinary norms and interactions in contemporary China.

The past as we know it is not an immutable structure. It is a reconstruction in memory that can borrow from other sources to the point of confabulation. Furthermore, the reconstructed past usually serves to maintain a personal identity and to perpetuate a selected life script. Future choices are affected by our beliefs about our past experiences and often serve to reinforce them. Armed with this knowledge, the psychodramatist can re-enact past difficulties to a beneficial resolution. By changing the protagonists' views of theirpast experience, the psychodramatist positively affects future choices and experiences. This is the thesis of Donnell Miller's monograph Changing the Past: Creating Future Futures From Past Futures Through Psychodrama. Miller blends theoretical constructs with reports of actual psychodrama sessions to show how working through past conflict can change present choices, and consequently, future futures.

This article addresses features of spontaneity, the power of life scripts, and surplus reality. A psychodrama unfolds wherein Jean, a 22-year-old woman, confronts the issue of being pulled across the generational boundary by her mother, who has used Jean to solve her struggles in her marriage as well as stresses in her life. Jean resolves the issue by disengaging from her mother in a dramatic scene in which the entire group assists by empowering Jean.

The article examines the relationship between the life script and the concept of the “memory of the future” using the example of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale “Clever Elsie.” It is shown that prospective thinking — that is, a person’s capacity to think about their own future — operates on two levels: explicit and implicit. It is their interaction that shapes future predictions and determines script-driven behavior. A content analysis of “Clever Elsie” revealed that the heroine’s fate is defined by catastrophic future images (flash-forwards) and early parental messages about the future (self-fulfilling prophecies), which reinforce a script of avoidance and lead to a loss of identity. The article discusses therapeutic strategies for working with unconscious future projections in various schools of Transactional Analysis, as well as the possibilities ofmodifying script beliefs through the construction of new narratives of the future.

The article explores the formation of human somatic and psychological life scripts. It examines the relationship between early embodied experiences and physiological processes from an epigenetic perspective, emphasizing the influence of environmental factors on gene expression and the consolidation of stress responses. Special attention is given to Pamela Levin’s Cycles of Power, encompassing both prenatal and postnatal development, as a framework for analyzing and transforming somatic symptoms and life scripts. The article elaborates on the concept of the imprint, as presented in Pamela Levin’s recent book. It demonstrates that therapeutic work with imprints (illness imprints) enables the “rewriting” of both script-related and physiological patterns, restoring the natural functioning of the organism and reducing stress effects. Integrating psychological and biological perspectives, the article presents a scientifically grounded approach to working with somatic symptoms and explores the role of epigenetic mechanisms in shaping bodily scripts. Practical recommendations are provided for psychotherapists and transactional analysis practitioners, including questionnaires and inquiry tools for exploring client symptoms. The presented materials are published in Russian for the first time with the author’s permission Pamela Levin.

The article examines the specifics of therapy for clients from dysfunctional families and adult children of alcoholics (ACoA). Using a clinical case example, it demonstrates the application of the «Lifeline» tool for future modeling, taking into account the influence of implicit memory on the life script. The methodology includes a comparative analysis of approaches to integrating dissociative experience, based on relational transactional analysis (J. Statheridge) and «Future Memory» psychotherapy. A practical case illustrates the analysis of a client’s «Lifeline» with a history of chronic trauma. As a result, a therapeutic plan has been developed comprising two interconnected directions that comprehensively engage explicit and implicit memory to achieve sustainable changes. The effectiveness of the tool for working with the consequences of long-term trauma in clients from ACoA and dysfunctional families is emphasized.

This article presents an overview of the main ideas from Mark Widdowson’s Transactional Analysis for Depression: A Step-by-Step Treatment Manual. It describes how transactional analysis conceptualizes depression through ego states, life script, introjects, and contaminations, and outlines the therapeutic processes—decontamination, deconfusion, and redecision—that form the core of treatment. The article summarizes the key mechanisms that maintain depressive states, including self-criticism, script beliefs, perceptual distortions, and a deficit of positive strokes. Practical therapeutic steps recommended by Widdowson are presented, showing how they help clients restore autonomy, reduce symptoms, and develop more stable emotional regulation.

The article presents the results of the roundtable discussion “Transgenerational Trauma in the TA Community”. An action team of transactional-analytic psychologists discussed issues related to the content, stages, characteristics, and mechanisms of the professional transgenerational trauma development and transmission. Special attention was given to its connection with the life script of the founders of this psychology and psychotherapy field, as well as to the manifestations and repetitions of this trauma in the development of the contemporary TA community. Colleagues shared their feelings, thoughts, and existing experience related to the topics under discussion.

Collective memory and autobiographical memory: The same evolutionary basis serving group cohesion and cooperation.

Abstract The life narratives people tell about themselves are conducive to well-being and a sense of self-continuity. This study utilized natural language processing methods to address between and within-group differences in the cultural and ethnic experiences that were remembered by a cohort of older Black and White Americans (N = 457; 50% Black) who grew up during the civil rights movement. The history-graded influence differentiated the lives of these two groups. We predicted that (a) when all the memories are combined and analyzed, two clusters would emerge with each cluster respectively reflecting experiences shared by the majority of individuals in each racial group, (b) idiosyncratic experiences would also be recalled, resulting in within-group differences, and (c) the affective qualities of cultural memories (i.e., event valence, use of emotion words, overall sentiment) are shaped by racial background and what was recalled. Latent semantic and cluster analyses identified two meaningful clusters: one cluster encompasses memories about racial division mostly from Black Americans (70.9%); the other cluster contains memories about family ancestry largely from White Americans (72.2%). Chi-square tests and independent t-tests revealed that Black (vs. White) Americans and the racial division (vs. family ancestry) cluster presented greater memory negativity. Notably, Black Americans who recalled divergent experiences had lower memory negativity than their same-race counterparts who recalled racial division. White Americans who recalled divergent experiences showed greater memory negativity than their same-race counterparts who recalled family ancestry. In discussing these findings, we draw on the master narrative framework and the life script theory.

This article examines the theme of narratives and stories in relation to life scripts. It builds on the existing transactional analysis (TA) literature about learning and life scripts and expands on three key aspects of the learning script in relation to existing TA literature and educational theory. It describes Fanita English’s four-story exercise and how it can be adapted to surface themes about learning scripts for educators and learners. Finally, the author explores the possibilities for updating our learning scripts as educators.

The article analyzes the development of the conceptual apparatus of psychology using the language of Transactional Analysis, developed in the teachings of Eric Berne, as an example. The ethical context of Transactional Analysis is considered in the context of a rapidly changing world as a vital task of mental, spiritual and even physical therapy, the purpose of which is to overcome existential crises, construct a new identity and achieve happiness. Revealing the ethics of Transactional Analysis in a broad sense, the authors consider the effectiveness of this approach for solving a wide range of socio-cultural and moral-psychological problems, using «non-classical» moral argumentation that allows avoiding evaluative moral judgments, accusations, and censures. The opportunity for this is provided by a specific conceptual apparatus that reflects the phenomenological approach of modern humanities, which is characterized by the language of existentials, rather than traditional scientific categories. The specificity of existentials (imagery, metaphorical nature, the synthesis of silence and speech) is well revealed in terms of Ego States (P-A-C), concepts of games and Life Script. The article presents the results of an expert survey of practicing psychologists on the specifics of the TA language, which largely determines its effectiveness in psychotherapy, and on the possibility of its application in both individual and group work. The relevance of the TA conceptual apparatus for self-therapy and for teaching the skills of psychological reflection to non-professionals is particularly emphasized. The discussion about the danger of «oversimplification» of E. Berne's teaching by a wide range of «ordinary people» is briefly analyzed. The strengths of the «simplicity» of the language of Transactional Analysis are analyzed from the standpoint of a practical request for a conceptual apparatus for self-reflection not only of individual but also of collective subjects. A conclusion is made about a positive synthesis of ethics and psychology in the formation of practices of moral therapy of the individual and society.

Friendship, when approached as an inherently queer relational form, challenges normative assumptions that hierarchise intimacy through the naturalisation and institutionalisation of the heteronormative family. Drawing on a personal narrative of a long-standing friendship, this article examines how such bonds can question and dismantle dominant intimacy hierarchies. It contributes to ongoing critiques of family as a normative institution by positioning friendship as a chosen, intentional and radical practice of intimacy: friends on purpose. To this end, autotheory is employed in order to represent the search for an adequate language for the intimate, non-institutionalised nature of relationships as well as to highlight its modes of radical subjectivity. The analysis further engages with historical concepts of intimate closeness such as the Boston Marriage, romantic friendship, the split-attraction model, and queerplatonic relationships, alongside the works of Michel Foucault, Didier Eribon, Angela Chen, and Geoffroy de Lagasnerie. Instead of integrating friendship into the institutional logic of family, it is conceptualised as a practice that disrupts conventional notions of kinship. At the same time, it is shown that non-institutionalised forms of relationships can still remain intertwined with amatonormativity and normative life scripts. By resisting the temporalities and prescribed values of romance, marriage, and reproduction, and by questioning their naturalisation, friendship opens up a powerful mode of relating beyond institutional recognition.

ABSTRACT This study explores the relationship between cultural life scripts and actual life stories of Czechs and Slovaks, building on prior research by Štěpánková et al. (2020. Czech and Slovak life scripts: The rare case of two countries that used to be one. Memory, 28(10), 1204–1218) that examined the semantic knowledge of an ideal life within the Czech and Slovak cultures (cultural life scripts). The current study investigates the extent to which individual life stories align with or diverge from these cultural life scripts. A clear reminiscence bump – a concentration of positive memories between the ages of 15 and 30 – was observed in participants' life stories. The impact of most important life events was analysed using the Transitional Impact Scale (TIS). Results showed that positive cultural script-consistent events yielded the highest TIS scores, while unique, script-divergent negative events had greater impact on psychological dimension of the TIS than their positive counterparts. These findings are discussed in the context of existing literature, highlighting their theoretical implications and alignment with prior research.

Queer temporality in Tony Kushner's angels in America.

ABSTRACT Not all of our experiences can be included in the narrative of our lives. When recalling their life stories, people must select their most relevant experiences to represent who they are. The way these events are recalled and chosen is influenced by cultural expectations about what a typical life should look like. Studies investigating these cultural life scripts typically focus on specific nationalities. Our study explores the expectations and experiences of heterosexual and sexual minority parents from Brazil and the United Kingdom. We asked participants to report the five events most likely to occur in the life of a child from their culture, gender, and sexual orientation, as well as the five most important events in their own lives. The results revealed similarities between the expected and experienced events of participants from both cultures and sexual orientations, but also significant specificities. Sexual minority parents reported more events related to minority stress than heterosexual parents. Additionally, Brazilian participants reported more expected and experienced events during and before the reminiscence bump period. These findings support the cultural life script account of the reminiscence bump and highlight important group-specific differences.

This article is dedicated to the phenomenon of the classic ”Club 27” — a group of seven musicians who died at the age of 27. Among them are legendary figures such as Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and others. All of them left behind an unforgettable legacy, yet their lives were tragically cut short. What unites these individuals beyond their musical talent? Why did their destinies end so dramatically? The article presents an in-depth analysis of these musicians’ lives using the tools of transactional analysis (TA). It explores the «Club 27» as both a cultural and psychological phenomenon, connecting the tragic fates of young musicians through the lens of ego states, life positions, parental injunctions, mirroring relationships, impasses, and life scripts — all shaped by early childhood and adolescent experiences under the influence of parental messages and traumatic events. The study identifies recurring patterns and biographical parallels: parental divorce, teenage rebellion, illness, alcoholism, and emotional coldness within families. These insights offer a deeper understanding of the psychological mechanisms behind the tragedies of these outstanding artists and allow for a new perspective on the inner world of iconic figures of the 20th and 21st centuries, highlighting the lasting impact of early psychological trauma on life scripts.