I'm ok, you're ok (Thomas Harris, 2004 ed.)

CHAPTER 1: Freud, Penfield, and Berne 

1. The brain functions as a high-fidelity tape recorder.

2. The feelings which were associated with past experiences also are recorded and are inextricably locked to those experiences.

3. Persons can exist in two states at the same time. The patient knew he was on the operating table talking with Penfield; he equally knew he was seeing the 'Seven-Up Bottling Company... and Harrison Bakery'. He was dual in that he was at the same time in the experience and outside of it, observing it.

4. These recorded experiences and feelings associated with them are available for replay today in as vivid a form as when they happened and provide much of the data which determines the nature of today's transactions. These experiences not only can be recalled but also relived. I not only remember how I felt. I feel the same way now.

...

The unit of social intercourse is called a transaction. If two or more people encounter each other... sooner or later one of them will speak, or give some other indication of acknowledging the presence of the others. This is called the transactional stimulus. Another person will then say or do something which is in some way related to the stimulus. and that is called the transactional response.

CHAPTER 2: Parent, Adult, and Child 

The Parent 
The Parent is a huge collection of recordings in the brain of unquestioned or imposed external events perceived by a person in his early years, a period which we have designated roughly as the first five years of life. This is the period before the social birth of the individual, before he leaves home in response to the demands of society and enters school. (See Figure 2.) The name Parent is most descriptive of this data inasmuch as the most significant 'tapes' are those provided by the example and pronouncements of his own real parents or parent substitutes. Everything the child saw his parents do and everything he heard them say is recorded in the Parent. Everyone has a Parent in that everyone experienced external stimuli in the first five years of life. Parent is specific for every person, being the recording of that set of early experiences unique to him.  




...

Another characteristic of the Parent is the fidelity of the recordings of inconsistency. Parents say one thing and do another. Parents say, 'Don't lie,' but tell lies. They tell children that smoking is bad for their health but smoke themselves. They proclaim adherence to a religious ethic but do not live by it. It is not safe for the little child to question this inconsistency, and so he is confused. Because this data causes confusion and fear, he defends himself by turning off the recording. 

We think of the Parent predominantly as the recordings of the transactions between the child's two parents. It may be helpful to consider the recordings of Parent data as somewhat like the recording of stereophonic sound. There are two sound tracks that, if harmonious, produce a beautiful effect when played together. If they are not harmonious, the effect is unpleasant and the recording is put aside and played very little, if at all. This is what happens when the Parent contains discordant material. The Parent is repressed or, in the extreme, blocked out altogether. Mother may have been a 'good' mother and father may have been 'bad', or vice versa. There is much useful data which is stored as a result of the transmission of good material from one parent; but since the Parent does contain material from the other parent that is contradictory and productive of anxiety, the Parent as a whole is weakened or fragmented. Parent data that is discordant is not allowed to be a strong positive influence in the person's life. 

Another way to describe this phenomenon is to compare it with the algebraic equation: a plus times a minus equals a minus. It does not matter how big the plus was, or how little the minus was. The result is always a minus - a weakened, disintegrated Parent. The effect in later life may be ambivalence, discord, and despair - for the person, that is, who is not free to examine the Parent.

...

Whether Parent data is a burden or a boon depends on how appropriate it is to the present, on whether or not it has been updated by the Adult, the function of which we shall discuss in this chapter.

The Child 
While external events are being recorded as that body of data we call the Parent, there is another recording being made simultaneously. This is the recording of internal events, the responses of the little person to what he sees and hears.

It is this 'seeing and hearing and feeling and understanding' body of data which we define as the Child. Since the little person has no vocabulary during the most critical of his early experiences, most of his reactions are feelings. We must keep in mind his situation in these early years. He is small, he is dependent, he is inept, he is clumsy, he has no words with which to construct meanings. Emerson said we 'must know how to estimate a sour look'. The child does not know how to do this. A sour look turned in his direction can only produce feelings that add to his reservoir of negative data about himself. It's my fault. Again. Always is. Ever will be. World without end.




During this time of helplessness there are an infinite number of total and uncompromising demands on the child. On the one hand, he has the urges (genetic recordings) to empty his bowels ad lib., to explore, to know, to crush and to bang, to express feelings, and to experience all of the pleasant sensations associated with movement and discovery. On the other hand, there is the constant demand from the environment, essentially the parents, that he give up these basic satisfactions for the reward of parental approval. This approval, which can disappear as fast as it appears, is an unfathomable mystery to the child, who has not yet made any certain connexion between cause and effect. 

The predominant by-product of the frustrating, civilizing process is negative feelings. On the basis of these feelings the little person early concludes, I'm not OK.' We call this comprehensive self-estimate the not ok, or the not ok Child. This conclusion and the continual experiencing of the unhappy feelings which led to it and confirm it are recorded permanently in the brain and cannot be erased. This permanent recording is the residue of having been a child. Any child. Even the child of kind, loving, well-meaning parents. It is the situation of child-hood and not the intention of the parents which produces the problem.

As in the case of the Parent, the Child is a state into which a person may be transferred at almost any time in his current transactions. There are many things that can happen to us today which recreate the situation of childhood and bring on the same feelings we felt then. Frequently we may find ourselves in situations where we are faced with impossible alternatives, where we find ourselves in a corner, either actually, or in the way we see it. These 'hook the Child', as we say, and cause a replay of the original feelings of frustration, rejection, or abandonment, and we relive a latter-day version of the small child's primary depression. Therefore, when a person is in the grip of feelings, we say his Child has taken over. When his anger dominates his reason, we say his Child is in command.

The Adult 

At about ten months of age a remarkable thing begins to happen to the child. Until that time his life has consisted mainly of helpless or unthinking responses to the demands and stimulations by those around him. He has had a Parent and a Child. What he has not had is the ability either to choose his responses or to manipulate his surroundings. He has had no self-direction, no ability to move out to meet life. He has simply taken what has come his way.

At ten months, however, he begins to experience the power of locomotion. He can manipulate objects and begins to move out, freeing himself from the prison of immobility. It is true that earlier, as at eight months, the infant may frequently cry and need help in getting out of some awkward position, but he is unable to get out of it by himself. At ten months he concentrates on inspection and exploitation of toys. 

The ten-month-old has found he is able to do something which grows from his own awareness and original thought. This self-actualization is the beginning of the Adult. Adult data accumulates as a result of the child's ability to find out for himself what is different about life from the 'taught concept' of life in his Parent and the 'felt concept' of life in his Child. The Adult develops a 'thought concept' of life based on data gathering and data processing. The motility which gives birth to the Adult becomes reassuring in later life when a person is in distress. He goes for a walk to 'clear his mind'. Pacing is seen similarly as a relief from anxiety. There is a recording that movement is good, that it has a separating quality, that it helps him see more clearly what his problem is.




The Adult, during these early years, is fragile and tentative. It is easily 'knocked out' by commands from the Parent and fear in the Child. Mother says about the crystal goblet, 'No, no! Don't touch that!' The child may pull back and cry, but at the first opportunity he will touch it anyway to see what it is all about. In most persons the Adult, despite all the obstacles thrown in its way, survives and continues to function more and more effectively as the maturation process goes on. 

The Adult is 'principally concerned with transforming stimuli into pieces of information, and processing and filing that information on the basis of previous experience'. It is different from the Parent, which is 'judgemental in an imitative way and seeks to enforce sets of borrowed standards, and front the Child, which tends to react more abruptly on the basis of prelogical thinking and poorly differentiated or distorted perceptions'. Through the Adult the little person can begin to tell the difference between life as it was taught and demonstrated to him (Parent), life as he felt it or wished it or fantasized it (Child), and life as he figures it out by himself (Adult).  

The Adult is a data-processing computer, which grinds out decisions after computing the information from three sources: the Parent, the Child, and the data which the Adult has gathered and is gathering. One of the important functions of the Adult is to examine the data in the Parent, to see whether or not it is true and still applicable today, and then to accept it or reject it; and to examine the Child to see whether or not the feelings there are appropriate to the present or are archaic and in response to archaic Parent data. The goal is not to do away with the Parent and Child but to be free to examine these bodies of data. The Adult, in the words of Emerson, 'must not be hinderedby the name of goodness, but must examine if it be goodness'; or badness, for that matter, as in the early decision, 'I'm not ok'. 

The Adult testing of Parent data may begin at an early age. A secure youngster is one who finds that most Parent data is reliable: They told me the truth!' 'It really is true that cars in the street are dangerous,' concludes the little boy who has seen his pet dog hurt by a car in the street. 'It really is true that things go better when I share my toys with Bobby,' thinks the little boy who has been given a prized possession by Bobby. 'It really does feel better when my pants aren't wet,' concludes the little girl who has learned to go to the bathroom by herself. If parental directives are grounded in reality, the child, through his own Adult, will come to realize integrity, or sense of wholeness. What he tests holds up under testing. The data which he collects in his experimentation and examination begins to constitute some 'constants' that he can trust. His findings are supported by what he was taught in the first place.

It is important to emphasize that the verification of Parent data does not erase the not ok recordings in the Child, which were produced by the early imposition of this data. Mother believes that the only way to keep three-year-old Johnny out of the street is to spank him. He does not understand the danger. His response is fear, anger, and frustration with no appreciation of the fact that his mother loves him and is protecting his life. The fear, anger, and frustration are recorded. These feelings are not erased by the later understanding that she was right to do what she did, but the understanding of how the original situation of childhood produced so many not ok recordings of this type can free us of their continual replay in the present. We cannot erase the recording, but we can choose to turn it off! 




Figure 5. The Adult gets data from three sources.

In the same way that the Adult updates Parent data to determine what is valid and what is not, it updates Child data to determine which feelings may be expressed safely. In our society it is considered appropriate for a woman to cry at a wedding, but it is not considered appropriate for that woman to scream at her husband afterwards at the reception. Yet both crying and screaming are emotions in the Child. The Adult keeps emotional expression appropriate. (The evidence once told me space travel was only fantasy; now I know it is reality.)

Another of the Adult's functions is probability estimating. This function is slow in developing in the small child and, apparently, for most of us, has a hard time catching up throughout life. The little person is constantly confronted with unpleasant alternatives (either you eat your spinach or you go without ice cream), offering little incentive for examining probabilities. Unexamined probabilities can underlie many of our transactional failures, and unexpected danger signals can cause more Adult 'decay', or delay, than expected ones. There are similarities here to the stock ticker in investment concerns, which may run many hours behind on very active trading days. We sometimes refer to this delay as 'computer lag', a remedy for which is the old, familiar practice of 'counting to ten'.The capacity for probability estimating can be increased by conscious effort. Like a muscle in the body, the Adult grows and increases in efficiency through training and use. If the Adult is alert to the possibility of trouble, through probability estimating, it can also devise solutions to meet the trouble if and when it comes. 

Under sufficient stress, however, the Adult can be impaired to the point where emotions take over inappropriately. The boundaries between Parent, Adult, and Child are fragile, sometimes indistinct, and vulnerable to those incoming signals which tend to recreate situations we experienced in the helpless, dependent days of childhood. The Adult sometimes is flooded by signals of the 'bad news' variety so overwhelming that the Adult is reduced to an 'onlooker' in the transaction. An individual in this situation might say, 'I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I couldn't help myself.' 

Unrealistic, irrational, non-Adult responses are seen in a condition referred to as traumatic neurosis. The danger, or 'bad news' signal, hits the Parent and the Child at the same time it hits the Adult. The Child responds in the way it originally did, with a feeling of not ok. This may produce all kinds of regressive phenomena. The individual may again feel himself to be a tiny, helpless, dependent child. One of the most primitive of these phenomena is thought blocking. One place this can be seen is in psychiatric hospitals that have a locked-door policy. When the door is locked on a new patient, his retreat is rapid and pronounced. This is why I am opposed to treating patients in a setting where the emphasis is on parental care. Catering to the helpless Child in the individual delays the reconstructive process of restoring the Adult to the executive function. 

An ideal hospital would be a comfortable motel with 'play area' for the Child, surrounding a clinic building devoted to activities designed for achieving autonomy of the Adult. The nurses would not wear uniforms or serve as parents to the Patients. Instead, nurses in street clothing would apply their skills and training to help each individual learn the identity of his Parent, Adult, and Child. 

In our treatment groups we use certain colloquial catch phrases such as, 'Why don't you stay in your Adult?' when a member finds his feelings are taking over. Another of these is, 'What was the original transaction?' This is asked as means of 'turning on the Adult' to analyse the similarity between the present incoming signal producing the present distress and the original transaction, in which the small child experienced distress. The ongoing work of the Adult consists, then, of checking out old data, validating or invalidating it, and refiling it for future use. If this business goes on smoothly and there is a relative absence of conflict between what has been taught and what is real, the computer is free for important new business, creativity. Creativity is born from curiosity in the Child, as is the Adult. The Child provides the 'want to' and the Adult provides the 'how to'. The essential requirement for creativity is computer time. If the computer is cluttered with old business there is little time for new business. Once checked out, many Parent directives become automatic and thus free the computer for creativity. Many of our decisions in day-to-day transactions are automatic. For instance, when we see an arrow pointing down a one-way street, we automatically refrain from going the oppositeway. We do not involve our computer in lengthy data processing about highway engineering, the traffic death toll, or how signs are painted. Were we to start from scratch in every decision or operate entirely without the data that was supplied by our parents, our computer would rarely have time for the creative process.

Some people contend that the undisciplined child, unhampered by limits, is more creative than the child whose parents set limits. I do not believe this is true. A youngster has more time to be creative - to explore, invent, take apart, and put together - if he is not wasting time in futile decision making for which he has inadequate data. A little boy has more time to build a snowman if he is not allowed to engage Mother in a long hassle about whether or not to wear overshoes. If a child is allowed to be creative by painting the front room walls with shoe polish, he is unprepared for the painful consequences when he does so at the neighbour's house. Painful outcomes do not produce ok feelings. There are other consequences that take time, such as mending in the hospital after a trial-and-error encounter with a car in the street. There is just so much computer time. Conflict uses a great deal. An extremely time-consuming conflict is produced when what parents say is true does not seem to be true to the Adult. The most creative individual is the one who discovers that a large part of the content of the Parent squares with reality. He can then file away this validated information in the Adult, trust it, forget about it, and gets on with other things - like how to make a kite fly, how to build a sand castle, or how to do differential calculus.

However, many youngsters are preoccupied much of the time with the conflict between Parent data and what they see as reality. Their most troubling problem is that they do not understand why the Parent has such a hold on them. When Truth comes to knock at the Parent's door, the Parent says, 'Come, let us reason together'. The little child whose father is in jail and whose mother steals to support him may have a loud recording in his Parent, 'You never trust a cop!' So he meets a friendly one. His Adult computes all the data about this nice guy, how he gets the ball game started in the sand lot, how he treats the gang to popcorn, how he is friendly, and how he speaks in a quiet voice. For this youngster there is conflict. What he sees as reality is different from what he has been taught. The Parent tells him one thing and the Adult another. During the period of his actual dependency upon his parents for security, however tenuous this security may be, it is likely he will accept the parents' verdict that cops are bad. This is how prejudice is transmitted. For a little- child, it may be safer to believe a lie than to believe his own eyes and ears. The Parent so threatens the Child (in a continuing internal dialogue) that the Adult gives up and stops trying to inquire into areas of conflict. Therefore, 'cops are bad' comes through as truth. This is called contamination of the Adult and will be examined in Chapter 6. 

CHAPTER 3: The Four Life Positions 

Very early in life every child concludes, 'I'm not OK.' He makes a conclusion about his parents, also: 'You're OK'. This is the first thing he figures out in his life-long attempt to make sense of himself and the world in which he lives. This position, I'm not ok - you're ok, is the most deterministic decision of his life. It is permanently recorded and will influence everything he does. Because it is a decision it can be changed by a new decision. But not until it is understood.




Transactional Analysis constructs the following classification of the four possible life positions held with respect to oneself and others:
1. I'm Not Ok - You're Ok
2. I'm Not Ok - You're Not Ok
3. I'm Ok - You're Not Ok
4. I'm Ok - You're Ok

Before I elaborate each position I wish to state a few general observations about positions. I believe that by the end of the second year of life, or sometime during the third year, the child has decided on one of the first three positions. The I'm not ok - you're ok is the first tentative decision based on the experiences of the first year of life. By the end of the second year it is either confirmed and settled or it gives way to Position 2 or 3: I'm not ok-you're not ok or I'm ok-you're not ok. Once finalized, the child stays in his chosen position and it governs everything he does. It stays with him the rest of his life, unless he later consciously changes it to the fourth position. People do not shift back and forth. The decision as to the first three positions is based totally on stroking and non-stroking. The first three are nonverbal decisions. They are conclusions, not explanations. Yet they are more than conditioned responses. They are what Piaget calls intellectual elaborations in the construction of causality. In other words, they are a product of Adult data processing in the very little person.

1. I'm Not OK-You're OK 

This is the universal position of early childhood, being the infant's logical conclusion from the situation of birth and infancy. There is OK-ness in this position, because stroking is present. Every child is stroked in the first year of life simply by the fact that he has to be picked up to be cared for. Without at least minimal handling the infant would not survive. There is also NOT-OK-ness. That is the conclusion about himself. I believe the evidence points to the overwhelming accumulation of not ok feelings in the child, making logical (on the basis of the evidence he- has) his not ok conclusion about himself. In explaining Transactional Analysis to patients and nonpatients I have found a generally that's it! response to the explanation of the origin and existence of the not ok Child. I believe that acknowledging the not ok Child in each of us is the only sympathetic, thus curative, way games can be analysed. Considering the universality of games, the universality of the I'm not ok is a reasonable deduction. Adler's break with Freud was over this point: sex was not at the basis of man's struggle in life, but rather feelings of inferiority, or not ok, which were apparent universally. He claimed that the child, by virtue of his small size and helplessness, inevitably considered himself inferior to the adult figures in his environment. Harry Stack Sullivan was greatly influenced by Adler, and I was greatly influenced by Sullivan, with whom I studied for the five years preceding his death. Sullivan, whose central contribution to psychoanalytic thought was the concept of 'interpersonal relationships', or transactions, claimed that the child built hisself-estimate totally on the appraisal of others, what he called 'reflected appraisals'. He said:

The child lacks the equipment and experience necessary to form an accurate picture of himself, so his only guide is the reactions of others to him. There is very little cause for him to question these appraisals, and in any case he is far too helpless to challenge them or to rebel against them. He passively accepts the judgements, which are communicated empathetically at first, and by words, gestures, and deeds in this period... thus the selfattitudes learned early in life are carried forever by the individual, with some allowance for the influence of extraordinary environmental circumstances and modification through later experiences.

2. I'm NOT OK - You're Not OK 
If all children who survive infancy initially conclude I'm not ok-you're ok, what happens to produce the second position, I'm not ok and neither are you? What happened to the you're ok? What happened to the source of stroking?

By the end of the first year something significant has happened to the child. He is walking. He no longer has to be picked up. If his mother is cold and nonstroking, if she only put up with him during the first year because she had to, then his learning to walk means that his 'babying' days are over. The stroking ceases entirely. In addition punishments come harder and more often as he is able to climb out of his crib, as he gets into everything, and won't stay put. Even self-inflicted hurts come more frequently as his mobility sends him tripping over. obstacles and tumbling down stairs. 

Life, which in the first year had some comforts, now has none. The stroking has disappeared. If this state of abandonment and difficulty continues without relief through the second year of life, the child concludes I'm not ok - you're not ok. In this position the Adult stops developing since one of its primary functions - getting strokes - is thwarted in that there is no source of stroking. A person in this position gives up. There is no hope. He simply gets through life and ultimately may end up in a mental institution in a state of extreme withdrawal, with regressive behaviour which reflects a vague, archaic longing to get back to life as it was in the first year during which he received the only stroking he ever knew - as an infant who was held and fed.

3. I'm OK - You're Not OK 
A child who is brutalized long enough by the parents he initially felt were ok will switch positions to the third, or criminal, position: I'm ok - you're not ok. There is OK-ness here, but where does it come from? Where is the source of stroking if you're not ok?

This is a difficult question considering that the position is decided in the second or third year of life. If a two-year-old concludes I'm ok, does this mean his ok is the product of 'self-stroking', and, if so, how does a small child stroke himself?

I believe this self-stroking does in fact occur during the time that a little person is healing from major, painful injuries such as are inflicted on a youngster who has come to be known as 'the battered child'. This is the child who has been beaten so severely that bones and skin are broken. Anyone who has had a broken bone or massive bruises knows the pain. Common in battered children are extremely painful injuries such as broken ribs, smashed kidneys, and fractured skulls. How does the every-breath agony of broken ribs or the excruciating headache from blood in the spinal fluid feel to a toddler? Every hour five infants in this country receive injuries of this kind at the hands of their parents.

I believe that it is while this little individual is healing, in a sense 'lying there licking his wounds', that he experiences a sense of comfort alone and by himself, if for no other reason than that his improvement is in such contrast to the gross pain he has just experienced. It is as if he senses, I'll be all right if you leave me alone. I'm ok by myself. As the brutal parents reappear, he may shrink in horror that it will happen again. You hurt me! You are not ok. I'm ok - you're not ok. The early history of many criminal psychopaths, who occupy this position, reveal this kind of gross physical abuse.

The person in the I'm ok - you're not ok position suffers from stroking deprivation. A stroke is only as good as the stroker. And there are no ok people. Therefore there are no ok strokes. Such a person may develop a retinue of 'yes men' who praise and stroke him heavily. Yet he knows they are not authentic strokes because he has had to set them up himself, in the same way he had to produce his own stroking in the first place. The more they praise him the more despicable they become, until he finally rejects them all in favour of a new group of yes men. 'Come close so I can let you have it' is an old recording. That's the way it was in the beginning.

4. I'm OK - You're Ok 

There is a fourth position, wherein lies our hope. It is the I'm ok - you're ok position. There is a qualitative difference between the first three positions and the fourth position. The first three are unconscious, having been made early in life. I'm not ok - you're ok came first and persists for most people throughout life. For certain extremely unfortunate children this position was changed to positions two and three. By the third year of life one of these positions is fixed in every person. The decision as to position is perhaps one of the first functions of the infant's Adult in the attempt to make sense out of life, so that a measure of predictability may be applied to the confusion of stimuli and feelings. These positions are arrived at on the basis of data from the Parent and Child. They are based on emotion or impressions without the benefit of external, modifying data. 

The fourth position, I'm ok-you're ok, because it is a conscious and verbal decision, can include not only an infinitely greater amount of information about the individual and others, but also the incorporation of not-yet-experienced possibilities which exist in the abstractions of philosophy and religion. The first three positions are based on feelings. The fourth is based on thought, faith, and the wager of action. The first three have to do with why. The fourth has to do with why not} Our understanding of ok is not bound to our own personal experiences, because we can transcend them into an abstraction of ultimate purpose for all men.

We do not drift into a new position. It is a decision we make. In this respect it is like a conversion experience. We cannot decide on the fourth position without a great deal more information than most persons have available to them about the circumstances surrounding the original positions decided on so early in life. Fortunate are the children who are helped early in life to find they are ok by repeated exposure to situations in which they can prove, to themselves, their own worth and the worth of others. Unfortunately, the most common position, shared by 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' persons alike, is the I'm not ok - you're ok position.

Finally, it is essential to understand that I'm ok-you're ok is a position and not a feeling. The not ok recordings in the Child are not erased by a decision in the present. The task at hand is how to start a collection of recordings which play ok outcomes to transactions, successes in terms of correct probability estimating, successes in terms of integrated actions which make sense, which are programmed by the Adult, and not by the Parent or Child, successes based on an ethic which can be supported rationally. A man who has lived for many years by the decisions of an emancipated Adult has a great collection of such past experiences and can say with assurance, 'I know this works'. The reason "I'm ok - you're ok" works is that instant joy or tranquility is not expected.

Personal or social storms are not going to subside immediately when we assume a new position. The Child wants immediate results - like instant coffee, and immediate relief from acid indigestion. The Adult can comprehend that patience and faith are required. We cannot guarantee instant ok feelings by the assuming of the I'm-ok-you're-ok position. We have to be sensitive to the presence of the old recordings; but we can choose to turn them off when they replay in a way that undermines the faith we have in a new way to live, which, in time, will bring forth new results and new happiness in our living. The Adult also can recognize the Child responses in others and can choose not to respond in kind.

CHAPTER 4: We Can Change 
All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Emancipated Adult 

The goal of Transactional Analysis is to enable a person to have freedom of choice, the freedom to change at will, to change the responses to recurring and new stimuli. Much of this freedom is lost in early childhood, marking the onset, according to Kubie, of the 'neurotic process'. This process is one which is continually involved in solving archaic problems to the exclusion of dealing effectively with today's reality.

Restoration of the freedom to change is the goal of treatment. This freedom grows from knowing the truth about what is in the Parent and what is in the Child and how this data feeds into present-day transactions. It also requires the truth, or the evidence, about the world in which he lives. Such freedom requires the knowledge that everyone with whom one deals has a Parent, an Adult, and a Child. It requires persistent exploration not only into 'knowable' areas but also into indeterminate areas, which can best be understood in terms of another function of the Adult, that of probability estimating. One of the realities of the human predicament is that we frequently have to make decisions before all the facts are in. This is true of any commitment. It is true of marriage. It is true of voting. It is true of signing a petition. It is true of the establishment of priorities. It is true of those values we embrace independently - that is, with the Adult. 

The Child in us demands certainty. The Child wants to know the sun will come up every morning, that Mother will be there, that the 'bad guy' will always get it in the end; but the Adult can accept the fact that there is not always certainty. Philosopher Elton Trueblood states:

The fact that we do not have absolute certainty in regard to any human conclusions does not mean that the task of inquiry is fruitless. We must, it is true, always proceed on the basis of probability, but to have probability is to have something. What we seek in any realm of human thought is not absolute certainty, for that is denied us as men, but rather the more modest path of those who find dependable ways of discerning different degrees of probability.

---

A note on contamination and prejudice:




CHAPTER 5: Analysing the Transaction 

Now that we have developed a language, we come to the central technique: using that language to analyse a transaction. The transaction consists of a stimulus by one person and a response by another, which response in turn becomes a new stimulus for the other person to respond to. The purpose of the analysis is to discover which part of each person - Parent, Adult, or Child - is originating each stimulus and response. 

There are many clues to help identify stimulus and response as Parent, Adult, or Child.

These include not only the words used but also the tone of voice, body gestures, and facial expressions. The more skilful we become in picking up these clues, the more data we acquire in Transactional Analysis. We do not have to dig deep into anecdotal material in the past to discover what is recorded in Parent, Adult, and Child. We reveal these aspects in ourselves every day. 

The following is a list of physical and verbal clues for each state.

Parent Clues - Physical: 

Furrowed brow, pursed lips, the pointing index finger, headwagging, the 'horrified look', foot-tapping, hands on hips, arms folded across chest, wringing hands, tongue-clicking, sighing, patting another on the head. These are typical Parent gestures. However, there may be other Parent gestures peculiar to one's own Parent. For instance, if your father had a habit of clearing his throat and looking skyward each time he was to make a pronouncement about your bad behaviour, this mannerism undoubtedly would be apparent as your own prelude to a Parent statement, even though this might not be generally seen as Parent in most people. Also, there are cultural differences. For instance, in the United States people exhale as they sigh, whereas in Sweden they inhale as they sigh.

Parent Clues - Verbal: 

I am going to put a stop to this once and for all; I can't for the life of me...; Now always remember... ('always' and 'never' are almost always Parent words, which reveal underlying limitations of an archaic system closed to new data); How many times have I told you? If I were you... 

Many evaluative words, whether critical or supportive, may identify the Parent inasmuch as they make a judgement about another, based not on Adult evaluation but on automatic, archaic responses. Examples of these kinds of words are: stupid, naughty, ridiculous, disgusting, shocking, asinine, lazy, nonsense, absurd, poor thing, poor dear, no! no!, sonny, honey (as from a solicitous saleslady), How dare you?, cute, there there, Now what?, Not again! It is important to keep in mind that these words are clues, and are not conclusive. The Adult may decide after serious deliberation that, on the basis of an Adult ethical system, certain things are stupid, ridiculous, disgusting, and shocking. Two words, 'should' and 'ought', frequently are giveaways to the Parent state, but as I contend in Chapter 12, 'should' and 'ought' can also be Adult words. It is the automatic, archaic, unthinking use of these words which signals the activation of the Parent. The use of these words, together with body gestures and the context of the transaction, help us identify the Parent.

Child Clues - Physical: 

Since the Child's earliest responses to the external world were nonverbal, the most readily apparent Child clues are seen in physical expressions. Any of the following signal the involvement of the Child in a transaction: tears; the quivering lip; pouting; temper tantrums; the high-pitched, whining voice; rolling eyes; shrugging shoulders; downcast eyes; teasing; delight; laughter; hand-raising for permission to speak; nail-biting; nose-thumbing; squirming; and giggling. 

Child Clues - Verbal: 

Many words, in addition to baby talk, identify the Child: I wish, I want, I dunno, I gonna, I don't care, I guess, when I grow up, bigger, biggest, better, best (many superlatives originate in the Child as 'playing pieces' in the 'Mine Is Better' game). In the same spirit as 'Look, Ma, no hands', they are stated to impress the Parent and to overcome the not ok.

There is another grouping of words which are spoken continually by little children.
However, these words are not clues to the Child, but rather to the Adult operating in the little person. These words are why, what, where, who, when, and how.

Adult Clues - Physical: 

What does the Adult look like? If we turn off the video on the Parent and Child tapes, what will come through on the face? Will it be blank? Benign? Dull? Insipid? Ernst {1} contends that the blank face does not mean an Adult face. He observes that listening with the Adult is identified by continual movement - of the face, the eyes, the body-with an eye blink every three to five seconds. Non-movement signifies non-listening. The Adult face is straight-forward, says Ernst. If the head is tilted, the person is listening with an angle in mind. The Adult also allows the curious, excited Child to show its face.  

Adult Clues - Verbal: 

As stated before, the basic vocabulary of the Adult consists of why, what, where, when, who, and how. Other words are: how much, in what way, comparative, true, false, probable, possible, unknown, objective, I think, I see, it is my opinion, etc. These words all indicate Adult data processing. In the phrase 'it is my opinion', the opinion may be derived from the Parent, but the statement is Adult in that it is identified as an opinion and not as fact. 'It is my opinion that high school students should have the vote' is not the same as the statement 'High school students should have the vote'.

This chapter then goes onto telling about the various possible ways a transaction might go on:

1. Parent-Parent transaction
2. Adult-adult transaction
3. Child-child transaction
4. Child-parent transation (Such as between sick husband (little boy) and nurturing wife (good mamma)).
5. Parent-child transaction
6. Child-adult transaction
7. Adult-parent transaction

Uncomplementary, or Crossed, Transactions 







Additional Illustrations of Crossed Transactions
Patient (A): I would like to work in a hospital like this.
Nurse (P): You can't cope with your own problems. (Figure 18)

Mother (P): Go clear up your room.
Daughter (P): You can't tell me what to do. You're not the boss around here. Dad's the boss! (Figure 19)

Therapist (A): What is your principal hang-up in life?
Patient (C): Red tape, red tape (pounding table), damn it, red tape! (Figure 20)

Son (A): I have to finish a report tonight that's due tomorrow.
Father (P): Why do you always leave things to the last minute? (Figure 21)

Man (A), standing with friend: We were trying to get this cap unlocked and dropped the key behind the bumper. Could you help us get it out?
Service Station Attendant (P): Who did it? (Figure 22)

Little Girl (A): Dirty shirts are warm.
Mother (P): Go take a bath. (Figure 23)

Adolescent Girl (P): Well, frankly, my Father likes Palm Springs best.
Friend (P): Our family tries to avoid the tourist places. (Figure 24)

Little Girl (C): I hate soup. I'm not going to eat it. You cook icky.
Mother (C): I'm just going to leave and then you can cook your own icky food. (Figure 25)

Little Boy (C): My Daddy has a million dollars.
Little Girl (C): That's nothing. My Daddy has 'finnegan' dollars. ('Finnegan' was this fouryear-old's way of saying 'infinity'.) (Figure 26)































Duplex Transactions 







Husband says to wife, 'Where did you hide the can opener?' The main stimulus is Adult in that it seeks objective information. But there is a secondary communication in the word hide. (Your house-keeping is a mystery to me. We'd go broke if I were as disorganized as you. If I could once, just once, find something where it belongs!) This is Parent. It is a thinly veiled criticism. This stimulates a duplex transaction (Figure 28).

The progress of this transaction depends on which stimulus the wife wishes to respond to. If she wants to keep things amiable and feels ok enough not to have been threatened she may respond, 'I hid it next to the tablespoons, darling'. This is complementary in that she gives him the information he desires and also acknowledges good-naturedly his 'aside' about her housekeeping. If her Adult computes that it is important to her marriage to do something about her husband's gentle suggestion, she may take the hint and become more organized. With her Adult handling the transaction, she can. 

However, if her not ok Child is hooked, her primary response will be to the word hide, and she may respond along the lines of, 'So what's the matter with you - you blind or something?' And there endeth the quest for the can opener while they wrangle over each other's merits and demerits in the area of organization, blindness, stupidity, etc. His beer is still unopened, and a game of 'Uproar' is well along.

Some transactions of this nature can involve stimulus and response at all levels: A man comes home and writes 'I love you' in the dust on the coffee table. The Adult is in command of the situation, although both his Parent and Child are involved (Figure 29). The Parent says, 'Why don't you ever clean this place up?' The Child says, 'Please don't get mad at me if I criticize you'. The Adult takes charge, however, on the basis that to be loving is important to my marriage, so I won't let my Parent or my Child be activated. If I tell her I love her she won't get mad at me, but perhaps she'll get the idea that it is important, after all, for a man in my position to have a home that looks nice.

This can turn into a complementary transaction if the wife is ok enough to take a little constructive criticism. The outcome would be happy if she shined up the house, met her husband at the door with a tall, cool drink, and told him what a sweet, sentimental, imaginative husband he is: Other husbands just moan and groan - but look what a jewel I've got! This approach is bound to succeed. However, if she can't do this, her Parent will probably retort, 'When was the last time you cleaned the garage' or her Child will send her out on the town to run up the charge accounts. This transaction illustrates that even though the Parent and Child are involved, the outcome can be amiable and advance a good marriage if the Adult is in charge.       

The Adult has a choice as to how it will respond to a stimulus in a complementary way that will protect both the relationship and the individuals in the relationship. This sometimes takes some very rapid (intuitive) computing.

The person who always comes out 'smelling like a rose' does not do so accidentally. He has a high-speed Adult. As handy as this is in social situations, as above, it is not as critical there as in the home. You can walk away from a cocktail party. Walking away from home is something else. 

The question arises: How can the Adult work better and faster? When someone knocks on the front door of life, who is going to get there first - the Parent, the Adult, or the Child?

How to Stay in the Adult 

In summary, a strong Adult is built in the following ways:

1. Learn to recognize your Child, its vulnerabilities, its fears, its principal methods of expressing these feelings.

2. Learn to recognize your Parent, its admonitions, injunctions, fixed positions, and principal ways of expressing these admonitions, injunctions, and positions.

3. Be sensitive to the Child in others, talk to that Child, stroke that Child, protect that Child, and appreciate its need for creative expression as well as the not ok burden it carries about.

4. Count to ten, if necessary, in order to give the Adult time to process the data coming into the computer, to sort out Parent and Child from reality.

5. When in doubt, leave it out. You can't be attacked for what you didn't say.

6. Work out a system of values. You can't make decisions without an ethical framework. How the Adult works out a value system is examined in detail in Chapter 12, 'P-A-C and Moral Values'.

CHAPTER 6: How We Differ 

All people are structurally alike in that they all have a Parent, an Adult, and a Child.

They differ in two ways: in the content of Parent, Adult, and Child, which is unique to each person, being recordings of those experiences unique to each; and in the working arrangement, or the functioning, of Parent, Adult, and Child.This chapter is devoted to an examination of these functional differences. There are two kinds of functional problems: contamination and exclusion.

Contamination 
At the end of an initial hour in which I had explained P-A-C to a sixteen-year-old girl who was withdrawn, uncommunicative, culturally deprived, a school dropout, and referred by the Welfare Department, I asked, 'Can you tell me what P-A-C means to you now?' After a long silence she said, 'It means that we are all made up of three parts and we'd better keep them separated or we're in trouble'.

The trouble when they are not separated is called contamination of the Adult.




Ideally (Figure 30) the P-A-C circles are separate. In many people, however, the circles overlap. The (a) overlap in the figure is contamination of the Adult by dated, unexamined Parent data which is externalized as true. This is called prejudice. Thus, beliefs such as 'white skins are better than black skins', 'right-handedness is better than left-handedness', and 'cops are bad' are externalized in transactions on the basis of prejudgement, before reality data (Adult) is applied to them. Prejudice develops in early childhood when the door of inquiry is shut on certain subjects by the security-giving parents. The little person dares not open it for fear of parental rebuke. We all know how difficult it is to reason with a prejudiced person. With some people one can present a logical and evidential case regarding racial issues or left-handedness or any other subject that the person holds a prejudice about; yet, the Parent in these people steadfastly dominates a portion of the Adult, and they will surround their prejudicial cases with all kinds of irrelevant arguments to support their position. As illogical as their position may seem, the rigidity of their position is in its safety. As illustrated in Chapter 2, it is safer for a little child to believe a lie than to believe his own eyes and ears. Therefore, one cannot eliminate prejudice by an Adult discourse on the subject of the prejudice. The only ways to eliminate prejudice are to uncover the fact that it is no longer dangerous to disagree with one's parents and to update the Parent with data from today's reality. Thus, treatment can be seen as separating Parent and Adult and restoring the boundary between them.

The (b) overlap in Figure 30 is contamination of the Adult by the Child in the form of feelings or archaic experiences which are inappropriately externalized in the present. Two of the most common symptoms of this kind of contamination are delusions and hallucinations. A delusion is grounded in fear. A patient who said to me, 'The world is hideous', was describing how the world seemed to him as a small child. A little person who was in constant fear of brutality at the hands of angry, unpredictable parents can, as a grownup, under stress, be flooded by the same fear to the extent that he can fabricate 'logical' supporting data. He may believe that the door-to-door salesman coming down the street is really coming to kill him. If confronted with the fact that it is only a salesman, this person may support his fear by a statement such as 'I knew it the minute I saw him. It's him! He's wanted by the FBI. I saw his picture in the post office. That's why he's coming to get me'. As in the case of prejudice, this delusion cannot be eliminated by a simple statement of the truth that this is, in fact, a salesman. It can only be eliminated by uncovering the truth that the original threat to the Child no longer exists externally. Only as the Adult is decontaminated is it able to compute reality data. 

Hallucinations are another type of contamination of the Adult by the Child. An hallucination is a phenomenon produced by extreme stress, wherein what was once experienced externally - derogation, rejection, criticism - is again experienced externally, even though 'no one is there'. A recorded experience 'comes on for real' and the person 'hears' voices that existed in a past reality. If you ask him what the voices say, he characteristically will describe the content as words of criticism, threat, or violence. The more bizarre the hallucination the more bizarre was life for him as a child. Bizarre hallucinations are not hard to understand when we consider the actual types of abuse, verbal and physical, to which some children are subjected.  

Exclusion 
In addition to contamination there is another functional disorder that explains how we differ: exclusion.

Exclusion is manifested by a stereotyped, predictable attitude which is steadfastly maintained as long as possible in the face of any threatening situation. The constant Parent, the constant Adult, and the constant Child all result primarily from defensive exclusion of the two complementary aspects in each case. {2} This is a situation in which an Excluding Parent can 'block out' the Child or an Excluding Child can 'block out' the Parent.

The Person Who Cannot Play 




The Person Without a Conscience 




The Decommissioned Adult 




CHAPTER 7: How We Use Time 

One of the most dramatic scientific adventures of this century is the exploration of space. We are not content to understand that it is infinite. We want landmarks, so to speak, platforms for our satellites, or mathematical slots into which we can aim our space vehicles. We want to comprehend space; to define it; in a sense, to use it. The other great cosmic reality is time. We may speculate about either end of our earthly existence. We may trust in immortality in the face of incomprehensible death; but, as in our efforts to define space, we must in our definition of time start where we are. All we can know is that man's average ration of time is three score and ten years. What we do with our known allotment is what concerns us. Of most immediate concern is what we do with the smaller blocks of time within our grasp: the next week, the next day, the next hour, this very hour. 

We all share with Disraeli a common concern that 'life is too short to be little'. Yet our greatest frustration is that so much of life is just that. Perhaps more significant and dramatic than space exploration is an investigation of our use of time. 'What folly,' said John Howe, 'to dread the thought of throwing away life at once, and yet have no regard to throwing it away by parcels and piecemeal.'

As with space, we are not content to comprehend time only as infinite. For many people the pressing question is 'How am I going to get through the next hour?' The more structured time is, the less difficult is this problem. Very busy people with many external demands do not have time on their hands. The 'next hour' is very well programmed. This programming, or structuring, is what people try to achieve, and when they are unable to do it themselves, they look to others to structure time for them. 'Tell me what to do.' 'What shall I do next?' 'What we need is leadership.'

Structure hunger is an outgrowth of recognition hunger, which grew from the initial stroking hunger. The small child has not the necessary comprehension of time to structure it but simply sets about doing things which feel good, moment to moment. As he gets a little older he learns to postpone gratifications for greater rewards: 'I can go outside and make mudpies with Susie now, but if I wait twenty more minutes and keep my nice dress on, I can go to the shopping centre with Daddy.' This is basically a problem in structuring time. Which alternative will be more fun? Which will bring a greater reward? As we grow older we have more and more choices. However, the not ok position keeps us from exercising these choices as freely as we might think we do. 

In our observation of transactions between people, we have been able to establish six types of experience, which are inclusive of all transactions.

They are withdrawal, rituals, activities, pastimes, games, and intimacy.

Withdrawal, although it is not a transaction with another person, can take place, nonetheless, in a social setting. A man, having lunch with a group of boring associates more concerned about their own stroking than his, may withdraw into the fantasy of the night before, when the stroking was good. His body is still at the lunch table, but 'he' isn't. Schoolrooms on a nice spring day are filled with bodies whose 'occupants' are down at the swimming hole, shooting into space on a blazing rocket, or recalling how nice it was kissing under the wisteria. Whenever people withdraw in such fashion it is always certain that the withdrawal keeps them apart from those they are with bodily. This is fairly harmless unless it happens all the time, or unless your wife is talking to you. A ritual is a socially programmed use of time where everybody agrees to do the same thing. It is safe, there is no commitment to or involvement with another person, the outcome is predictable, and it can be pleasant in so far as you are 'in step' or doing the right thing. There are worship rituals, greeting rituals, cocktail party rituals, bedroom rituals. The ritual is designed to get a group of people through the hour without having to get close to anyone. They may, but they don't have to. It is more comfortable to go to a High Church Mass than to attend a revival service where one may be asked, 'Are you saved, brother?' Sexual relations are less awkward in the dark for people for whom physical intimacy has no involvement at the level of personality. There is less chance for involvement in throwing a cocktail party than in having a dinner for six. There is little commitment, therefore little fulfilment. Rituals, like withdrawal, can keep us apart. An activity, according to Berne, is a 'common, convenient, comfortable and utilitarian method of structuring time by a project designed to deal with the material of external reality'. {1} Common activities are keeping business appointments, doing the dishes, building a house, writing a book, shovelling snow, and studying for exams. These activities, in that they are productive or creative, may be highly satisfying in and of themselves, or they may lead to satisfactions in the future in the nature of stroking for a job well done. But during the time of the activity, there is no need for intimate involvement with another person. There may be, but there does not have to be. Some people use their work to avoid intimacy, working nights at the office instead of coming home, devoting their lives to making a million instead of making friends. Activities, like withdrawal and rituals, can keep us apart.

Pastimes are a way of passing time. Berne defines a pastime as ... an engagement in which the transactions are straightforward ... With happy or well organized people whose capacity for enjoyment is unimpaired, a social pastime may be indulged in for its own sake and bring its own satisfactions. With others, particularly neurotics, it is just what the name implies, a way of passing (i.e., structuring) the time: until one gets to know people better, until this hour has been sweated out, and on a larger scale, until bed-time, until vacation time, until school starts, until the cure is forthcoming, until some form of charism, rescue, or death arrives. Existentially a pastime is a way of warding off guilt, despair, or intimacy, a device provided by nature or culture to ease the quiet desperation. More optimistically, at best it is something enjoyed for its own sake and at least it serves as a means of getting acquainted in the hope of achieving the longed-for crasis with another human being. In any case, each participant uses it in an opportunistic way to get whatever primary and secondary gains he can from it. People who cannot engage in pastimes at will are not socially facile. Pastimes can be thought of as being a type of social probing where one seeks information about new acquaintances in an unthreatening, noncommittal way. Berne's observation is that 'pastimes form the basis for the selection of acquaintances and may lead to friendship' and further that they have as an advantage the 'confirmation of role and the stabilizing of position'.

Berne has given some delightful and disarming names to certain of these pastimes, which can be recognized at cocktail parties, women's luncheons, family reunions, and the Kiwanis Club as: variations of 'Small Talk', such as 'General Motors' (comparing cars) and "Who Won' (both 'man talk'); 'Grocery', 'Kitchen', and 'Wardrobe' (all 'lady talk'); 'How To' (go about doing something); 'How Much' (does it cost?); 'Ever Been' (to some nostalgic place); 'Do You Know' (So-and-So); 'What Became Of (Good Old Joe); 'Morning After' (what a hang-over!); and 'Martini' (I know a better way). {3} Pastimes may be played by the Parent, Adult, or Child. A parent-Parent pastime was initiated by the following transaction:

Maude: You mean you do upholstery?
Bess: Only when necessary.
This led to a discussion of the high price of having it done, how shoddy work is these days, and the sale at Macy's.

One Child-Child pastime is the sharing of impossible alternatives symbolic of the damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't situation of the little child. Anxiety may be relieved by this pastime, not because the problem is solved, but because it is handed to someone else - 'Here, you struggle with this for a while!' The following questions were overheard in an exchange between two five-year-olds: Would you rather eat a hill full of ants or drink a pail of boiling medicine? Would you rather be chased by a wild bull or wear your shoes on the wrong feet all day? Would you rather sit on a hot stove or go through the washing machine fifty times? Would you rather be stung by a thousand wasps or sleep in the pigpen? Answer one or the other! You have to answer one or the other. Grown-up versions may be more sophisticated, as, Are you a Democrat or a Republican? 

The Adult may play pastimes about such subjects as the weather in order to keep a relationship going until something interesting or stroke-producing appears:
Mr A: Looks like a storm coming up.
Mr B: Those clouds really look black.
Mr A: Reminds me of the time I was flying my plane and ran into a squall over San Francisco Bay.
Mr B: Oh, you fly? 

As useful as pastimes may be in certain social situations, it is evident that relationships that do not progress beyond them die or, at best, exist in quiet desperation and growing boredom. Pastimes, like withdrawal, rituals, and activities, can keep people apart. Games are such significant transactional phenomena that Berne has devoted a whole book to them, his best-selling Games People Play. Most games cause trouble. They are the relationship wreckers and the misery producers, and in understanding them lies the answer to 'why does this always happen to me?' The word 'game' should not be misleading, explains Berne. It does not necessarily imply fun or even enjoyment. For a full understanding of games, his book is recommended. However, the following is a brief definition, which will serve the purposes of this guide to Transactional Analysis. A game is an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined,, predictable outcome, Descriptively it is a recurring set of transactions, often repetitious, superficially plausible, with a concealed motivation; or, more colloquially, a series of moves with a snare, or 'gimmick'. Games are clearly differentiated from procedures, rituals, and pastimes by two chief characteristics: (1) their ulterior quality and (2) the payoff, Procedures may be successful, rituals effective, and pastimes profitable, but all of them are by definition candid; they may involve contest, but not conflict and the ending may be sensational, but it is not dramatic. Every game, on the other hand, is basically dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distinct from merely exciting, quality.

As pointed out in Chapter 3, all games have their origin in the simple childhood game of 'Mine Is Better Than Yours', easily observable in any group of four-year-olds. It was then, as it is now, designed to bring a little momentary relief from the burden of the not ok position. As in the more sophisticated grown-up versions, it is ulterior in that it does not express what is really felt. When the little person says, 'Mine is better than yours', he is really feeling, I'm not as good as you'. It is an offensive defence. It is protective in that it seeks to maintain homeostasis. It also has a pay-off, as do games grownups play. When 'Mine Is Better Than Yours' is pushed far enough, the game ends with a hard shove, a slapped face, or devastating evidence of some sort that 'It is not: mine's better.' This then puts the little person back in his place, it has been proved again that I'm not ok, and in the maintenance of this fixed position there is a certain miserable security. 

This is the essence of all games. Games are a way of using time for people who cannot bear the stroking starvation of withdrawal and yet whose not ok position makes the ultimate form of relatedness, intimacy, impossible. Though there is misery, there is something. As the comedian said, 'It's better to have halitosis than no breath at all.' It is better to be roughed up playing games than to have no relationship at all. 'The developing [child] is more likely to survive in the warmth of wrath and to suffer blight in the chill of indifference,' wrote Dr Richard Galdston, of abused children. Thus, games provide benefits to all the players. They protect the integrity of the position without the threat of uncovering the position.

To further clarify the nature of games we shall report the moves in one game, 'Why Don't You, Yes But'. The players are Jane, a young career woman, and her friend. (This game frequently is played in the helping situation, the clergyman's study, the psychiatrist's office, or the kitchen of a longsuffering coffee mate.):

Jane: I am so plain and dull that I never have any dates.
Friend: Why don't you go to a good beauty salon and get a different hairdo?
Jane: Yes, but that costs too much money.
Friend: Well, how about buying a magazine with some suggestions for different ways of setting it yourself?
Jane: Yes, but I tried that - and my hair is too fine. It doesn't hold a set. If I wear it in a bun, it at least looks neat.
Friend: How about using makeup to dramatize your features, then.
Jane: Yes, but my skin is allergic to makeup. I tried it once and my skin got rough and broke out.
Friend: They have lots of good new nonallergenic makeups out now. Why don't you go see a dermatologist?
Jane: Yes, but I know what he'll say. He'll say I don't eat right. I know I eat too much junk and don't have well-balanced meals. That's the way it is when you live by yourself. Oh, well, beauty is only skin deep.
Friend: Well, that's true. Maybe it would help if you took some Adult Education courses, like in art or current events. It helps make you a good conversationalist, you know.
Jane: Yes, but they're all at night. And after work I'm so exhausted.
Friend: Well, take some correspondence courses, then.
Jane: Yes, but I don't even have time to write letters to my folks. How could I ever find time for correspondence courses?
Friend: You could find time if it were important enough.
Jane: Yes, but that's easy for you to say. You have so much energy. I'm always dead.Friend: Why don't you go to bed at night? No wonder you're tired when you sit up and watch The Late Show' every night.
Jane: Yes, but I've got to do something fun. That's all there is to do when you're like me! 

Here the discussion has gone full circle. Jane has systematically knocked down every one of her friend's suggestions. She begins with the complaint that she is plain and dull, then ends up begging the question with the final reason: she is plain and dull because 'that is the way I am'.

Her friend finally gives up in defeat and perhaps finally stops coming over, further underlining Jane's not ok. This 'proves' to Jane that there indeed is no hope for her - she can't even keep the friends she has, and this justifies her indulging in still another game, 'Ain't It Awful'. The benefit to Jane is that she doesn't have to do anything about herself because she has repeated proof that nothing can be done. 'Why Don't You, Yes But' can be played by any number, according to Berne: One player who is 'it', presents a problem. The others start to present solutions, each beginning with 'Why Don't You'. To each of these the one who is 'it' objects with a 'Yes But'. A good player can stand off the rest of the group indefinitely, until they all give up, whereupon 'it' wins.

Since all the solutions, with rare exception, are rejected, it is apparent that this game must serve some ulterior purpose. The 'gimmick' in 'Why Don't You, Yes But' is that it is not played for its ostensible purpose (an Adult quest for information or solutions) but to reassure and gratify the Child. A bare transcript may sound Adult, but in living tissue it can he observed that the one who is 'it' presents herself as a Child inadequate to meet the situation; whereupon the others become transformed into sage Parents anxious to dispense their wisdom for the benefit of the helpless one. This is exactly what 'it' wants, since her object is to confound these Parents one after another.

(This is a latter-day version of 'Mine's Better Than Yours', which denies the real conviction, You Are Better Than I.) As the game ends, all those who offered advice are dejected, having failed in helping 'it', and 'it' has proved the point that her problem really is insoluble, which makes it possible for her to indulge her Child in a new game of 'Ain't It Awful'. That's the way it is and that's the way I am (and therefore I don't have to do anything about it, for, as we have just seen, nothing can be done).

Berne describes about three dozen games in Games People Play. His games titles are colloquial, and most of them, with semantic precision, put the finger on the central characteristic of the game, as: 'Ain't It Awful'; 'If It Weren't for You, I Could'; 'Let's You and Him Fight'; and 'Now I've Got You, You Son of a Bitch'. Because the titles are colloquial, they frequently bring a laugh. The fact is games are not funny. They are defences to protect individuals from greater or lesser degrees of pain growing from the not ok position. The popularity of Berne's game book has given rise in many sophisticated circles to a new pastime of game calling. 

The concept of games can be a useful therapeutic tool when used in combination with a prior applied understanding of P-A-C; but in the absence of such insight the game concept, particularly game calling, can simply be another way to be hostile. People with an understanding of P-A-C can use an academic discussion of games by applying it to themselves; but to be 'called' on a game by another person, in the absence of insight or true concern, most often produces anger. It is my firm belief from long observation of this phenomenon that game analysis must always be secondary to Structural and Transactional Analysis. Knowing what game you are playing does not, ipso facto, make it possible for you to change. There is danger in stripping away a defence without first helping a person to understand the position - and the situation in childhood in which it was established - which has made this defence necessary. Another way of stating this is that if only one hour were available to help someone, the method of choice would be a concise teaching of the meaning of P-A-C and the phenomenon of the transaction. This procedure, I believe, holds more promise for change in short-term treatment than game analysis. 

Summarily, we see games as time-structuring devices which, like withdrawal, rituals, activities, and pastimes, keep people apart. What then can we do with time in a way which does not keep us apart? George Sarton observed: 'I believe one can divide men into two principal categories: those who suffer the tormenting desire for unity and those who do not. Between these two kinds an abyss - the "unitary" is the troubled; the other is the peaceful.' 

For many thousands of years man's existence has been structured preponderantly by withdrawal, ritual, pastimes, activities, and games. Scepticism about this assertion could perhaps best be met by a reminder of the persistent recurrence throughout history of war, the grimmest game of all. The majority of men have helplessly accepted these patterns as human nature, the inevitable course of events, the symptoms of history repeating itself. There has been a certain peace in a resignation of this sort. But, as Sarton suggests, the truly troubled people of history have been those who have refused to resign themselves to the inevitability of apartness and who have been driven on by a tormenting desire for unity. The central dynamic of philosophy has been the impulse to connect. The hope has always been there, but it has not overcome the intrinsic fear of being close, of losing oneself in another, of partaking in the last of our structuring options, intimacy. A relationship of intimacy between two people may be thought of as existing independent of the first five ways of time structuring: withdrawal, pastimes, activities, rituals, and games. It is based on the acceptance by both people of the I'm ok - you're ok position. It rests, literally, in an accepting love where defensive time structuring is made unnecessary. Giving and sharing are spontaneous expressions of joy rather than responses to socially programmed rituals. Intimacy is a game-free relationship, since goals are not ulterior. Intimacy is made possible in a situation where the absence of fear makes possible thefullness of perception, where beauty can be seen apart from utility, where possessiveness is made unnecessary by the reality of possession. 

It is a relationship in which the Adult in both persons is in charge and allows for the emergence of the Natural Child. In this regard the Child may be thought of as having two natures: the Natural Child (creative, spontaneous, curious, aware, free of fear) and the Adaptive Child (adapted to the original civilizing demands of the Parent). The emancipation of the Adult can enable the Natural Child to emerge once more. The Adult can identify the demands of the Parent for what they are -archaic - and give permission to the Natural Child to emerge again, unafraid of the early civilizing process, which turned off not only his aggressive antisocial behaviour but his joy and creativity as well. This is the truth that makes him free - free to be aware again and free to hear and feel and see in his own way. This is a part of the phenomenon of intimacy. Thus the gift of a handful of primroses may more readily be a spontaneous expression of love and joy than the expensive perfume from I. Magnin on the socially important anniversary date. The forgotten anniversary date is not a catastrophe for the intimate husband and wife, but it very often is for those whose relationship exists by virtue of ritual. 

The question is frequently asked: Are withdrawal, pastimes, rituals, activities, and games always bad in a relationship? It is safe to say that games nearly always are destructive, inasmuch as their dynamic is ulterior, and the ulterior quality is the antithesis of intimacy. The first four are not necessarily destructive unless they become a predominant form of time structuring. Withdrawal can be a relaxed, restorative form of solitary contemplation. Pastimes can be a pleasant way of idling the social motor. Rituals can be fun - birthday parties, holiday tradition, running to meet Dad when he's home from work - in that they repeat again and again joyous moments which can be anticipated, counted on, and remembered. Activities, which include work, not only are necessities of life but are rewarding in and of themselves, as they allow for mastery, excellence, and craftsmanship and the expression of a great variety of skills and talents. However, if there is discomfort in a relationship between two people when these modes of time structuring cease, it is safe to say there is little intimacy. Some couples programme their entire time together with frantic activity. The activity itself is not destructive unless the compulsion to keep busy is one and the same as the compulsion to keep apart. 

The question now arises: If we strip ourselves of the first five ways of time structuring, do we automatically have intimacy? Or do we have nothing? There seems to be no simple way to define intimacy, yet it is possible to point to those conditions which are most favourable for its appearance: the absence of games, the emancipation of the Adult, and the commitment to the position I'm ok-you're ok. It is through the emancipated Adult that we can reach out to the vast areas of knowledge about our universe and about each other, explore the depths of philosophy and religion, perceive what is new, unrefracted by the old, and perhaps find answers, one at a time, to the great perplexity, 'What's the good of it all?' An elaboration of this idea will follow in Chapter 12.

CHAPTER 8: P-A-C and Marriage 

A friend of mine tells the following story about something that happened when he was a little boy. At the end of a meal his mother announced to the brothers and sisters, who numbered five, that dessert would be the remainder of a batch of her special home-made oatmeal cookies, whereupon she procured the cookie jar and set it on the table. There followed a noisy scramble by the children to get into the jar, with the littlest brother, age four, last, as usual. When he got to the jar he found only one cookie left, and it had a piece missing, whereupon he grabbed it and tearfully threw it to the floor in a rage of despair, crying, 'My cookie is all broke!'

It is the nature of the Child to mistake disappointment for disaster, to destroy the whole cookie because a piece is missing or because it isn't as big, as perfect, or as tasty as someone else's cookie. In his family the anecdote lived as a standard retort to further complaints, 'What's the matter, your cookie broke?'

This is what happens when marriages break. The Child takes over in one or both partners, and the whole marriage is shattered when imperfections begin to appear.

It has long been recognized that the best marriages grow when both partners have similar backgrounds and similar reality interests. 
One of the most helpful ways to examine similarities and dissimilarities is the use of Transactional Analysis in premarital counselling to construct a personality diagram of the couple contemplating marriage. 

The aim is to expose not just the obvious similarities or dissimilarities but to undertake a more thorough inquiry of what is in the Parent, Adult, and Child of each partner. A couple who enters into such an inquiry might be said to have already a lot in their favour, inasmuch as they take marriage seriously enough to take a long look before they leap. However, one of the partners, having serious doubt about the soundness of the alliance, may undertake such an inquiry on his own.

First we compare the Parent of each.

We then undertook an inquiry into the strength of the Adult in each and an assessment of their reality interests.

We then turned to an examination of the Child in each.

The Establishment of Goals 
A ship with no destination drifts and is carried along by the prevailing tides, now up, now down, groaning and creaking in the high seas, tranquil and lovely in the calm. It does exactly as the sea does. Many marriages are like this. They stay afloat but they have no direction. The priority input in their decision making is, What are other people doing? They conform to their social circle in attire, housing, raising children, values, andthinking. 'As long as others are doing it, it must be OK,' is their standard of what to do. If 'everyone' is buying a certain kind of luxury automobile, they also will buy one, even if their hire-purchase commitments already constitute a library of monthly bad news. They have not built their own set of independent values concerned with their own particular realities and therefore frequently end up disillusioned and in debt.

Only the Adult can say 'no' to the Child's clamouring for something bigger, better, and more in order to feel more ok. Only the Adult can ask the question, If four pairs of shoes make you happy, will ten pairs make you happier? The rule is that each increment of material possessions brings less joy than the one that immediately preceded it. If one could quantify joy, it is likely that a new pair of shoes brings more happiness to a child than a new car brings to a grown man. Also, the first car brings more joy than the second, and the second more than the third. H.L. Mencken said, 'A man always remembers his first love. After that he begins to bunch them.' The Child in us needs bunches - as on Christmas morning: surrounded with gifts the child cries, 'Is that all?' A little boy was asked on a children's television programme what he got for Christmas. 'I don't know,' he said, distressed, 'there was too many.' 

An Adult examination of a family's realities can weigh whether or not the acquisition of a certain possession will be worth (in terms of joy) the mortgage, the department store bill, or the diversion of the money from something else. The Adult can also give in to the Child's need to collect bunches of possessions by taking up a hobby such as collecting stamps, coins, rare books, model railroad equipment, bottles, or rocks. The Adult can determine whether the expenditure for these collections is realistic. When it is, the 'bunching' is fun and harmless. If it is bankrupting the family, however (eg, collecting villas, sports cars, and original Picassos), the Adult may have to say 'no' to the Child's fun. Decisions regarding hobbies, possessions, where to live, and what to buy must be made according to a set of values and realistic considerations unique to the marriage. Agreement about these decisions is extremely difficult if goals for the marriage have not been established. A couple in treatment may learn to see the difference between Parent, Adult, and Child, but they are still on the same social sea, and if they do not chart a course, they will, despite all their insights, continue to follow the old ups and downs and fun and games. It takes more than knowing something to muster the power to cut through the social currents. It takes the establishment of and embarking upon a new course in the direction of goals arrived at by the Adult. Persons either set a new course or they fall back into the same patterns of drift. It does not matter how many charts they have. This is where the considerations of moral values, of ethics and religion, become important to the course of a marriage. A man and wife must undertake some fundamental inquiries about what they consider important in order to chart their course. Will Durant views the fundamental problem of ethics in the form of the question, 'Is it better to be good or to be strong?' {6} This question can be asked in many ways in the context of the marriage. Is it better to be kind or to be rich? Is it better to spend time with the family or to spend time in civic activities? Is it better to encourage your children to 'take it on the chin' or to 'hit back'? Is it better to live big today or hoard every penny in the bank for tomorrow? Is it better to be known as a thoughtful neighbour or to be known as a civic leader?

These are questions which can lead to hopeless forensic entanglements unless they are asked by the Adult, for they are difficult even then. It is not enough to know what opinions the Parent in each partner contains in answer to these questions. It is not enough to know the Child needs the feelings of each. If the Parent or Child data is in disagreement, there must be some ethical standard accepted by both, which can give direction to the course of the marriage and value to all decisions that must be made. It has been said that 'love is not a gazing at each other, but a looking outward together, in the same direction'. The Parent and Child in each partner may lead backward to great divergence. Only through the Adult is convergence possible. Yet the goal 'out there' cannot be established without moral and ethical considerations. One of my frequent questions to a couple in an impasse over 'what to do now' is: 'What is the loving thing to do?' 

This is the reaching beyond scientific evaluation to the possibility of the evolution of something better than what has been before. What is 'being loving'? What is love? What kinds of words are 'should' and 'ought'? These questions are considered in depth in Chapter 12, 'P-A-C and Moral Values'.

CHAPTER 9: P-A-C and Children 

The best way to help children is to help parents. If parents do not like what their children do, it is not the children alone who must change. If Johnnie is a problem, he is not going to improve by being taken from expert to expert, unless something is done about the situation at home. This chapter is written to help parents help children. 'Experts' cannot do the job parents can.

This chapter has following subtopics that you can refer for more information on parenting and child rearing.

- Where to Start
- The School-Age Child
- Preadolescents in Treatment
- The Adopted Child
- The Battered Child
- Teaching P-A-C to the Retarded

Summarily, we may say that the solution to the problems of all children, regardless of their situation, is the same solution that applies to the problems of grownups. We must begin with the realization that we cannot change the past. We must start where we are. We can only separate the past from the present by using the Adult, which can learn to identify the recordings of the Child with its archaic fears and the recordings of the Parent with its disturbing replay of a past reality. Parents who have learned to do this through their understanding and application of P-A-C will find themselves able to help their children differentiate between life as they observed it or were taught it (Parent), life as they felt it (Child), and life as it really is and life as it can be (Adult). They will find that this same procedure will be of the greatest value in the period of change that lies ahead, the years of adolescence, which we examine in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 10: P-A-C and Adolescents 

One day a sixteen-year-old member of one of my adolescent groups reported the following incident: 'I was standing on the street corner and the light was red. My Parent said, "Don't cross", my Child said, "Go ahead anyway", and while I was debating what to do the light turned green.'

The years of adolescence are like this. Teenagers are confronted with big and little decisions. Yet, often they seem to have to wait for circumstances to make their decisions for them, because they are not really free to decide for themselves. Their brain is nearing its prime development. Their body is mature. But legally and economically they are dependent, and their attempts at emancipated action are frequently undercut by the realization that they can't really make their own decisions anyway, so what's the use of making good decisions. They feel they may as well drift along through adolescence and wait for the light to turn green. The Adult does not develop under these circumstances. Suddenly when they are legally emancipated they feel adrift, they don't know what they want to do, and many of them pass time hoping something will happen, someone will come along, somehow something will turn them on. Yet, at this point, one-fourth of their life has passed.

Because of external and internal pressures the transactions of the teenager frequently fall back into the old Child-Parent patterns. In adolescence the feelings of the Child replay in greatly amplified form as the hormones turn on and as the adolescent turns away from his parents as the principal source of stroking to his own age group for stroking of a new kind. The not ok tapes come on with increasing frequency, but the coping techniques learned in childhood to minimize the not ok now can be dangerous. The seductive cuteness of the little girl must now be brought under control to guard against new developments, both external and internal. The 'mine is better' boisterousness of the little boy must be modified in the name of manners as the adolescent learns the painful process of self-control. Communication has to be relearned and revised. The adolescent is pushed out on the stage with a new manuscript in his hands, which he has never read, and the lines don't come off too well at first. He is like a plane shooting ahead at full speed, between converging cloud layers. Below, and rising fast, are the boiling clouds of sexual urges and the rebellious struggling for independence; above are the hovering and lowering clouds of parental anxiety and disapproval. He feels things are closing in, and he desperately looks for an opening.

The central difficulty is that he and his parents often are still working under the terms of the old Parent-Child contract. As much as he sees himself as a grownup, he still feels like a child. Parents may suggest what they believe to be a perfectly reasonable course of action and are frustrated, baffled, and hurt over his angry rebuttal, hooking their Child. Often the problem is that he mistakes his external parents for his internal Parent. He cannot hear the mother and father of his teenage years because the old tapes play back the mother and father of the three-year-old, with all the hand slapping, horrified looks, and thunderous 'no's' of those early years. The external stimulus hits the Parent, Adult, and Child of the teenager simultaneously. The question is, Which one will handle the transaction? Throughout childhood the Child is continually activated, even though there are, depending on the individual, a vast number of Adult transactions. The Child is extremely vulnerable, or 'hookable', in this emotionally charged time of life. Whereas the Child responses of the little person could quickly be rationalized as 'childish', those same responses now become threatening and disintegrating to the parents. The door slamming of the five-year-old can be rather terrifying if the slammer is a six-foot-tall fifteen-yearold. The sulk of the little girl is seen as ugly and infuriating in the teenager. What may have been seen in the little boy as a habit of 'making up stories' appears in the adolescent under the heading of 'lies'. The early recordings are the same. Many of the coping techniques of the Child continue in the adolescent years. Bertrand Russell writes of this: So many things were forbidden me that I acquired the habit of deceit, in which I persisted up to the age of twenty-one. It became second nature to me to think that whatever I was doing had better be kept to myself, and I have never quite overcome the impulse to hide what I am reading when anybody comes into the room. It is only by a certain effort of the will that I can overcome this impulse.

This 'effort of the will' is the Adult. The Adult can identify the old recordings. It can also recognize the inappropriateness and ineffectiveness of their replay in adolescence. The central need, then, is to keep the Adult in control of this adult-size body so that the realities in the present can gain priority over the realities of the past.

What constitutes the central work of treatment is the freeing up of the Adult in both the teenager and his parents in order that an Adult-Adult contract may be drawn. Without an emancipated Adult, life is an unbearable double bind for both. The problem of the adolescent is that inside he has a strong troublemaking Parent, and he is forced to live in the setting in which that Parent developed, where the Parent within is reinforced by the parents without. As parents become threatened and fearful, they find themselves turning more and more frequently to their own Parent for Grandparent solutions, which can be as inadequate as trying to make a jet plane run with hay. Both the parents and the teenager are so threatened that the Adult is decommissioned in both. The teenager acts out Child feelings and the parents, fearful of letting their feelings take over, most often turn the transaction over to the Parent (grandmother and grandfather). No common reality exists without an Adult-Adult contract, and communication ceases.

...
Chapter ends with the para:

Through the troubling years of adolescence, when young people sometimes seem to turn a deaf ear to the words of their anxious parents, there nevertheless is a hunger to hear and experience reassurances of Mum and Dad's love and concern. The longing for this reassurance was stated in a compelling way recently by my five-year-old daughter, Gretchen. When Mother arrived on the scene, Gretchen was maintaining a precarious balance as she walked along the narrow edge of a brick flower enclosure. Mother said, 'You be careful or you'll fall down into those flowers.' Gretchen said, 'Do you care about the flowers or about me?' The 'five-year-old' in the adolescent asks the same question, only he does not state it in so many words. Parents who are sensitive to this unstated plea and who, through acts of love, concern, restraint, and respect, demonstrate repeatedly It Is You We Care About will find the years of adolescence can produce rewards and surprises far beyond their expectations. 

CHAPTER 11: When Is Treatment Necessary?

If a person sprains an ankle he can hobble along and eventually the ankle will get well. He still has some use of it while he hobbles. If he breaks a leg he needs support for. it while the bone is healing. One problem is an impairment. The other is crippling. Medical attention would have been helpful in the first case; it was imperative in the second. We can view the need for treatment of emotional problems in somewhat the same way. A person's Adult may be impaired by old recordings from the past, but he may manage to get over difficulties or through problems without treatment. Treatment could make it easier. But he manages. For some people, however, the Adult is impaired to the point where they cannot function. They are crippled by repetitious failure or immobilized by guilt. Frequently there are physical symptoms. Mothers cannot function as mothers, workers cannot do their job, children give up at school, or some persons' behaviour becomes inappropriate to the point where they break the law. For these people treatment is required; yet everyone could benefit from it.

All persons can become Transactional Analysts. Treatment simply speeds the process. Treatment with Transactional Analysis is essentially a learning experience through which an individual discovers how to sort out the data that goes into his decisions. There is no magic applied by an omnipotent expert. The therapist uses words to convey what he knows and uses in his own transactions to the person who comes into treatment, so he can know and use the same technique. One of my psychiatrist friends said, 'One of the best Transactional Analysts I know is a truck driver.' The goal is to make every person in treatment an expert in analysing his own transactions.

Many forms of psychiatric treatment are quite different. The public image is assuredly different. For this reason the decision to go to a psychiatrist generally is not made without a great deal of internal debate. Many patients experience unpleasant feelings over the thought of exposing themselves to someone, even though that someone is an 'expert' or professional helper, such as a psychiatrist. As the patient opens the door to the office for the first time, he frequently feels alone, fearful, and ashamed over the implication of failure.

Even if the Adult in the individual gets him to the psychiatrist's office, the Child soon takes over and a Parent-Child situation develops. The patient's Child expresses feelings and anticipates a relationship with the psychiatrist's Parent in the transactions of the first hour. The psychoanalysts refer to this as transference - that is, the situation provokes a transfer of feelings and related behaviour from the past, when the patient was a child, into the present, in which the Child in the patient responds as it once did to the authority of the parent. This unique transaction is fairly common in life, and there are elements of it present in any contact with authority, as, for instance, when one is stopped by a highway patrolman. Psychoanalysts maintain that the patient has improved when he has succeeded in avoiding this kind of transfer of feelings from childhood. At this point in analysis, the patient does not have to pick and choose what he is going to reveal about himself to his analyst. In other words, the patient no longer must be afraid of the analyst's Parent. This is referred to in traditional psychoanalysis as overcoming resistance.

In Transactional Analysis we bypass much of the retarding effects of transference and resistance by the mutually participant format and content of P-A-C. The patient soon finds he is relating on equal terms to another human being to whom he has come for help, a human being interested in advancing the patient's knowledge of himself at once so that, as quickly as possible, he can become his own analyst. If the patient is hampered by transference and resistance feelings, these are handled directly with him in the initial hour after he has become acquainted with Parent, Adult, and Child.

This chapter has following subtopics that you can refer for more specific information.

- Diagnosis
- Why Group Treatment?

CHAPTER 12: P-A-C and Moral Values

% You tell your six-year-old son to go back out there and punch that kid in the nose the 'way he punched you!' Why?

% You march in a demonstration protesting the Vietnam war. Why?

% You give one-tenth of your income to your church. Why?

Every day most people make decisions of this kind. They are all moral decisions, or decisions of right and wrong. Where does the data which goes into these decisions come from? From the Parent, Adult, and Child. After you have examined all of your own Parent data, kept some and rejected some, what do you do if you do not feel you have the necessary guides for decision making? Abdicate? Once you have an emancipated Adult, what do you do with it? On moral questions, can you figure things out for yourself - or do you have to go ask an 'authority'? Can we all be moralists? Or is that for very smart and wise people?

If we don't seem to be doing very well, where can we go for new data? Where are we deficient? What kinds of reality can the Adult examine?Reality is our most important treatment tool. Reality, understood through the study of history and the observation of man, is also the tool by which we construct a valid ethical system. We are not reasonable, however, if we assume that the only reality about man is that within our own personal experience or comprehension. Reality, for some people, is broader than it is for others, because they have looked more, lived more, read more, experienced more, and thought more. Or their reality simply is different from someone else's reality.

Our need for direction in the journey through life is similar to the navigational problem of an airplane pilot. Pilots in the early days of aviation flew 'by the seat of their pants' and relied on their vision, comparing what they saw below them - rivers, inlets, railroad tracks, and towns - with the maps they had spread before them. This, of course, was unreliable when vision was obstructed, even for a short time. Therefore, navigational aids were devised to 'take a fix' on two points. (The two points are special radio stations. Each emits a signal informing him of the compass radial his plane is on in relation to the station.) He draws the two radials as lines on his map, and where the two lines cross is where he is. If he took a fix in only one direction he could not find his location. He might discover he was on the equator. But where on the equator? He would have to 'look' in another direction for the data to answer that question.

I feel that many psychiatrists and psychologists have been guilty of 'one fix' treatment in that they have devoted all their time to looking at only one reality, the past history of the patient - what he did - and largely ignored an examination of the types of reality that might help him understand what he should do.

We are hopelessly impoverished if we believe that the only realities that concern our mental health have to do with a state of affairs wherein 'I am So and So because when I was three years old Mother hit Father with my potty seat on Christmas Eve in Cincinnati.' Archaeology of this kind reminds me of H. Allen Smith's story about the little girl who wrote a thankyou note to her. grandmother for giving her a book about penguins for Christmas: 'Dear Grandmother, Thank you very much for the nice book you sent me for Christmas. This book gives me more information about penguins than I care to have.' We can spend a lifetime digging through the bones of past experience, as if this were the only place reality existed, and completely ignore other compelling realities. One such reality is the need for and existence of a system of moral values.

The chapter has following subtopics that you can refer to for specifics:
- What Is a Rational Code of Morality?
- Is Agreement on Moral Values Possible?
- The Worth of Persons
- 'I Am Important, You Are Important'
- 'It Won't Work!'
- The Original Game Is the Original Sin
- P-A-C and Religion
- What Is a Religious Experience?
- How Does a Religious Experience Feel?
- People in Perspective
- What Is Reality Therapy?

The subtopic "People in Perspective" has these interesting lines:
In a sermon I heard some time ago the following statistics were presented:

If the 3 billion people of the world could be represented in a community of one hundred:

Six would be United States citizens; ninety-four would be citizens of other countries.

Six would own one-half of the money in the world; ninety-four would share the other half; of the ninety-four, twenty would own virtually all of the remaining half.

Six would have 15 times more material possessions than the other ninety-four put together.

Six have 72 per cent more than the average daily food requirement; two-thirds of the ninety-four would have below-minimum food standards, and many of them would be on a starvation diet.

The life span of six would be seventy years. The life span of ninety-four would be thirtynine years.

Of the ninety-four, thirty-three would come from countries where the Christian faith is taught. Of the thirty-three, twenty-four would be Catholic and nine would be Protestant.

Less than one-half of the ninety-four would have heard the name of Christ, but the majority of the ninety-four would know of Lenin.

Among the ninety-four there would be three communist documents which outsell the Bible.

By the year 2000 one out of every two persons will be Chinese.

We are deluded if we continue to make sweeping statements about God and about man without continually keeping before us the facts of life: the long history of the development of man, and the present-day diversity of human thought. This may be frightening data to some people. 'Hopeless!' they may cry. I rather like Teilhard's view. When asked once what made him happy, he said: I'm happy because the world is round.'

The borders, corners, or angles are not physical, but psychological. If we remove the psychological fences erected to protect the not ok Child existent in every person, there are no barriers to prevent our living together in peace.

...

The chapter ends with the lines:

In Transactional Analysis we have these words. The patient begins by activating his Child, and viewing the therapist as Parent. In the initial hour, Parent, Adult, and Child are defined, and these words are then used to define the contract, or mutual expectations from treatment. The therapist is there to teach and the patient is there to learn. The contract is Adult-Adult. If the patient is asked, 'What happened?" he can tell what happened. He has learned to identify his own Parent, Adult, and Child. He has learned to analyse his transactions. He has acquired a tool to free up and strengthen his Adult, and only this Adult can be responsible.

I agree wholeheartedly with Glasser's central focus of responsibility, just as I agree with the ideal of the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. The reality that concerns me, however, is why these admonitions do not routinely produce responsible persons. To simply restate them in new ways is not going to do the job.

We cannot produce responsible persons until we help them uncover the I'm not ok - you're ok position which underlies the complicated and destructive games they play. Once we understand positions and games, freedom of response begins to emerge as a real possibility. As long as people are bound by the past, they are not free to respond to the needs and aspirations of others in the present; and 'to say that we are free', says Will Durant, 'is merely to mean that we know what we are doing'.

CHAPTER 13: Social Implications of P-A-C 

The chapter has following subtopics that one can refer to for specifics:
- How Irrational Are We Capable of Being?
- Is This Younger Generation Different?
- Analysing International Transactions
- Winners and Losers

From the subtopic: How Irrational Are We Capable of Being? 

Stanley Milgram's research at Yale begins to put a scientific foundation beneath Cook's deductions around obedience. Milgram carried out a series of psychological experiments in obedience. He took a sample cross-section of the adult (aged twenty to fifty) male population of Bridgeport, Connecticut, from blue-collar workers through professionals. The experiment was to determine how much punishment one person would inflict on another when so ordered, but it was deceptively presented as a scientific study by 'Bridgeport Research Associates' on learning techniques. The subjects were selected at random, paid four and a half dollars for their time.

A learner was strapped into an 'electric chair' after the subject (a teacher) had experienced a sample shock of 45 volts to convince him of the authenticity of the instrument. Then from an adjoining rthe subject (teacher) delivered a shock of increasing intensity for each wrong answer. Actually the learner was not shocked but his responses were a standardized tape recording of murmurs, gasps, pleas, and shrieks matched to the ascending voltage. The answers were prearranged by the experimenter, so the only limiting factor preventing the teacher from delivering the maximum intensity of the shock machine was his compassion for a human being in pain. The conflict for the teacher (Mr Everyman) was obedience to the authoritative system versus his belief that he should not hurt another person.  

What percentage of the so-called teachers went the full route and gave the maximum shock? But before you guess, listen to the voice of Mr Everyman at the switch:

150 volts delivered: 'You want me to keep going?' (command)

165 volts delivered: That guy is hollering in there. There's a lot of them here. He's liable to have a heart condition. You want me to go on?' (command)

180 volts delivered: "He can't stand it I'm not going to kill that man in there! You hear him hollering? He's hollering. He can't stand it. What if something happened to him? You know what I mean? I mean, I refuse to take the responsibility.' (the experimenter Accepts The Responsibility) 'All right.'

195 volts, 210, 225, 240, and so on.

The subject (teacher) unfailingly obeyed the experimenter. What percentage of the almost one thousand teachers went the whole route? Estimate before you let your eyes stray ahead. A group of forty psychiatrists who studied the project predicted one-tenth of one per cent. In the actual experiment, sixty-two per cent obeyed the experimenter's commands fully. What did you guess?

Milgram concluded: 'With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who in everyday life are responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter's definition of the situation into performing harsh acts. The results, as seen and felt in the laboratory, are to this author disturbing. They raise the possibility that human nature, or more specifically, the kind of character produced in American democratic society, cannot be counted on to insulate its citizens from brutality and inhumane treatment when at the direction of a malevolent authority.'

The implications of this experiment are indeed frightening if we view the results as having only to do with something irredeemable in human nature. However, with Transactional Analysis we can talk about the experiment in a different way. We can say that 62 percent of the subjects did not have a freed-up Adult with which to examine the authority in the Parent of the experimenters. Undoubtedly one unexamined assumption was: Whatever experiments are necessary for research are good. This is perhaps the same assumption that helped 'reputable' scientists participate in the laboratory atrocities in Nazi Germany.

The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy) - Highlights

CHARACTERS 
# Estha

Estha, which is short for Esthappen Yako, is Rahel's twin brother. He is a serious, intelligent, and somewhat nervous child who wears "beige and pointy shoes" and has an "Elvis puff". His experience of the circumstances surrounding Sophie's visit is somewhat more traumatic than Rahel's, beginning when he is sexually abused by a man at a theater. The narrator emphasizes that Estha's "Two Thoughts" in the pickle factory, stemming from this experience—that "Anything can happen to Anyone" and that "It's best to be prepared"—are critical in leading to his cousin's death.

Estha is the twin chosen by Baby Kochamma, because he is more "practical" and "responsible", to go into Velutha's cell at the end of the book and condemn him as his and Rahel's abductor. This trauma, in addition to the trauma of being shipped (or "Returned") to Calcutta to live with his father, contributes to Estha's becoming mute at some point in his childhood. He never goes to college and acquires a number of habits, such as wandering on very long walks and obsessively cleaning his clothes. He is so close to his sister that the narrator describes them as one person, despite having been separated for most of their lives. He is repeatedly referred to as "Silent".

# Rahel

Rahel is the partial narrator of the story, and is Estha's younger sister by 18 minutes. As a girl of seven, her hair sits "on top of her head like a fountain" in a "Love-in-Tokyo" band, and she often wears red-tinted plastic sunglasses with yellow rims. An intelligent and straightforward person who has never felt socially comfortable, she is impulsive and wild, and it is implied that everyone but Velutha treats her as somehow lesser than her brother. In later life, she becomes something of a drifter; several times, the narrator refers to her "Emptiness". After the tragedy that forms the core of the story, she remains with her mother, later training as an architectural draftsman and engaging in a failed relationship with an American, elements of which parallel the author's own life story.

# Ammu

Ammu is Rahel's and Estha's mother. She married their father (referred to as Baba) only to get away from her family. He was an alcoholic, and she divorced him when he started to be violent toward her and her children. She went back to Ayemenem, where people avoided her on the days when the radio played "her music" and she got a wild look in her eyes. When the twins are seven, she has an affair with Velutha. This relationship is one of the cataclysmic events in the novel. She is a strict mother, and her children worry about losing her love.

# Velutha

Velutha is a Paravan, an Untouchable, who is exceptionally smart and works as a carpenter at the Ipe family's pickle factory. His name means white in Malayalam, because he is so dark. He returns to Ayemenem to help his father, Vellya Paapen, take care of his brother, who was paralyzed in an accident. He is an active member of the local Communist movement. Velutha is extremely kind to the twins, and has an affair with Ammu for which he is brutally punished.

# Chacko

Chacko is Estha's and Rahel's maternal uncle. He is four years elder to Ammu. He meets Margaret in his final year at Oxford and marries her afterward. They have a daughter, Sophie, whose death in Ayemenem is central to the story.

# Baby Kochamma

Baby Kochamma is the twins' maternal great aunt. She is of petite build as a young woman but becomes enormously overweight, with "a mole on her neck", by the time of Sophie's death. She maintains an attitude of superiority because of her education as a garden designer in the United States and her burning, unrequited love for an Irish Catholic priest, her relationship with whom is the only meaningful event in her life. Her own emptiness and failure spark bitter spite for her sister's children, further driven by her prudish code of conventional values. Her spite ultimately condemns the twins, the lovers, and herself to a lifetime of misery.

...

Navomi Ipe Kochamma, better known by her nickname Baby Kochamma, is an antagonist within the novel. She is the vindictive great aunt of the child protagonists Estha and Rahel. (Ref: https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Baby_Kochamma)

# Mammachi

Mammachi is Chacko and Ammu's mother and Estha and Rahel's grandmother. She's nearly blind and plays a mean violin. She founded Paradise Pickles and Preserves and built it into a successful business before turning it over to Chacko, who transformed it into, um, a less successful business. Mammachi is sort of your typical cranky old-lady figure – very stubborn and set in her beliefs and habits. Her ideas of how the world works are pretty much set in stone. She is prejudiced against the lower classes, always wants to make herself look important, and hates Margaret Kochamma with a passion.

# Pappachi

Pappachi is Estha and Rahel's grandfather, Ammu's father. He was once an Imperial Entomologist, which is a frou-frou way of saying that he studied bugs for the government. His biggest failure in life came from his biggest triumph: he discovered a rare breed of moth, but he didn't get credit or even naming rights for his discovery. Pappachi was an angry, jealous man who beat Mammachi regularly. He dies before the action of the novel really kicks off, so he's referred to mostly as a memory.

# Kochu Maria
Kochu Maria is Mammachi and Baby Kochamma's housekeeper. She is short and ugly. She doesn't speak English, so whenever the twins speak English around her, she thinks they're making fun of her (and, well, sometimes they are). (Ref 2)

# Comrade Pillai
Comrade K.N.M. Pillai is the leader of the Communist Party in Ayemenem. He runs the local printing press, and one of his big responsibilities is to print the labels for Paradise Pickles and Preserves. He has big political ambitions, so even though he gets a lot of business from Chacko for printing his labels, he tries to make Chacko look like a villain to the factory workers. He figures that this way, he can rustle up their political support. (Ref 3)

PLOT 

The story is set in Ayemenem, now part of Kottayam district in Kerala, India. The temporal setting shifts back and forth between 1969, when fraternal twins Rahel (girl) and Esthappen (boy) are seven years old, and 1993, when the twins are reunited.

Ammu Ipe is desperate to escape her ill-tempered father, known as Pappachi, and her bitter, long-suffering mother, known as Mammachi. She persuades her parents to let her spend a summer with a distant aunt in Calcutta. To avoid returning to Ayemenem, she marries a man there but later discovers that he is an alcoholic, and he physically abuses her and tries to pimp her to his boss. She gives birth to Rahel and Estha, leaves her husband, and returns to Ayemenem to live with her parents and brother, Chacko. Chacko has returned to India from England after his divorce from an English woman, Margaret, and the subsequent death of Pappachi.

The multi-generational family home in Ayemenem also includes Pappachi's sister, Navomi Ipe, known as Baby Kochamma. As a young girl, Baby Kochamma fell in love with Father Mulligan, a young Irish priest who had come to Ayemenem. To get closer to him, Baby Kochamma converted to Roman Catholicism and joined a convent against her father's wishes. After a few months in the convent, she realized that her vows brought her no closer to the man she loved. Her father eventually rescued her from the convent and sent her to America. Because of her unrequited love for Father Mulligan, Baby Kochamma remained unmarried for the rest of her life, becoming deeply embittered over time. Throughout the book, she delights in the misfortune of others and constantly manipulates events to bring calamity.

The death of Margaret's second husband in a car accident prompts Chacko to invite her and Sophie (Margaret's and Chacko's daughter) to spend Christmas in Ayemenem. En route to the airport to pick up Margaret and Sophie, the family visits a theater. On the way to the theater, they encounter a group of Communist protesters who surround the car and force Baby Kochamma to wave a red flag and chant a Communist slogan, thus humiliating her. Rahel thinks she sees Velutha, a servant who works for the family's pickle factory among the protesters. Later at the theater, Estha is sexually molested by the "Orangedrink Lemondrink Man", a vendor working the snack counter. Estha's experience factors into the tragic events at the heart of the narrative.

Rahel's assertion that she saw Velutha in the Communist mob causes Baby Kochamma to associate Velutha with her humiliation at the protesters' hands, and she begins to harbor enmity toward him. Velutha is a dalit (lower caste in India). Rahel and Estha form an unlikely bond with Velutha and come to love him despite his caste status. It is her children's love for Velutha that causes Ammu to realize her own attraction to him, and eventually, she comes to "love by night the man her children loved by day". Ammu and Velutha begin a short-lived affair that culminates in tragedy for the family.

When her relationship with Velutha is discovered, Ammu is locked in her room and Velutha is banished. In her rage, Ammu blames the twins for her misfortune and calls them "millstones around her neck". Distraught, Rahel and Estha decide to run away. Their cousin, Sophie also joins them. During the night, as they try to reach an abandoned house across the river, their boat capsizes and Sophie drowns. When Margaret and Chacko return from a trip, they see Sophie's body laid out on the sofa.

Baby Kochamma goes to the police and accuses Velutha of being responsible for Sophie's death. A group of policemen hunt Velutha down, savagely beat him for crossing caste lines, and arrest him on the brink of death. The twins, huddling in the abandoned house, witness the horrific scene. Later, when they reveal the truth to the chief of police he is alarmed. He knows that Velutha is a Communist, and is afraid that if word gets out that the arrest and beating were wrongful, it will cause unrest among the local Communists. He threatens to hold Baby Kochamma responsible for falsely accusing Velutha. To save herself, Baby Kochamma tricks Rahel and Estha into believing that the two of them would be implicated as having murdered Sophie out of jealousy and were facing sure imprisonment for them and their Ammu. She thus convinces them to lie to the inspector that Velutha had kidnapped them and had murdered Sophie. Velutha dies of his injuries overnight.

After Sophie's funeral, Ammu goes to the police to tell the truth about her relationship with Velutha. Afraid of being exposed, Baby Kochamma convinces Chacko that Ammu and the twins were responsible for his daughter's death. Chacko kicks Ammu out of the house and forces her to send Estha to live with his father. Estha never sees Ammu again. Ammu dies alone a few years later at the age of 31.

After a turbulent childhood and adolescence in India, Rahel gets married and goes to America. There, she divorces before returning to Ayemenem after years of working dead-end jobs. Rahel and Estha, now 31, are reunited for the first time since they were children. They had been haunted by their guilt and their grief-ridden pasts. It becomes apparent that neither twin ever found another person who understood them in the way they understand each other. Toward the end of the novel, the twins have sex. The novel comes to a close with a nostalgic recounting of Ammu and Velutha's love affair.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_of_Small_Things

WHY SHOULD YOU READ “THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS” BY ARUNDHATI ROY? - LAURA WRIGHT

A few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes and that when they do those few dozen hours like the salvaged remains of a burned clock must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. This is the premise of Arundhati Roy's 1997 novel The God of small things set in the town in Kerala, India called Ayemenem. The story revolves around fraternal twins Rahel and Estha who are separated for 23 years after the fateful few dozen hours in which their cousin drowns their mothers illicit affair has revealed and her lover is murdered while the book is set to the point of Rahel and Estha's reunions, the narrative takes place mostly in the past. Reconstructing the details around the tragic events that led to the separation. Roy's rich language and masterful storytelling earned her the prestigious Booker prize for the god of small things. In the novel, she interrogates the culture of her native India, including its social mores and Colonial history. One of our focuses is the caste system, a way of classifying people by hereditary social class that is thousands of years old. By the mid 20th century, the original five casts associated with specific occupations have been divided into some 3,000 sub-casts.

Brahmins / Priestly / Academic class
Kshatriyas / Rulers / Administrators / Warriors
Vaishyas / Artisans / Tradesmenm / Farmers / Merchants
Shudras / Servants / Manual laborers
Dalits / Street cleaners / Untouchables

Though the caste system was constitutionally abolished in 1950, it continued to shape social life in India routinely marginalizing people of lower castes. In the novel Rahel and Estha have a close relationship with the Velutha a worker in their family's Pickle Factory and member of the so-called Untouchable caste. When the Velutha and the twins mother Ammu embark on an affair, they violate what Roy describes as the love laws forbidding intimacy between different castes. Roy warns that the tragic consequences of their relationship would lurk forever in ordinary things like coat hangers, the tar on roads and the absence of words. Roy's writing makes constant use of these ordinary things bringing lush detail to even the most tragic moments. The book opens at the funeral of the twins half-British cousin Sophie after her drowning. As the family mourns, lilies curl and crisp in the hot Church, a baby bat crawls up a funeral. Sorry tears drip from a chin like raindrops from a roof. The novel forays into the past to explore the characters' struggles to operate in a world where they don't quite fit alongside their nation's political turmoil. Ammu struggles not to lash out at her beloved children when she feels particularly trapped in her parents small town home when neighbors judge and shun her for being divorced. The Velutha meanwhile balances his affair with Ammu and friendship with the twins not only with his employment to their family, but also with his membership to a budding communist counter-movement to Indira Gandhi's Green Revolution. In the 1960s, the misleadingly named Green Revolution introduced chemical fertilizers and pesticides and the damming of rivers to India. While these policies produced high yield crops that staved off famine, they also forced people from lower castes off their land and caused widespread environmental damage. When the twins return to Ayemenem as adults the consequences of the Green Revolution are all around them. The river that was bursting with life in their childhood greets them with a ghastly skull smile with holes where teeth had been and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed. As Roy probes the depth of human experience, she never loses sight of the way her characters are shaped by the time and the place where they live. In the world of the god of small things various kinds Of despair competed for primacy, personal despair could never be desperate enough. Personal turmoil dropped by at the Wayside Shrine of the vast violent circling driving ridiculous insane unfeasible public turmoil of a nation.
 
Ref: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-should-you-read-the-god-of-small-things-by-arundhati-roy-laura-wright

THEMES 

1. Family

The God of Small Things is probably more than anything else a novel about family. It explores the relationship between brother and sister, mother and child, grandparent and grandchild, aunt and niece/nephew, and cousins. It looks at the ways families are forced to stick together and also how they fall apart. Unconditional family love is a major issue on the table here. Sometimes we feel obligated to love our family members. On the other hand, just because you're related to someone doesn't mean you'll love them or that they'll have your back. Just like in real life, family relationships in the novel can be complicated, confusing, and frustrating.

Chew on This
- In The God of Small Things, "family" refers to people obligated to each other because of blood, regardless of whether or not they actually care about one another.

- In The God of Small Things, "family" refers to the people one cares about.

2. Society and class

The characters in The God of Small Things are constantly coming up against the forces of society and class. Indian society was structured for centuries according to very rigid social classes and boundaries, through what is known as the caste system. Even though the novel takes place after the caste system stopped being a legal social policy, its characters still find themselves limited by what is and isn't deemed socially acceptable for them. Social rules dictate who can love whom, which occupations people can adopt, and who is considered to be better than whom. (Sounds a little like an extreme version of high school, doesn't it?)

Chew on This
- The characters of The God of Small Things are ultimately constrained and held back by class boundaries.

- In the end, the characters of The God of Small Things show us that class boundaries are breakable.

3. Versions of reality

Throughout The God of Small Things, we get to see how things look from different characters' points of view – different versions of the same reality. We see Estha and Rahel at two very different points in their lives, 23 years apart. There is a stark difference between their perspectives as 7-year-olds and as 31-year-olds. As kids, we see them learning about the world as they go; as adults, they are trying to make sense of the past.

Chew on This
- Viewing one event from multiple perspectives helps us get at the one true story.

- Viewing one event from multiple perspectives shows us that there is no single "correct" version of things.

4. Memory and the past

Time in The God of Small Things doesn't unfold in a linear way; we don't start at Point A and watch the story progress until we get to Point B. Instead, we move back and forth between 1969 and 1993, with a few other episodes thrown in for flavor. The story is told through a series of memories and flashbacks. From the moment the novel begins, we know what's going to happen, we just don't know how. We start at the end, and the narrator uses the characters' memories to put the pieces together for us. (Check out "Writing Style" for more on this.)

Chew on This
- In The God of Small Things, memories tend to be extremely painful to recall.

- In The God of Small Things, memories of better times help the characters make sense of the troubles they're going through.

5. Guilt and Blame

Guilt and blame are a tricky duo in this book, lurking around every corner. Some really horrible things happen here: Estha is molested; Sophie Mol drowns; a family breaks apart. Even though the narrator sometimes suggests that these things might have been destined to happen, the only way for the characters to make sense of the tragedies they are living through is to find someone to blame. Margaret Kochamma, for instance, finds it easiest to blame Estha for Sophie Mol's death, while Chacko blames Ammu.

Along with blame, guilt is an emotion all too familiar to our characters. Unfortunately, we often see instances of guilt, or shame, where there should be none. For example, Estha feels incredibly guilty after the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man molests him, convinced that he did something wrong.

Chew on This
- Even though it was unintentional, one could argue that Estha and Rahel are directly responsible for Sophie Mol's death.

- There is no one person to blame for what happens to Sophie Mol; her death is a product of many circumstances.

6. Innocence

One of the most interesting aspects of The God of Small Things is how the narrator helps us see and understand the world from a kid's perspective. This ranges from everyday things (like what certain words mean) to the most shocking and horrific events imaginable (like Sophie Mol's death). Usually when we think about innocence, we think about a world of simplicity. When you're innocent, what you don't know can't hurt you – you can be blissfully naïve. This book puts a different spin on innocence – here, it's not about what Estha and Rahel don't know, but rather the way they make sense of what they do know, see, or experience.

Estha and Rahel, both separately and together, lose their innocence throughout the course of the novel. One of the most touching aspects of Estha's loss of innocence – when he is molested, and when he is forced to condemn Velutha – is how he tries to prevent the same thing from happening to Rahel. While both children undergo a loss of innocence through painful experiences, Estha is the more profoundly affected of the two. He watches his world change and tries to prevent his sister from having to share that experience.

Chew on This
- By portraying the twins as cute and innocent, the narrator shows us that they don't fully understand what's happening around them.

- Portraying the twins as cute and innocent helps emphasize how horrible the events happening to them are.

7. Love

"OK," you yawn, "another book with love as a theme. Can't anyone write anything different?" Well, friends, it's true, The God of Small Things is about love. The novel puts it right out there on the table, repeatedly invoking the "Love Laws" that dictate "who should be loved, and how. And how much" (1.209-210). Love and rules are constantly butting heads in the book. Ammu and Velutha's love is forbidden because of their caste (social status) differences. Rahel and Estha's love is expressed physically at the end of the book, resulting in the taboo of incest. Mammachi's feelings toward her son, Chacko, also blur the lines between familial and romantic love. (See "Family" under "Quotes by Theme.") And Baby Kochamma is in love with Father Mulligan, a priest who can never marry. In The God of Small Things, love constantly violates social rules.

Chew on This
- The God of Small Things is about what happens when love is thwarted and not allowed to flourish.

- Love that breaks "The Love Laws" is the only successful love.

8. Fear

In a novel in which so many bad things happen, it's not all that surprising that fear comes to the forefront. It's hard to think of even one character who doesn't demonstrate fear at some point. The thing to keep in mind about fear in The God of Small Things is that it isn't just a reaction to something scary; it's a powerful motivator that pushes characters to act in particular, often dangerous, ways.

Estha's fear of the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man and Rahel's fear that Ammu doesn't love her anymore provoke the twins to run away across the river. Baby Kochamma and Mammachi's fear of social disgrace push them to lock Ammu away and send the police after Velutha. Fear is a mechanism behind many of the major, life-changing moments of the novel, and the result is often more terrifying than the thing that was originally feared.

Chew on This
- In The God of Small Things, fear causes people to act in ways that lead to bad things happening.

- In The God of Small Things, fear is a natural response to bad things that are inevitable.

9. Identity

The question of identity ("Who am I?") is important to all the characters in The God of Small Things, but especially to Estha and Rahel. On one level, they have a very good idea of who they are: they are extensions of one another. When they are together, they are a whole being. Nevertheless, the more Estha and Rahel learn about the world around them, the more we see them taking on alternate identities and imagining themselves as someone else. Ambassador E. Pelvis, Ambassador Stick Insect, and The Airport Fairy are all versions of themselves they identify with in different situations. Part of what makes their reunion in 1993 so important is that for the first time in 23 years they can consider themselves whole again.

Chew on This
- As kids, Estha and Rahel share one identity.

- As kids, Estha and Rahel each have a separate identity that balances the other out.

10. Mortality

Mortality, or death, resonates throughout The God of Small Things. We find out from the very beginning that Sophie Mol is going to die, and our anticipation of and eventual reaction to her death keeps us on edge from the first to the very last page. But Sophie Mol isn't the only person who comes face to face with death; Velutha dies in an incredibly graphic and violent way, and Ammu's death scene is full of anguish and fear. The novel asks us to consider not just the experience of death, but also that of witnessing it.

Chew on This
- Sophie Mol's death has the greatest effect on the rest of Estha's life.

- Velutha's death has the greatest effect on the rest of Estha's life.

Ref: https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/god-of-small-things/themes#versions-of-reality-theme

QUOTES 

1. 
D’you know what happens when you hurt people?’ Ammu said. 'When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.'

2.
“As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts and the Two Thoughts he thought were these:
a) Anything can happen to anyone.
and
b) It is best to be prepared.”

3.
“There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.”

4.
“People always loved best what they identified most with.”

5.
“That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.

And how much.”

6.
“If you are happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count? Estha asked. "Does what count?" "The happiness does it count?". She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff. Because the truth is, that only what counts, counts... "If you eat fish in a dream, does it count?" Does it mean you've eaten fish?”

7.
“Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.”

8.
“Humans are animals of habit.”

9.
“The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunged out at them like a famished beast. Then Rahel's Ammu was fed to it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. They way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, though and I. Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out for Rahel to climb into. Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.

She was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them Double.”

10.
“Rahel’s toy wristwatch had the time painted on it. Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place).”

Ref 1: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/810135-the-god-of-small-things?page=3
Ref 2: https://www.shmoop.com/god-of-small-things/kochu-maria.html
Ref 3: https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/god-of-small-things/comrade-knm-pillai

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) - Highlights

CHARACTERS

# Elizabeth Bennet

The second eldest of the Bennet daughters, she is twenty years old and intelligent, lively, playful, attractive, and witty – but with a tendency to form tenacious and prejudicial first impressions. As the story progresses, so does her relationship with Mr Darcy. The course of Elizabeth and Darcy's relationship is ultimately decided when Darcy overcomes his pride, and Elizabeth overcomes her prejudice, leading them both to surrender to their love for each other.

# Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy 

Mr Bingley's friend and the wealthy, twenty-eight-year-old owner of the family estate of Pemberley in Derbyshire, rumoured to be worth at least £10,000 a year (equivalent to £796,000 or $1,045,000 in 2018). While he is handsome, tall, and intelligent, Darcy lacks ease and social graces, and so others frequently mistake his initially haughty reserve and rectitude as proof of excessive pride (which, in part, it is). A new visitor to the village, he is ultimately Elizabeth Bennet's love interest.

# Mr Bennet 

A late-middle-aged landed gentleman of a modest income of £2000 per annum, and the dryly sarcastic patriarch of the now-dwindling Bennet family (a family of Hertfordshire landed gentry), with five unmarried daughters. His estate, Longbourn, is entailed to the male line.

# Mrs Bennet (née Gardiner) 

The middle-aged wife of her social superior, Mr Bennet, and the mother of their five daughters. Mrs Bennet is a hypochondriac who imagines herself susceptible to attacks of tremors and palpitations (her "poor nerves"), whenever things are not going her way. Her main ambition in life is to marry her daughters off to wealthy men. Whether or not any such matches will give her daughters happiness is of little concern to her.

# Jane Bennet 

The eldest Bennet sister. Twenty-two years old when the novel begins, she is considered the most beautiful young lady in the neighbourhood and is inclined to see only the good in others (but can be persuaded otherwise on sufficient evidence). She falls in love with Charles Bingley, a rich young gentleman recently moved to Hertfordshire and a close friend of Mr Darcy.

# Mary Bennet 

The middle Bennet sister, and the plainest of her siblings. Mary has a serious disposition and mostly reads and plays music, although she is often impatient to display her accomplishments and is rather vain about them. She frequently moralises to her family. According to James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen, Mary ended up marrying one of her Uncle Philips' law clerks and moving into Meryton with him.

# Catherine "Kitty" Bennet 

The fourth Bennet daughter at 17 years old. Though older than Lydia, she is her shadow and follows her in her pursuit of the officers of the militia. She is often portrayed as envious of Lydia and is described a "silly" young woman. However, it is said that she improved when removed from Lydia's influence. According to James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen, Kitty later married a clergyman who lived near Pemberley.

# Lydia Bennet 

The youngest Bennet sister, aged 15 when the novel begins. She is frivolous and headstrong. Her main activity in life is socializing, especially flirting with the officers of the militia. This leads to her running off with George Wickham, although he has no intention of marrying her. Lydia shows no regard for the moral code of her society; as Ashley Tauchert says, she "feels without reasoning."

# Charles Bingley 

A handsome, amiable, wealthy young gentleman from the north of England (possibly Yorkshire, as Scarborough is mentioned, and there is, in fact, a real-life town called Bingley in West Yorkshire), who leases Netherfield Park, an estate three miles from Longbourn, with the hopes of purchasing it. He is contrasted with Mr Darcy for having more generally pleasing manners, although he is reliant on his more experienced friend for advice. An example of this is the prevention of Bingley and Jane's romance because of Bingley's undeniable dependence on Darcy's opinion. He lacks resolve and is easily influenced by others; his two sisters, Miss Caroline Bingley and Mrs Louisa Hurst, both disapprove of Bingley's growing affection for Miss Jane Bennet.

# Caroline Bingley 

The vainglorious, snobbish sister of Charles Bingley, with a dowry of £20,000. Miss Bingley harbours designs upon Mr Darcy, and therefore is jealous of his growing attachment to Elizabeth. She attempts to dissuade Mr Darcy from liking Elizabeth by ridiculing the Bennet family and criticising Elizabeth's comportment. Miss Bingley also disapproves of her brother's esteem for Jane Bennet, and is disdainful of society in Meryton. Her wealth (her dowry gives her an income of £1,000 per annum, which she overspends) and her expensive education seem to be the two greatest sources of Miss Bingley's vanity and conceit; likewise, she is very insecure about the fact that her and her family's money all comes from trade, and is eager both for her brother to purchase an estate, ascending the Bingleys to the ranks of the Gentry, and for herself to marry a landed gentleman (i.e. Mr Darcy). The dynamic between Miss Bingley and her sister, Louisa Hurst, seems to echo that of Lydia and Kitty Bennet's; that one is no more than a follower of the other, with Caroline in the same position as Lydia, and Louisa in Kitty's (though, in Louisa's case, as she's already married, she's not under the same desperation as Caroline). Louisa is married to Mr Hurst, who has a house in Grosvenor Square, London.

# George Wickham 

Wickham has been acquainted with Mr Darcy since infancy, being the son of Mr Darcy's father's steward. An officer in the militia, he is superficially charming and rapidly forms an attachment with Elizabeth Bennet. He later runs off with Lydia with no intention of marriage, which would have resulted in her and her family's complete disgrace, but for Darcy's intervention to bribe Wickham to marry her by paying off his immediate debts.

# Mr William Collins 

Mr Collins, aged 25 years old as the novel begins, is Mr Bennet's distant second cousin, a clergyman, and the current heir presumptive to his estate of Longbourn House. He is an obsequious and pompous man who is excessively devoted to his patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

# Lady Catherine de Bourgh 

The overbearing aunt of Mr Darcy. Lady Catherine is the wealthy owner of Rosings Park, where she resides with her daughter Anne and is fawned upon by her rector, Mr Collins. She is haughty, pompous, domineering, and condescending, and has long planned to marry off her sickly daughter to Darcy, to 'unite their two great estates', claiming it to be the dearest wish of both her and her late sister, Lady Anne Darcy (née Fitzwilliam).

~ * ~

PLOT 

The novel is set in rural England in the early 19th century. Mrs Bennet attempts to persuade Mr Bennet to visit Mr Bingley, a rich bachelor recently arrived in the neighbourhood. After some verbal sparring with her husband, Mrs Bennet believes he will not call on Mr Bingley. Shortly after, he visits Netherfield, Mr Bingley's rented residence, much to Mrs Bennet's delight. The visit is followed by an invitation to a ball at the local assembly rooms that the entire neighbourhood will attend.

At the ball, Mr Bingley’s friendly and cheerful manner makes him popular with guests. He appears attracted to Jane Bennet (the Bennets' eldest daughter), with whom he dances twice. Bingley's friend, Mr Darcy, reputed to be twice as wealthy, is haughty and aloof, causing a decided dislike of him. He declines to dance with Elizabeth (the Bennets' second eldest daughter), stating she is not attractive enough to tempt him.[5] Elizabeth finds this amusing and jokes about it with her sisters.

Mr Bingley's sister, Caroline, later invites Jane to Netherfield for dinner. On her way there, Jane is caught in a rain shower and develops a bad cold, forcing her to stay at Netherfield to recuperate. When Elizabeth goes to see Jane, Mr Darcy finds himself becoming attracted to Elizabeth, while Miss Bingley grows jealous, as she herself has designs on Mr Darcy.

Mr Collins, Mr Bennet's cousin and heir to the Longbourn estate, visits the Bennet family. He is a pompous, obsequious clergyman who intends to marry one of the Bennet girls. After learning that Jane may soon be engaged, he quickly decides on Elizabeth, the next daughter in both age and beauty.

Elizabeth and her family meet the dashing and charming army officer, George Wickham, who singles out Elizabeth. He says he is connected to the Darcy family and claims Mr Darcy deprived him of an occupation (a permanent position as a clergyman in a prosperous parish with good revenue) promised to him by Mr Darcy's late father. Elizabeth's dislike of Mr Darcy is confirmed.

At the ball at Netherfield, Mr Darcy asks Elizabeth to dance, and, despite her vow never to dance with him, she accepts. Excluding Jane and Elizabeth, several Bennet family members display a distinct lack of decorum. Mrs Bennet hints loudly that she fully expects Jane and Bingley to become engaged, and the younger Bennet sisters expose the family to ridicule by their silliness.

Mr Collins proposes to Elizabeth. She rejects him, to her mother's fury and her father's relief. Shortly after, the Bingleys suddenly depart for London with no plans to return. After Elizabeth's rejection, Mr Collins proposes to Charlotte Lucas, a sensible young woman and Elizabeth's friend. Charlotte, older (27), is grateful for a proposal that guarantees her a comfortable home. Elizabeth is aghast at such pragmatism in matters of love. Meanwhile, a heartbroken Jane visits her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner in London. It soon is clear that Miss Bingley has no intention of resuming their acquaintance leaving Jane upset, though composed.

In the spring, Elizabeth visits Charlotte and Mr Collins in Kent. Elizabeth and her hosts are invited to Rosings Park, the imposing home of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, patroness of Mr Collins and Mr Darcy's wealthy aunt. Lady Catherine expects Mr Darcy to marry her daughter. Mr Darcy and his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam, are also visiting at Rosings Park. Fitzwilliam tells Elizabeth how Mr Darcy recently saved a friend from an undesirable match. Elizabeth realises this was Jane and is horrified that Mr Darcy interfered. Later, Mr Darcy proposes to Elizabeth, declaring his love for her despite her inferior social rank. She rejects him angrily, stating she could never love a man who caused her sister such unhappiness and further accuses him of treating Wickham unjustly. The latter accusation angers Mr Darcy and he accuses her family of lacking propriety and suggests he has been kinder to Bingley than to himself.

Later, Mr Darcy gives Elizabeth a letter, explaining that Wickham, the son of his late father's steward, had refused the living his father arranged for him, and was instead given money for it. Wickham quickly squandered the money and when impoverished, asked for the living again. After being refused, he tried to elope with Darcy's 15-year-old sister, Georgiana, for her considerable dowry. Mr Darcy also writes that he believed Jane, due to her reserved behaviour, was indifferent to Bingley. Mr Darcy apologises for hurting Jane and Elizabeth.

Some months later, Elizabeth accompanies the Gardiners on a tour of Derbyshire. They visit Pemberley, the Darcy estate (after Elizabeth ascertains Mr Darcy's absence). The housekeeper there describes Mr Darcy as kind and generous. When Mr Darcy returns unexpectedly, he is exceedingly gracious and later invites Elizabeth and the Gardiners to meet his sister, and Mr Gardiner to go fishing. Elizabeth is surprised and delighted by their treatment. She then receives news that her sister Lydia has run off with Wickham. She tells Mr Darcy immediately, then departs in haste, believing she will never see him again as Lydia has ruined the family's good name.

After an agonising interim, Wickham has agreed to marry Lydia. With some veneer of decency restored, Lydia visits the family and tells Elizabeth that Mr Darcy was at her and Wickham's wedding. Though Mr Darcy had sworn everyone involved to secrecy, Mrs Gardiner now feels obliged to inform Elizabeth that he secured the match, at great expense and trouble to himself. She hints that he may have had "another motive" for having done so.

Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy return to Netherfield. Bingley proposes to Jane who accepts. Lady Catherine, having heard rumours that Elizabeth intends to marry Mr Darcy, visits Elizabeth and demands she promise never to accept Mr Darcy's proposal. Elizabeth refuses and the outraged Lady Catherine leaves. Darcy, heartened by Elizabeth's response, again proposes to her and is accepted. Elizabeth has difficulty in convincing her father that she is marrying for love, not position and wealth, but Mr Bennet is finally convinced.

LESSONS TO BE LEARNT FROM JANE AUSTEN'S "PRIDE AND PREJUDICE" 

#A 
First Impressions Don't Make The Man (or Woman)

One can never forget the first time Elizabeth and Darcy met while attending an assembly at Meryton. Elizabeth overhears Mr. Darcy referring to her as only "tolerable." I hated him, to say the least. How can a man be so absolutely consumed in his own pride? More importantly, how can he be so rude towards a woman so congenial as Elizabeth Bennet? It wasn't until later in the story where the woes of Mr. Darcy's past and the love he holds for his younger sister are revealed, that I started liking the man behind the mask. First impressions often leave us in want of something more--whether that impression is good or bad. The more I learned about Mr. Darcy's true character, the more I realized how quick we are to judge others on the first encounter.

Ref: https://www.theodysseyonline.com/the-most-important-lessons-learned-from-pride-and-prejudice

#B
The importance of planning.

In this easily-readable novel, Ms. Austen underscores the importance of planning.  Pride and Prejudice as perfectly-structured a novel as ever was written: from the initial tension in Elizabeth and Darcy’s meeting to the disastrous anticlimax of the first proposal, the upward trajectory of Elizabeth’s feelings for the man she’d judged poorly, Darcy’s climactic saving of the Bennet family’s reputation, and his subsequent successful proposal of marriage to Elizabeth, the novel moves quickly and deliberately in precisely-plotted chapters.  Austen wastes no time with frivolous details: everything ties together; each scene has a purpose.

Take a page from Austen’s book as you plan your lessons.  Careful preparation can lead to centuries of success!

Ref: https://www.carneysandoe.com/blog-post/5-lessons-teachers-can-learn-pride-prejudice

#C 
A little humor goes a long way.

Despite the conviction of certain seventeen-year-old boys, Pride and Prejudice is not just Victorian chick lit.  It’s a romantic tale with a marriage plot, to be sure, but it’s also a comedy.  From the sycophantic Mr. Collins to the drily sarcastic Mr. Bennet, the novel is filled with jokes, little nods from Austen to the reader.  The book is really funny.

When faced with a potentially gloomy future, Mrs. Bennet breaks down.  Elizabeth, however, learns to laugh.  It is her humor, in large part, which melts the icy exterior of the shy Mr. Darcy and leads to their mutual happiness.  Keep her success in mind–and bring this sense of humor to the classroom.  When facing issues, take a minute to step back.  If you can learn to laugh at a problem, you might remedy it more effectively.

Ref: https://www.carneysandoe.com/blog-post/5-lessons-teachers-can-learn-pride-prejudice

#D 
If at first you don’t succeed…try again

There’s no shame in failure. Mr. Darcy failed miserably in his first attempt at proposing to the object of his affection, but he tried again.  And look at him now: a timeless hunky archetype with 200 years of admirers to his name.

Austen, too, met with failure. She first drafted the novel in 1796—seventeen years before it was finally published. Her refusal to be disheartened led to the publication of a novel that proved truly timeless.

You’ll have failures in the classroom, and so will your students. But don’t let these failures discourage you. Look to your Victorian counterparts—if at first you don’t succeed, try again.

Ref: https://www.carneysandoe.com/blog-post/5-lessons-teachers-can-learn-pride-prejudice

#E
It is good to honor thy parents

Familial relationships in the novel express the importance of honor and respect. Jane and Lizzie exemplify what it looks like to their parents this way. Barrs explains:

Despite the many flaws in their parents, particularly their mother, they are unfailingly polite and respectful in their presence and when speaking about them. They maintain this respect even when they finally feel the need to express problems, for example, when Elizabeth talks to her father about his failure to restrain Lydia.

Ref: https://www.crossway.org/articles/6-lessons-from-pride-and-prejudice/

#F 
You Can Judge a Man by the Size of His Library

In Austen’s world, size matters. The size of one’s book collection, that is.

While stuck at Netherfield because her sister has fallen ill there, the hospitable Mr. Bingley offers Elizabeth access to his books, to “all that his library afforded.” Elizabeth assures him she is content with what she has. He admits, “I wish my collection were larger for your benefit and my own credit; but I am an idle fellow, and though I have not many, I have more than I ever looked into."

Then coy Miss Bingley attempts to converse with Darcy while he is engaged in reading. “When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library," Miss Bingley proclaims. "I am astonished that my father should have left so small a collection of books. What a delightful library you have at Pemberley, Mr. Darcy!"

"It ought to be good," he replies. "It has been the work of many generations."

"And then you have added so much to it yourself, you are always buying books,” Miss Bingley says flirtatiously.

Later, after Elizabeth has shed her initial false impressions about Darcy, she recollects the evolution of her feelings toward him. She explains that her love for Darcy “has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." Indeed.

Ref:  https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/i-learned-everything-i-needed-to-know-about-marriage-from-pride-and-prejudice/281110/

#G
28 LESSONS WE’VE LEARNED FROM PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

1. Beware of truths universally acknowledged.
2. Be persistent in the face of rejection.
3. There is great joy in a long walk.
4. Don’t set too much stock in first impressions.
5. There are worse things than being single…like being married to Mr. Collins.
6. A six-hour movie isn’t too long if it’s the right story.
7. You can learn a lot about a man by the way he treats his sister.
8. You can’t hide in the library forever.
9. Sharp wit and a pair of fine eyes are worth far more than an expensive dress.
10. The man of your dreams will love you even when you have a terrible cold.
11. When in doubt, say it in a letter.
12. Never play dumb to attract a man.
13. Don’t make important life choices just to soothe your mother’s nerves.
14. Men, always keep your home ready for unexpected guests. You never know when the love of your life will show up.
15. Bad boys are not worth it.
16. Gorge all you want at a banquet as long as you’re wearing an empire-waist dress.
17. It’s not the end of the world if your little sister gets married before you do.
18. A dashing uniform does not make the man.
19. “Obstinate, headstrong girl!” really is a compliment.
20. Don’t be stingy about giving others a second chance. You never know when your own happiness may depend on one.
21. When it comes to a man’s library, size matters.
22. An intelligent woman should never tolerate a disrespectful man…no matter how rich he is.
23. A great love story is always in style.
24. It really is a woman’s prerogative to change her mind.
25. Marrying your true love means marrying his or her entire family.
26. Men may leave you, but your sisters never will.
27. Happy relationships are based on more than romance.
28. Colin Firth then, Colin Firth now, Colin Firth forever.

Ref: https://blog.basbleu.com/2015/01/28/28-lessons-weve-learned-from-pride-and-prejudice/

#H
Five Life Lessons We Can Learn from Elizabeth Bennet

1. She Learns from Her Mistakes.
When Elizabeth reads Darcy’s letter and finds out that she has misjudged Wickham and Darcy’s characters, she says to herself, “How despicably have I acted! I, who have prided myself on my discernment! … I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself!” Elizabeth could have justified her actions, but she recognizes that she was wrong. Even though – at the time – she hates Darcy, she acknowledges that he’s right in many respects; she acknowledges that she jumped to conclusions, and let prejudice cloud the truth. Elizabeth’s ability to recognize her faults and correct them requires a lot of humility and self-awareness we should all aspire to achieve.

2. She Does Not Settle.
Elizabeth turns down both Mr. Collins and Mr. Darcy’s proposals without hesitation. She is open and honest in her refusals, and she does not care that her mother and society essentially demand her to accept them. She knows what she wants, and she knows what she doesn’t want. Only when Darcy actually gains some manners does she finally accept him.

3. She Boldly Voices Her Opinions.
Elizabeth is not afraid to state her opinions or contradict someone - regardless of who they may be. When Lady Catherine De Bourgh insults herself and her family, Elizabeth rebukes her. When Lady Catherine asks Elizabeth to promise to never become engaged to Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth refuses. When a man of Mr. Darcy’s standing states his opinion of her low rank and then proposes to her, she reprimands him. One classic example:  ``You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it.'' Now if that’s not bold, I don’t know what is.

4. She Takes Care of Her Family.
Throughout the novel, Elizabeth repeatedly mentions her concern for her family’s welfare – especially Jane’s. Even though her mother has no filter, and her sister, Lydia, only lives and breathes to flirt with officers, Elizabeth still defends them to Mr. Darcy and Lady Catherine. And who can forget how she walks from Longbourn to Netherfield in the mud and dirt just to take care of Jane?

5. She is Not Afraid to Defy Society’s Expectations.
Elizabeth does not care how Miss Bingley or Mr. Darcy perceive her after she comes to Netherfield with her skirt “six inches deep in mud.” She does not care that a man who has 10,000 pounds a year asks her to marry him. She is very forward thinking, she reads, and she doesn’t care much for the typical accomplishments that women of her day were supposed to have. Instead of sewing pin cushions or painting tables, she cultivates her mind through reading and engaging with others.

Elizabeth Bennett is a strong, independent woman who never changes who she is. Even though she’s a 19th-century fictional character, her character is a wonderful example of what a strong female is.

Ref: https://www.hercampus.com/school/utah/five-life-lessons-we-can-learn-elizabeth-bennet

#I

Here are 4 Gentlemanly Lessons from Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice:

1. He is Self-Aware
This may seem like an odd quality to attribute to Mr. Darcy. In the novel, pride is his blind spot. When reading the book, or watching his brilliant portrayal by Colin Firth in the film Pride & Prejudice, you will find a moment when Mr. Darcy acknowledges his awareness of his pride.

Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride – where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will always be under good regulation.”

In the arrogance of the statement it is possible to miss the subtlety of the sentence. I have considered this quote frequently. When he refers to a superiority of mind, Mr. Darcy means an understanding of his place in the world. He is aware of himself, and who he is, as master of Pemberly, and 10,000 pounds per annum. This situation places him in a high station, with responsibilities and privileges greater than most men.

Self awareness does not entitle anyone to arrogance, but having a settled belief of who you are may at times rub others the wrong way. Confidence in your character, introversion, even quietness, can often mistake you as cold and uncaring by others. Learn to be aware not only of your qualities and faults, but also how they effect those around you.

2. He looks out for his friend
Elizabeth’s sister, Jane, and Mr. Darcy’s friend, Mr. Bingley, begin to fall in love through the first portion of Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Darcy, having the benefit of a detached view of the situation, sees the dangers to his friend in a alliance with a family as foolish and silly as the Bennet girls. He does his best to distance his friend from the Bennet family in London, and continues to prevent Mr. Bingley from accidentally meeting Jane when she visits the city.

When he proposes to Elizabeth, Mr. Darcy acknowledges his hypocrisy saying when she confronts him with his actions. “I have no wish of denying that I did every thing in my power to separate my friend from your sister, or that I rejoice in my success. Towards him I have been kinder than towards myself.”

While this does nothing to endear Elizabeth to accept the proposal, it does reveal the depth of Mr. Darcy’s care for his friend.

Good friends are hard to come by, whenever you find one he should be as a brother. While few of us would intentionally do wrong by a friend, how frequently do we put their interests before our own?

3. He learns from criticism
When his proposal to Elizabeth is rejected, and she criticizes his arrogance and faults, he doesn’t ignore them. Instead, he honestly examines his behavior to see the truth in her words. Most importantly, he acts upon the reflection rather than ignoring it.

My object then, was to show you, by every civility in my power, that I was not so mean as to resent the past; and I hoped to obtain your forgiveness, to lessen your ill opinion, by letting you see that your reproofs had been attended to.”

Frequently, as a young man it is possible to believe you’ve reached the heights and see your faults and virtues honestly, but that’s not always the case. Others, friends and enemies, will point out faults we might not have seen from time to time. It can be easy to ignore them, discrediting their words because of their own faults or abilities. But those criticisms can be invaluable measures of how you are perceived and judged by the world.

4. He doesn’t take credit
Even after saving Elizabeth’s sister from disgrace, paying Mr. Wickham off to marry Lydia, Darcy doesn’t say anything of his involvement. He actively tries to hide his role in the situation from Elizabeth and her family, considering it a matter of honor.

For a person of skill or talent, it can genuinely be difficult to not take credit for your actions. Credit is tempting, allowing you to shine in the light of a hero, even if temporarily. The problem is, that in doing so you reduce the value of your actions, allowing the motives of your deeds to become questionable. More than once I have wished that I had let my good deeds remain a secret.

To sum up: Mr. Darcy is most appealing on paper, or in a film. Fiction is more forgiving than reality. I’ve found that some of his lesser qualities are less charming to the opposite sex when demonstrated in real life. But the lessons above are real, in both fact and fiction. Becoming a better man isn’t easy, and it isn’t always romantic, but it is something to be proud of.

Ref: http://goodguyswag.com/pride-and-prejudice-gentlemanly-lessons/

#J

Themes of Pride & Prejudice
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is said to be a satirical and social critique on social status and the expectations of women during the eighteenth century. Throughout the book, the strong themes of prejudice, reputation, and class are explored as the romance between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy develops. In this lesson, we will look at the themes to get a better understanding of Pride and Prejudice.

Prejudice
As the title suggests, prejudice is one of the main themes of the novel. Prejudice is one of many obstacles that gets in the way of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy from connecting quickly. For example, Mr. Darcy's prejudice toward Elizabeth is largely because of her social standing. He does not notice the strength of her character for a long time since he is above her in class. The narrator says, 'Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty... and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness.'

Here, the narrator demonstrates how Mr. Darcy's initial prejudice initially clouds his ability to see Elizabeth for the strong, intelligent woman that she is. Once he is able to disregard their social differences, he allows himself to fall in love with her. Austen's attention to Mr. Darcy's prejudice and subsequent transformation into a humbler perspective shows the issues that social prejudice can cause, and the good that can come from removing those prejudices from society.

Reputation
During eighteenth century England, a woman's reputation and femininity were considered incredibly important. Women were expected to adhere to certain rules and exhibit pristine behavior in the public sphere. Many of the Bennet sisters step out of these expectations in ways that potentially harm their reputations.

A good example of this is the story line of Elizabeth's sister, Lydia. Lydia makes an irrational decision by running away with Wickham and living with him out of wedlock. Her decision could result in irreparable damage to her entire family's reputation if Wickham refuses to marry her. In fact, Lydia's decision to forgo her own reputation threatens the rest of her sisters' reputations. Elizabeth speaks to her father about Lydia's behavior and its consequences by saying, 'Our importance, our respectability in the world must be affected by the wild volatility, the assurance and disdain of all restraint, which mark Lydia's character. . . she will soon be beyond the reach of amendment.'

Ref: https://study.com/academy/lesson/literary-themes-in-pride-and-prejudice.html

MAJOR THEMES: 
Marriage, Wealth, Class, Self-knowledge (Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice)

QUOTES:
#1
"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
— Mr. Darcy, Pride and Prejudice

#2
"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."
— Caroline Bingley, Pride and Prejudice

#3
“My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me.”
— Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

#4
"Your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.""And yours," he replied with a smile, "is willfully to misunderstand them.”
— Mr. Darcy, Pride and Prejudice

#5
"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."
— Mary Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

#6
"One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty."
— Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

#7
"A girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then."
— Mr. Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

#8
"People themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever."
— Mr. Bingley, Pride and Prejudice

#9
"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"
— Mr. Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

#10
"I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine."
— Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

Ref: https://www.bustle.com/articles/158113-16-pride-and-prejudice-quotes-that-will-make-you-understand-why-its-universally-adored

#11
He spoke of apprehension and anxiety, but his countenance expressed real security.

Ref: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice

REFERENCES

Ref for characters, plot and 'major themes' section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice