Notes on Ch.4. We Can Change

Goal of TA - Freedom of Choice for the Person

The goal of Transactional Analysis (TA) 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. This freedom is lost in early childhood by some people they become neurotic. People afflicted with neurotic process continually involve themselves in solving archaic problems in stead of dealing with today's reality.

Restoration of freedom to change is the goal of Psychotherapy or treatment using TA.

In Child state people demand certainty. In Adult state they accept probability.

Accepting the probabilistic nature of future is important trying to discern probabilities is also important.

The statement of philosopher Elton Trueblood is appropriate here.

"The fact taht 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 onthe 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 discrning different degrees of probability."

Does Man Have a Free Will?

Human beings even though caught in cause-and-effect drama, have become more than what it was implied by cause and effect analysis. The evidence of evolution - and of personal experience - convinces us that many has become more than his antecedents. (The present decisions and actions have also a role in determining the outcome).

Man does what he does for certain reasons, but those reasons do not all lie in the past. Man, through thought, is able to look to the future. It is described by Charles Harteshorne as 'creative causation'. Elton Trueblood emphasized this point by proposing that causes for human behavior lie not only in the past but in man's ability to contemplate the future (in deterministic terms or estimate probabilities). Man is a creature whose present is constantly being dominated by reference to the nonexistent, but nevertheless potent, future. Most of the thought of the man is concerned with what might be produced, provided certain steps could be taken.

Thinking is very imporant. A genuine novelty can emerge in the very act of thinking. Thinking is a true and creative cause. Something happens, when a man thinks, which would not have occurred otherwise. This is what is meant by self causation.

What Makes People Want to Change?

Their thoughts and actions hurt them sufficiently big.

He is bored with his thoughts and actions.

Awareness that they can change for better.