Notes on Preface to I'm Ok - You're Ok by Thomas Harris

There are times when practitioners, users and theoreticians are dissatisfied with their subject content. New paradigms arise out of such discontent in a field.

Thomas Harris says in the preface, that he was one the psychiatrists who are impatient with their subject. Harris advocates that transaction is an answer. It provides answers to questions about how mind operates, why people do what they do and how they can be helped to stop doing, if they wish. This analysis informs the patient that he is responsible for his choices now and the results in the future, no matter what happened in the past. Thus it facilitates people to have self-control and self-direction through the freedom of choice.

Eric Berne's paper "Transactional Analysis: A New and Effective Method of Group Therapy" presented in 1957 at the Western Regional Meeting of the American Group Psychotherapy Association of Los Angeles is the foundation for this approach to psychiatry.

An interesting observation of Herman Melville
"A man of true science uses but few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose: whereas the smatterer in science...thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things'.

Transactional analysis is a teaching and learning device.

"The problems of the world-and they are chronicled daily in headlines of violence and despair - essentially are the problems of individuals. If individuals can change, the course of the world can change. This is a hope worth sustaining." (Thomas Harris)