With Transactional Analysis, Eric Berne made complex interpersonal transactions

understandable especially the "games" that the "inner child" plays in order to gain
recognition from others.
The TA therapists task is to help the person to regain its inner childs innate "Okness" so
that it will be able to obtain the recognition or "strokes" --in short, the love--that it needs
and so that the whole person can function in a positive manner. As consultants, educators
and organizers, transactional analysts with their skills in analyzing transactional
patterns are able to understand, predict and help improve peoples communication and
productivity.
Transactional Analysis started as, and has remained, a social psychology, a clear
departure from psychoanalysis, as a system that focuses on people's external behavior and
only secondarily on analyzing their internal psychological processes. Eric Berne designed
Transactional Analysis as a system that seeks to understand the interactions of people and
to improve the human social environment. Almost fifty years after Transactional
Analysis' inception and thirty years after Eric Berne's untimely death it has become a
movement with thousands of members all around the world and is poised to enter the
third millenium as a highly effective, information based psychology and psychiatry of
human communication.
Egos States.
Berne made complex interpersonal transactions understandable when he recognized that
people can interact from one of three "ego-states" -- Parent, Adult or Child -- and that
these interactions can occur at overt and covert levels. Each one of the ego states in is
effect a "mind module," a system of communication with its own language and function;
the Parent's is a language of values , the Adult's is a language of logic and rationality and
the Child's is a language of emotions. Effective functioning in the world depends on the
availability to of all three, intact ego states. Transactional Analysts are trained to
recognize what ego states people are transacting from, and to follow, in precise detail, the
transactional sequences that people engage in as they interact with each other. With this
training they are also able to intervene effectively to improve the quality of
communication and interaction for their clients.
Games
Berne codified socially dysfunctional behavior patterns in terms of the "games" that
people play. Games are essentially devious, toxic and sometimes deadly methods of
obtaining "strokes." The term stroke is Berne's name for the unit of human contact and
recognition. Strokes, Berne pointed out, are needed by people for psychological and
eventually physical survival, just as they need food, water and air. These repetitive
stroke-gathering interactions, labeled by Berne with the instantly recognizable names
( "Why Don't You Yes But," "Now I've Got You."and "I'm Only Trying to Help", etc)
which made TA famous, are the building blocks of people's life scripts.

Scripts
People build their lives around certain favorite games which, with their repetitive toxic
outcomes, promote dysfunctional, life-long scripts. Scripts are based on early-life
decisions, made by the originally OK child. These decisions which dictate people's
actions throughout life always represent the relinquishing of the child's Okness. They
determine the dysfunctional roles (Rescuer, Persecutor, Victim) which people fall upon
throughout life unless they are changed or "redecided," or as Berne put it unless the
person "closes down the show and puts on a new (aware, autonomous, intimate, in short
OK) one on the road."
Transactional Analysis as a Communication Skill
Transactional Analysts are specialists in human communication in psychotherapy, in
relationships and at work; in particular the transactional methods that people use to obtain
much needed strokes. Transactional Analysis psychotherapists task is to help people
identify their ego states and evaluate and improve the ways in which their ego states
function, to recognize the inner dialogues between a person's ego states, especially those
that involve a harsh demeaning Parent, to recognize the games that people play and to
help them stop playing games and get strokes in a spontaneous aware and intimate and
manner. The potent therapist provides permission to change and protection against the
anxiety that change creates. Stopping the playing of games is the first step in eventual
replacing them with direct and honest interactions and eventually abandoning the
dysfunctional life script. Transactional Analysis' efficient, yet insightful, contractual
method makes it ideally suited for brief psychotherapy.
Likewise as consultants, educators, counselors and coaches transactional analysts with
their skills in analyzing transactional patterns are able to understand predict and help
improve dysfunctional, unproductive, toxic, uncooperative interactions between people
and can quickly help people communicate clearly and effectively at the three levels of the
Parent (values,) the Adult (rationality) and the Child (emotions, creativity.)