_For less troubled people who want to improve the effectiveness of their communication skills and break free from frustrating, self-destructive patterns._ Transactional analysis has perhaps done more than any of the other main approaches to therapy to increase the sensitivity of the public to the psychological dimensions of human relationships. It has achieved widespread popularity in a short time largely because of its simple, commonsense vocabulary that is easy to apply to personal, family, and group situations. Eric Berne (1910-1970) completed his medical training in 1935, then finished his psychiatric residency at Yale in 1941. He soon separated himself from psychoanalysis and began to formulate his theory of transactional analysis (TA). By the mid-sixties, TA was gaining in popularity: Berne wrote his book, _Games People Play_, primarily for professionals, but it became a best-seller filling a need for an easy-to-understand and easy-to-apply approach to therapy. TA is based on the premise that human personality has three parts: Berne called them the _Parent_, _Adult_, and _Child_. Although similar in meaning to Freud's _superego_, _ego_, and _id_, Berne's terms were intended to name dimensions of personality that could be observed directly; his three "ego states" are not theoretical constructs. The Child ego state is the source of fun, humor, creativity, wishful thinking, and irresponsibility. It is impulsive and resists control. The Parent ego state is the repository of values, attitudes, and expectations inherited from one's parents. _Shoulds_, _oughts_, {133} hands-on-hips, and finger-wagging gestures are common expressions of the Parent. The Adult ego state is the source of reason, logic, and unemotional evaluation. It forms the basis for decision making and predicting outcomes. Only one ego state can be in control of our emotions or behavior at a time. Berne observed that many emotional difficulties in individual clients result from problems involving their ego states. Some personality problems come about because a person cannot separate his or her ego states and switches from one to another erratically and uncontrollably. For example, a young mother begins--in a calm rational way--to describe the behavior of her nine-year-old son. She talks about his impertinent and disrespectful behavior, and, as she does, she becomes enraged, her face turns beet-red, and she yells at her therapist that someday she is going to give her boy a beating he'll never forget! Transactional analysis would try to show her that she tends to slip from her reasonable Adult state to the state of an angry Parent who demands complete respect and subservience. Berne called this structural problem of the personality _confusion_. [Illustration: PERSONALITIES: Normal Personality, Confused, Excluded, Contaminated]