Diagram (d) illustrates communication that involves an ulterior message. For example, a psychologically clever salesman is showing hair driers to a woman. She tells him how much she is prepared to spend and then asks, "How much is that one?" The salesman (arrow 1 in the diagram) replies: "You wouldn't be able to afford that model." His response is based on his customer's stated budget limitations and appears to be Adult-to-Adult. However, the hidden message (dotted arrow [1]) is directed to his customer's Child state, which, as he predicts, causes her to reply rebelliously (arrow 2), "That's the one I want." In (e), another example of this class of communications that are not what they appear to be, there are two ulterior transactions. A secretary returns a few minutes late from lunch. Her boss asks, apparently Adult-to-Adult (arrow 1), "What time is it?" They both know what the hidden message is. The secretary answers sharply (arrow 2): "It's 1:15." The ulterior message from the boss is "Are you late again?" (P-C: arrow [1].) The secretary's covert or hidden reply is "Get off my back: you're always criticizing." (C-P: arrow [2].) The central objective of TA, then, is to make clients aware of these and other patterns or games that their habitual ways of communicating reveal. By doing this, clients find that communication becomes less problematic and more effective as they learn to control their responses. AN EXAMPLE Joyce was forty-one when she decided to take her seventeen-year-old only son, Joe, to see Dr. Goldstein, a transactional analyst. For about five years, ever since his father died, Joe and his mother had quarreled a great deal. Dr. Goldstein met with Joyce, then with her son, and then with them both. After he listened to their complaints about one another, he agreed to try to help. For six weeks, Joe and his mother met once a week with Dr. Goldstein as "TA students." They were to put family problems on a back burner; their energy was devoted to learning to apply the concepts of transactional analysis. Dr. Goldstein had them {137} analyze many examples of communication. During a second six-week period, Joyce and her son were coached to learn to talk to one another more effectively. Here are some samples of their automatic patterns of response _before_ they began to use TA: SON: The soup's too salty. (A-A or C-P) MOTHER: I don't know why I work so hard! All you do is complain! I'm just not appreciated! (C-P) SON: Mom, here's the sports jacket I bought for graduation. (A-A) MOTHER: You can't go in _that_! We're taking that jacket back. I can't trust you to buy clothes for yourself. Let's go! (P-C)