INTRODUCTION
The most frequent question I am asked as a psychology professor is about how to analyze the behavior of another person. The student explains how they are interested in creeping inside the consciousness of their older brother or ex-partner or best friend in order to see clearly the how and the why of that person’s behavior.
Privately, I wonder if my students have a secret and possibly dark plan to manipulate their friends and loved ones.
In the past, I have always refused to answer the how-to-analyze others question. But I would not refuse to answer with the grace and compassion of a parent who is refusing to treat their child to a second ice cream cone. I would refuse to answer like a bully who wanted to show off. I would give a long explanation about how terrible it is that some people, by whom I meant the student asking the question, liked to think of others in as inhumane and calculating a way as to try to analyze or manipulate them.
But I’m all done with that. No more embarrassing students into thinking as I do. It is time to give students what they have been asking for all along, which is a guide to analyzing behavior and thoughts and mind in as simple a language as I am able.
There are many types of analysis endorsed by psychologists and other doctors of the human soul. The most common of these is called psychoanalysis, which was developed over many thousand manuscript pages by neurologists Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer.
I was surprised to learn that Freud was a neurologist, and not at least some kind of humanitarian or poet. No, Freud was a neurologist, and he believed until his dying day that psychoanalysis was a form of neurological surgery. He argued that, in order to practice psychoanalysis, a person must be in full medical standing—that is, they must hold a doctor of medicine degree.
But I will not be teaching you about psychoanalysis. There are at least 25,000 other writers and doctors and probably calligraphers and scholars who would be eager to teach you the wooden language and the tedious practice of psychoanalysis.
There is another form of psychological analysis that is dear to me and my friends, but the word for it scares people away. That word is Daseinsanalysis. (I will shorten it as DA so that you don’t have to look at that word in all of its indignity any longer.) DA is based on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, author of Being and Time, and inventor of a vocabulary that has made graduate students seem smarter than they are for 70 years. I write about the philosopher and, careful not to use his vocabulary, DA in my scholarly books and articles. You can find those by searching for them online.
The form of psychological analysis I want to introduce to you throughout these pages is called Transactional Analysis, which I will occasionally abbreviate as TA. TA was developed by American psychiatrists in San Francisco during the 1950s. These folks possessed something rare, and something that was missing from the rest of psychology: they had a sense of humor.
They were also concise. TA does in ten pages what it takes psychoanalysis 10,000 pages to accomplish. TA requires no new words to commit to memory, either, which is unheard of in other academic disciplines. TA has no “pre-operational” or “ion channel” or “fantasmal psychic-economies.”[1] TA uses words like “Parent” and “Child,” and phrases like “What are you looking at?” and “Ain’t it awful?” No translational dictionary or flash cards are necessary. This means, however, that TA won’t be helpful in making it seem to others that you possess more college degrees than you do.
All you will need in order to understand TA is a sense of humor, which, sadly, has been mostly banned from scholarly discourse.
What You’ll Find Inside
A standard general psychology textbook is 600 pages long. Those aren’t paperback novel pages, either. Textbook pages are the size of magazine pages, except that the pictures are all stock photos from GettyImages, and the writing is terrible. Oh, and textbooks usually cost upwards of 250 United States dollars.
It would really be something if each of the 600 pages held useful secrets for resolving uncertainties in life. Secrets like how to make sense of disappointment, frustration, anxiety, and relationship drama. But that doesn’t ordinarily happen.
Psychology textbooks don’t even provide practical advice about what you could be doing right now in order to be happier or healthier or more excited about your future. What they provide instead are thousands of reports on studies that have been conducted. Textbooks are like narrowly focused and quickly outdated encyclopedias.
Psychology professors are often no better than the textbooks they write. They are famous for telling their students how it will take a minimum of ten years of devoted study before anybody can begin to apply psychology to themselves or others. This lifetime study of psychology has become something of an industry joke. The joke goes like this: “You can’t do anything with a psychology degree.”
Interested students are told about how they will need a PhD or evidence that they’ve sat on a couch for 12-25 years before the secrets of psychology and analysis can be theirs. Like the information stuffed into psychology textbooks, the joke isn’t very funny.
This groin kick is followed by another. Once the ambitious student gets their three PhDs, they are still prohibited from being helpful. You will never hear the psychologist say, for example, “I can cure you” or even “I will make you better.” To do so is considered professional conceit of the highest order. The psychologist is limited to saying things like:
· “There is a shade of a chance that you’ll see some improvement,” or
· “This medicine showed promise with a group of antelopes raised in captivity,” or
· “Patients showed improvement in 41% of cases.”
And so on.
But these qualified and reluctant promises can only be shared once a person has slogged through and has been tested over 12,000 pages of drivel—a fraction of the entire catalog of some eight-billion books and articles that belong to the body of psychological literature.
But this book is different. It’s purpose is simple: to bypass the boring and mostly useless stuff printed in psychology textbooks and side-step the opinion that psychologists are to be of little help so that you, the reader, can begin to see yourself and your problems differently. You won’t have to ask “is it working?” because the differences will be striking. You will find TA (that’s “Transactional Analysis,” in case you have already forgotten) creeping into your ordinary daily observations.
The guide has been organized using common topics from standard psychology textbooks—topics like “Perception” and “Development” and “Memory.” The difference is that, in those books, each chapter is like a different world. Their chapters begin with some version of the phrase “forget everything you have just read about in the previous chapter, because this one will be completely different.” In this book, by comparison, the chapter headings build onto one another. Social psychology is essential to understanding personality, and these are both essential to understanding learning or depression or love. This means that you’ll have to read the chapters in order.
Concluding each chapter is a set of questions and prompts to help you practice analysis on yourself (and sometimes on others).
[1] This kind of language, regrettably, is not a joke. It appeared in a psychoanalytic paper the author was asked to review.
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