Though these statements can be said to express problems, they all originate in the difficulty that surrounds decision making. The unsettling nature of indecisiveness is sometimes expressed in the indiscriminate plea: Do something - anything - just do something. In treating patients we see two essential difficulties with decision making: (1)

'I always make the wrong decision', which is the expression of the person whose decisions and the activity which follows generally turn out badly for him; and (2) 'I keep going over and over the same thing', which is the expression of the person whose computer is cluttered with unfinished business or pending decisions.

The first step in solving either of these difficulties is to recognize that in each decision there are three sets of data that must be processed. The first set of data is in the Parent, the  second in the Child, and the third in the Adult. Parent and Child data are dated. Adult data represents external reality as it exists in the present, together with a vast amount of data accumulated in the past, independent of the Parent and Child. Data from all three sources pours into the computer in response to a transactional stimulus. Which is going to respond - Parent, Adult, or Child? Perhaps the best way to explain this process is to illustrate.

We shall say that a middle-aged businessman, who has a reputation as a good father, a good husband, and a responsible citizen, has to make a decision whether to sign his name to a petition that will appear in the local newspaper. This petition supports a fair-housing bill to enable individuals of all races to live wherever their income allows. The request comes by telephone, and as soon as he hangs up he is aware of great discomfort, a churning in his stomach, and the feeling that a perfectly good day has been ruined.

He has a decision to make, and there is obviously a great amount of conflict about it. Where does the conflicting data come from?

One source is his Parent. Among the recordings that turn on are 'Don't bring shame on the family'; 'Don't stick your neck out'; 'Why you?' and 'Your family and children must always come first!' These are overtones to an even more compelling recording, cut in his earliest years in his home in a Southern town, 'You've got to keep them in their place'. In fact there is a whole category of Parent data under the heading 'nigger' which has been unavailable for inquiry. On this body of data the door was locked in early childhood by the firm directives, 'Don't ask questions.' 'He's a nigger, that's why.' 'And don't let me hear you bring it up again!' (Even the 'harmless' little rhymes like 'Eenie, meenie, minie, mo. Catch a nigger by the toe' orchestrate the theme.)

These early recordings, reinforced through the years by continuing parental dictates and by further evidence that the presence of Negroes can be the cause of trouble (for example, in Little Rock, Selma, Watts, and Detroit), are a powerful force bearing on this man's decision.

The power of this incoming data lies in its ability to reproduce fear in the Child. The 'six foot-tall' Parent is again at work on the 'two-foot-tall' Child to make him conform. Thus the second set of data comes from the Child. This data is expressed mostly as feelings: fear, what will 'they' say, what would happen if my daughter 'married one', what will happen to the value of my property? There are realistic difficulties here, but the intensity of the feelings is not so much related to the realistic difficulties as to the original difficulty of the three-year-old child dependent upon his parents for security. This produces the churning stomach and the sweaty hands. The conflict can be so painful that the man heads for his liquor cabinet or some other evasive activity to 'get his Parent off his back'.

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This would be a short-lived war were it not for another set of data, which also is being fed into the computer. This is the data which comes from reality and is in the particular domain of the Adult. A 'simple' or 'nonthinking' man isn't too much troubled by reality. He simply gives in to the Parent. His slogan is Peace (for the Child) at Any Price. The old ways are the best ways. It is human nature. History repeats itself. Let George do it.

It is only the man with an operating Adult who must take into account the seriousness of the threat of racial crisis even to his own well-being. Only his Adult can go for more data. Only his Adult can assess how the evil of slavery, or treating persons as things, has produced a humiliation and a hopelessness so devastating to many Negroes that it is expressed in Little Rock or Selma or Watts or Detroit. Only the Adult, like Lincoln, can say, 'The dogmas of the quiet past are insufficient to the present struggle.' Only the Adult can look objectively at all the data and proceed to look for more.

It is in this process of identifying and separating the three sets of data that we begin to bring order out of the chaos of feelings and indecision. Once separated, the three bodies of data can be examined by the Adult to see what is valid.

The questions our troubled businessman must ask in examining his Parent data are: Why did his parents believe these things? What was their Parent like? Why was their Child threatened? What was their ability or inability to examine their own P-A-C? Is what they believed true? Are white persons superior to black persons? Why? Why not? Is it wrong never to stick your neck out? Would an antidiscriminatory position necessarily 'bring shame on the family'? Might it bring honour? Does he really place his family and children first if he does not contribute to a realistic solution of racial problems in his community? It might even be helpful to ask what his parents believe today in contrast to what they believed when his Parent was recorded.

His Adult must also examine the data coming from the Child. Why does he feel so threatened? Why is his stomach upset? Is there a realistic threat? Is his fear appropriate today? Or was it appropriate only when he was three years old? He may have realistic fears about rioting and violence. He could be killed; but he must differentiate between the fear produced by current events and the fear he felt at age three. The 'age three' fear is far greater. At age three he cannot change reality. But at forty-three he can. He can take steps to change reality, and ultimately to change the circumstances which produce the realistic danger.

Understanding the 'age three' fear is essential to freeing the Adult for processing new data. This is the fear - the archaic fear of the all-powerful Parent - which makes persons 'prejudge', or which makes them prejudiced. A person who is prejudiced is like the little boy in Chapter 2 who accepts 'cops are bad' as ultimate truth. He is afraid to do otherwise. This produces the contamination of the Adult (Figure 8), and this contamination allows prejudice, or unexamined Parent data, to be externalized as true.

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To paraphrase Socrates, who held that 'the unexamined life is not worth living', we may

say the unexamined Parent is not worth basing one's life on: It might be wrong.

The Emancipated Adult

The goal of Transactional Analysis is to enable a person to have freedom of choice, the freedom to change at will, to change the responses to recurring and new stimuli. Much of this freedom is lost in early childhood, marking the onset, according to Kubie, of the 'neurotic process'. This process is one which is continually involved in solving archaic problems to the exclusion of dealing effectively with today's reality.

The roots of the neurotic process may lie in a ... phenomenon of infancy and/or early childhood - the formation of stereotyped behavioural patterns or 'fixations'. These may include affective displays - for example, crying, screaming, night terrors; instinctual performance or nonperformance - for example, eating, ruminating, vomiting, regurgitating, food refusals, compulsive food choices, patterns of excreting or retention; respiratory patterns such as breath holding, and so forth; or patterns of general actions - for example, tics, head bumping, rocking, sucking and so forth.

Not one of these acts is in and of itself inherently abnormal. As long as it can change freely in response to changing external or internal cues, it remains normal. It is the loss of the freedom to change which marks the onset of the neurotic process. {1} [Italics mine]

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Restoration of the freedom to change is the goal of treatment. This freedom grows from knowing the truth about what is in the Parent and what is in the Child and how this data feeds into present-day transactions. It also requires the truth, or the evidence, about the world in which he lives. Such freedom requires the knowledge that everyone with whom one deals has a Parent, an Adult, and a Child. It requires persistent exploration not only into 'knowable' areas but also into indeterminate areas, which can best be understood in terms of another function of the Adult, that of probability estimating. One of the realities of the human predicament is that we frequently have to make decisions before all the facts are in. This is true of any commitment. It is true of marriage. It is true of voting. It is true of signing a petition. It is true of the establishment of priorities. It is true of those values we embrace independently - that is, with the Adult.

The Child in us demands certainty. The Child wants to know the sun will come up every morning, that Mother will be there, that the 'bad guy' will always get it in the end; but the Adult can accept the fact that there is not always certainty. Philosopher Elton True blood states:

The fact that we do not have absolute certainty in regard to any human conclusions does not mean that the task of inquiry is fruitless. We must, it is true, always proceed on the basis of probability, but to have probability is to have something. What we seek in any realm of human thought is not absolute certainty, for that is denied us as men, but rather the more modest path of those who find dependable ways of discerning different degrees of probability. {2}

This is in the explorative realm of philosophy and religion, into which we will look further in Chapter 12, 'P-A-C and Moral Values'.

The Adult in our businessman, confronted with the housing petition, can admit that the outcome of his signing is uncertain. If he signs, he may be ridiculed. If his I'm ok - you're ok position includes all persons, regardless of race or religion, he may be attacked by prejudiced persons who are in a position to hurt his income, his membership in the golf club, or his relationship with his wife. But he also can weigh the possibility that his contribution to a solution to racial unrest in his community may lead to a significant reduction in the problem. In the long run it may bring stroking to his Child in the form of a reputation as a man with integrity and courage.

When the Parent or the Child dominates, the outcome is predictable. This is one of the essential characteristics of games. There is a certain security in games. They may always turn out painfully, but it is a pain that the player has learned to handle. When the Adult is in charge of the transaction, the outcome is not always predictable. There is the possibility of failure, but there is also the possibility of success. Most important, there is the possibility of change.

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What Makes People. Want to Change?

Three things make people want to change. One is that they hurt sufficiently. They have beaten their heads against the same wall so long that they decide they have had enough. They have invested in the same slot machines without a pay-off for so long that they finally are willing either to stop playing or to move on to others. Their migraines hurt. Their ulcers bleed. They are alcoholic. They have hit the bottom. They beg for relief. They want to change.

Another thing that makes people want to change is a slow type of despair called ennui, or boredom. This is what the person has who goes through life saying, 'So what?' until he finally asks the ultimate big 'So What?' He is ready to change.

A third thing that makes people want to change is the sudden discovery that they can. This has been an observable effect of Transactional Analysis. Many people who have shown no particular desire to change have been exposed to Transactional Analysis, through lectures or by hearing about it from someone else. This knowledge has produced an excitement about new possibilities, which has led to their further inquiry and a growing desire to change. There also is the type of patient who, although suffering from disabling symptoms, still does not really want to change. His treatment contract reads, I'll promise to let you help me if I don't have to get well'. This negative attitude changes, however, as the patient begins to see that there is indeed another way to live. A working knowledge of P-A-C makes it possible for the Adult to explore new and exciting frontiers of life, a desire which has been there all along but has been buried under the burden of the not ok.

Does Man Have a Free Will?

Can man really change if he wants to, and if he can, is even his changing a product of past conditioning? Does man have a will? One of the most difficult problems of the Freudian position is the problem of determinism versus freedom. Freud and most behaviourists, have held that the cause-and-effect phenomenon seen in all the universe also holds true for human beings, that whatever happens today can theoretically be understood in terms of what has happened in the past. If a man today murders another man, we are accustomed by Freudian orientation to look into his past to find out why. The assumption is that there must be a cause or causes, and that the cause or causes lie somewhere in the past. The pure determinist holds that man's behaviour is not free and is only a product of his past. The inevitable conclusion is that man is not responsible for what he does; that, in fact, he does not have a free will. The philosophical conflict is seen most dramatically in the courts. The judicial position is that man is responsible. The deterministic position, which underlies much psychiatric testimony, is that man is not responsible by virtue of the events of his past.

We cannot deny the reality of cause and effect. If we hit a billiard ball and it strikes several more, which then are impelled to strike other billiard balls in turn, we must accept the demonstration of the chain sequence of cause and effect. The monistic principle holds that laws of the same kind operate in all nature. Yet history demonstrates that while billiard balls have become nothing more than what they are as they are caught in the cause-and-effect drama, human beings have become more than what they were. The evidence of evolution - and of personal experience - convinces us that man has become more than his antecedents.

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Will Durant has commented on how nineteenth-century French philosopher Henri Bergson relentlessly pressed the issue of determinism to absurdity:

Finally, was determinism any more intelligible than free will? if the present moment contains no living and creative choice, and is totally and mechanically the product of the matter and motion of the moment before, then so was that moment the mechanical effect of the moment that preceded it, and that again of the one before... and so on, until we arrive at the primeval nebula as the total cause of every later event, of every line of Shakespeare's plays, and every suffering of his soul; so that the sombre rhetoric of Hamlet and Othello, of Macbeth and Lear, in every clause and every phrase, was written far off there in the distant skies and the distant aeons, by the structure and content of that legendary cloud. What a draft upon credulity ... There was matter enough for rebellion here; and if Bergson rose so rapidly to fame it was because he had the courage to doubt where all the doubters piously believed. {3}

The answer lies not in refuting the cause-and-effect nature of the universe or of man's behaviour but in looking elsewhere than in the past for cause. Man does what he does for certain reasons, but those reasons do not all lie in the past. In a television interview I was asked my opinion as to why Charles Whitman climbed a tower at the University of Texas and shot scores of people on the ground below. After a recount of a number of possible reasons I was asked, 'But why do some people do a thing like this and others do not?' This is a valid question. If our position is that we simply don't know enough about the past history of an individual then we still hold to the position that somewhere 'back there' lies an answer.

There is an essential difference, however, between a man and a billiard ball. Man, through thought, is able to look to the future. He is influenced by another type of causal order which Charles Harteshorne calls 'creative causation'. {4} Elton True-blood elaborates this point by suggesting that causes for human behaviour lie not only in the past but in man's ability to contemplate the future, or estimate probabilities:

The human mind ... operates to a large extent by reference to final causes. This is so obvious that it might seem impossible to neglect it, yet it is neglected by everyone who denies freedom in employing the billiard ball analogy of causation. Of course, the billiard ball moves primarily by efficient causation, but man operates in a totally different way. Man is a creature whose present is constantly being dominated by reference to the nonexistent, but nevertheless potent, future. What is not, influences what is. I have a hard problem but the outcome is not merely the result of a mechanical combination of forces, which is true of a physical body; instead I think, and most of my thought is concerned with what might be produced, provided certain steps could be taken. {5}

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Ortega defines man as 'a being which consists not so much in what it is as in what it is going to be'. {6} True blood points out

... it is not enough to say that the outcome is determined even by one's previous character, for the reality in which we share is such that genuine novelty can emerge in the very act of thinking. Thinking, as we actually experience it daily, is not merely awareness of action, as it is in all epiphenomena list doctrine, but is a true and creative cause. Something happens, when a man thinks, which would not have occurred otherwise. This is what is meant by self-causation as a genuine third possibility in our familiar dilemma. {7}

Thus we see the Adult as the place where the action is, where hope resides, and where change is possible.