The tools of the mind become burdens when the environment which made them necessary no longer exists.

- Henri Bergson

All people are structurally alike in that they all have a Parent, an Adult, and a Child. They differ in two ways: in the content of Parent, Adult, and Child, which is unique to each person, being recordings of those experiences unique to each; and in the working arrangement, or the functioning, of Parent, Adult, and Child. This chapter is devoted to an examination of these functional differences. There are two kinds of functional problems: contamination and exclusion. {1}

At the end of an initial hour in which I had explained P-A-C to a sixteen-year-old girl who was withdrawn, uncommunicative, culturally deprived, a school dropout, and referred by the Welfare Department, I asked, 'Can you tell me what P-A-C means to you now?' After a long silence she said, 'It means that we are all made up of three parts and we'd better keep them separated or we're in trouble'.

The trouble when they are not separated is called contamination of the Adult.

Ideally (Figure 30) the P-A-C circles are separate. In many people, however, the circles overlap. The (a) overlap in the figure is contamination of the Adult by dated, unexamined Parent data which is externalized as true. This is called prejudice. Thus, beliefs such as 'white skins are better than black skins', 'right-handedness is better than left-handedness', and 'cops are bad' are externalized in transactions on the basis of pre-judgment, before reality data (Adult) is applied to them. Prejudice develops in early childhood when the door of inquiry is shut on certain subjects by the security-giving parents. The little person dares not open it for fear of parental rebuke. We all know how difficult it is to reason with a prejudiced person. With some people one can present a logical and evidential case regarding racial issues or left-handedness or any other subject that the person holds a prejudice about; yet, the Parent in these people steadfastly dominates a portion of the Adult, and they will surround their prejudicial cases with all kinds of irrelevant arguments to support their position. As illogical as their position may seem, the rigidity of their position is in its safety.

As illustrated in Chapter 2, it is safer for a little child to believe a lie than to believe his own eyes and ears. Therefore, one cannot eliminate prejudice by an Adult discourse on the subject of the prejudice. The only ways to eliminate prejudice are to uncover the fact that it is no longer dangerous to disagree with one's parents and to update the Parent with data from today's reality. Thus, treatment can be seen as separating Parent and Adult and restoring the boundary between them.

The (b) overlap in Figure 30 is contamination of the Adult by the Child in the form of feelings or archaic experiences which are inappropriately externalized in the present. Two of the most common symptoms of this kind of contamination are delusions and hallucinations. A delusion is grounded in fear. A patient who said to me, 'The world is hideous', was describing how the world seemed to him as a small child. A little person who was in constant fear of brutality at the hands of angry, unpredictable parents can, as a grownup, under stress, be flooded by the same fear to the extent that he can fabricate 'logical' supporting data. He may believe that the door-to-door salesman coming down the street is really coming to kill him. If confronted with the fact that it is only a salesman, this person may support his fear by a statement such as 'I knew it the minute I saw him. It's him! He's wanted by the FBI. I saw his picture in the post office. That's why he's coming to get me'. As in the case of prejudice, this delusion cannot be eliminated by a simple statement of the truth that this is, in fact, a salesman. It can only be eliminated by uncovering the truth that the original threat to the Child no longer exists externally. Only as the Adult is decontaminated is it able to compute reality data.

Hallucinations are another type of contamination of the Adult by the Child. An hallucination is a phenomenon produced by extreme stress, wherein what was once experienced externally - derogation, rejection, criticism - is again experienced externally, even though 'no one is there'. A recorded experience 'comes on for real' and the person 'hears' voices that existed in a past reality. If you ask him what the voices say, he characteristically will describe the content as words of criticism, threat, or violence. The more bizarre the hallucination the more bizarre was life for him as a child. Bizarre hallucinations are not hard to understand when we consider the actual types of abuse, verbal and physical, to which some children are subjected.

In addition to contamination there is another functional disorder that explains how we differ: exclusion.

Exclusion is manifested by a stereotyped, predictable attitude which is steadfastly maintained as long as possible in the face of any threatening situation. The constant Parent, the constant Adult, and the constant Child all result primarily from defensive exclusion of the two complementary aspects in each case. {2}

This is a situation in which an Excluding Parent can 'block out' the Child or an Excluding Child can 'block out' the Parent.

Typical of the Parent-Contaminated Adult with a Blocked-Out Child (Figure 31) is the man who is duty-dominated, always working late at the office, all business, impatient with family members who want to plan a skiing trip or a picnic in the woods. It is as if, at some point in his childhood, he was so utterly quashed by serious, stern, duty-bound parents that he found the only safe way to proceed through life was to turn his Child off completely, or to block it out. He had found, through experience, that every time he let it out there was trouble: 'Go to your room'; 'Children should be seen and not heard'; 'How many times must I tell you...'; 'Crow up!' If this little person also was rewarded for perfect conformity, diligent effort, compliance, and doing exactly as he was told, the path of wisdom appeared to be total conformity to the Parent and total blocking out of childlike impulses.

This type of person has very little happiness recorded in his Child. He probably never will be able to let his happy Child out, because he has very little happy Child. However, he can be helped to appreciate that his position is not fair to his own family and to his own children and that, indeed, his marriage may break up if he persists in trying to block out the Child in his wife and children. He can, through purposeful effort by his Adult, take a trip with his family, cut down his office hours, listen lovingly (an Adult discipline) to his children's fantasies, and participate in their life. He can, with his Adult, establish a value of being loving or of preserving his family. He will not change the nature of his Parent or create a happy Child which is not within him, but he can achieve the insight which makes it possible to build a satisfactory life in the present.

A more serious difficulty, particularly to society, is presented by the Child-Contaminated Adult with a Blocked-Out Parent (Figure 32). This condition develops in the person whose real parents, or those who fulfilled the parental role, were so brutal and terrifying or, in the other extreme, so doltishly indulgent that the only way to preserve life was to 'shut them off' or block them out. This is typical of the psychopath, the person who at some point early in life gives up the first position, I'm not ok - you're ok, and assumes a new one, I'm ok -you're not ok. This little person concludes correctly that his parents are in fact not ok. They are so not ok that he excludes them entirely. In the extreme he may do this by homicide. If not this, he at least excludes them psychologically, so that, in a sense, he does not have a Parent. He excludes the painful Parent, but he also excludes what little 'good' there is in the Parent. Such a person does not have available to his current transactions any tapes which supply data having to do with social control, appropriate 'shoulds' and 'should nots', cultural norms, or what, in one sense, may be referred to as conscience. His behaviour is dominated by his Child, which through the contaminated Adult, manipulates other people to his own ends. His Adult is able to estimate consequences, but the consequences he is concerned with have to do with whether or not he will be caught and seldom contain elements of concern for others. Although there may be exceptions, the general rule is that we do not learn to be loving if we have never been loved. If the first five years of life consist totally of a critical struggle for physical and psychological survival, this struggle is likely to persist throughout life.

One way to determine whether or not a person has a Parent is to determine the existence of feelings of shame, remorse, embarrassment, or guilt. These feelings, which exist in the Child, turn on as the Parent 'beats on the Child'. If these feelings do not exist, it is probable the Parent has been blocked out. It is a safe assumption that if a man who has been arrested for child-molestation does not express any feelings of remorse or guilt - apart from the fact that he was caught - he does not have a functioning Parent. This has prognostic implications for rehabilitation. The treatment of such a person is difficult. One cannot evoke a Parent where one does not exist. A number of experiments have been conducted with monkeys who were raised not by their real mothers but by surrogate mothers in the form of wire dummies covered with terry cloth. During infancy the little monkeys formed strong attachment to these terry-cloth surrogates. However, when these monkeys, reared by the terry-cloth mothers, reached maturity, their capacity for reproduction and rearing their own young was minimal. {3} They were deficient in experience about mothering, often thought to be instinctual. Mothering was not recorded in the Parent, so nothing replayed.

The prognosis for the person with a blocked-out Parent is not quite so dire in that, unlike the monkey, he has a 12-billion-cell computer with which to assess reality and construct answers even if none were recorded early. A criminal psychopath can understand his (P)- A-C to the extent that his Adult can direct his future activities in such a way that his pattern of crime, arrest, and conviction can change. He may never have an operational Parent to back up his Adult, but his Adult can become strong enough to carry him through a successful life wherein he gains the approval and even esteem of others. It is on this possibility that rehabilitative efforts in the field of corrections must be based.

Figure 33. The blocked-out, or decommissioned, Adult (psychosis)

The person who has a blocked-out Adult (Figure 33) is psychotic. His Adult is not functioning, and therefore he is out of touch with reality. His Parent and Child 'come on straight', frequently in a jumbled mixture of archaic data, a jumbled replay of early experiences that do not make sense now because they did not make sense when they were recorded. This was observable in a female hospital patient whose singing of tent-meeting hymns (Parent) was interspersed with obscenities relating to body functions (Child). The content was bizarre, but seemed to replay an old Parent-Child conflict between good and bad, should and should not, salvation and damnation. The content of these verbal productions quickly revealed a great deal about her Parent and Child. The fact that her Adult was gone indicated the severity of the conflict. 'The struggle is too hard; I will not try '. This is not to say that there was any comfort in her giving up. She was at the mercy of the same terrifying feelings which existed in her as a child.

The first step in treating a psychotic patient is to reduce these feelings of terror. Basic to the recovery of the patient is that from his first encounter with the therapist he sense the demonstrated position I'm ok - you're ok. In 1963 my associate, Gordon Haiberg, reported the effect of this stated position on psychotic patients he was then treating at Stockton State Hospital:

Treatment begins with the first exchange of glances between the therapist and patient, when the therapist enters with the basic position I'm ok - you're ok. Psychotics are yearning to establish a more meaningful relationship with people ... When these usually very perceptive individuals are confronted by an individual who assumes the position I'm ok - you're ok this is a new and intriguing experience for them. The Adult is 'hooked' by this human assumption and begins asking, 'How come you're on the outside and I'm on the inside?' The question is not answered immediately but at the intuitively correct time after the therapist has had the opportunity to establish what is the most destructive manoeuvre or game the person is using. The patient is simply and directly informed, for example: 'You scare the hell out of people.'... He is frankly told he is ok, he is important because of the uniqueness of his being a human being, and he starts to gain hope. When the Adult can begin processing data, listening, learning, and helping in decisions, the innate regenerative powers begin operating on their own and the healing process begins. {4}

My ongoing hospital groups, which at any given time contain from ten to twenty patients, frequently include psychotic patients. In the setting of a group, wherein I'm ok - you're ok is the stated contract, the psychotic patient feels supported, stroked, and reassured, and the stage is set for the return of the Adult.

In one hospital group one woman got up repeatedly throughout the hour to straighten her skirt and pull it down below her knees. Though this activity could not go unnoticed, no one made anything of it, no one looked disapproving; the group simply went on with its discussion. The hour included thirty minutes of the teaching of P-A-C, followed by discussion. At the end of the hour the man next to the woman said to her, 'You know, I kept track, and you got up to straighten your skirt nineteen times'.

With some surprise and delight in discovery she said, 'I did?'

She was able to make this Adult response without suspicion of threat. The emergence of the Adult, however tenuous, is the beginning of the re-establishment of contact with reality, and the stage is set for the learning of P-A-C, through which further discovery can be made by the patient about his own behaviour.

In conjunction with group treatment, drugs are administered to aid in mood elevation and the calming of extreme agitation. In cases of severe depression, electric shock treatment is administered. The effect of shock treatment is dramatic. After two or three treatments the patient becomes cheerful, relaxed, and willing to talk. The treatment temporarily knocks out the painful, archaic recordings, allowing the recommissioning of the Adult. With the Adult again functioning the patient can begin to learn P-A-C, to understand where the archaic feelings come from and how he can turn them off himself.

Periodic Blocking-Out in the Manic-Depressive Personality

A person with a constant Parent, a constant Child, or a constant Adult, which exclude the other two parts of the personality, responds to events around him in a fairly fixed and predictable way. His mood remains constant, too.

Most of us have mood changes as each part of our P-A-C makes its contribution to our thinking and behaviour. Some days we feel ok and some we don't. Usually, if we try, we can discover the reason why we are 'up' or 'down'. Sometimes the reasons are elusive or do not seem to be related to any specific signal in the present. Many people experience mood  changes along with the change of seasons. The holiday seasons frequently produce depression, as is clearly illustrated by sharply increased hospital admissions at Christmas. The coming of the autumn season produces elation for many people as the old back-toschool tapes replay and we 'smell again' the exciting odours of pencil boxes, oiled floors, and crayons. These same smells may produce depression in others, depending on what happened in those early school years. Many old recordings replay to produce the 'highs' and 'lows'  we all experience. Though elusive, these reasons for mood changes can usually be uncovered with a little inquiry by the Adult. Most of us ride out the sad feelings and enjoy the good, because the Adult remains in charge and keeps our behaviour appropriate.

There is a condition in which these mood changes are extreme and produce exaggerated behaviour over which the Adult has no control. The Adult not only is unable to control behaviour, it is also unable to discover the cause of the mood change. This condition is found in the manic-depressive personality. A manic-depressive person periodically undergoes severe and unexplainable shifts in mood. In the manic, or high, phase he feels euphoric, on top of the world, and full of energy. He may be talkative and aggressive. It is as if his Child is running away with him.

The Parent does not seem to have a restrictive influence in this phase, and the person feels he can do no wrong. He jumps from one object to another, spending his elation in one activity, only to drop it for another even more risky joy, as if he is, in a sense, testing how far he can go in his pleasure binge. The problem is that, although he feels great, his Adult is impaired, or contaminated, and his behaviour is not realistic. He may become obnoxious to others, and in the extreme, he may have to be restrained or hospitalized. Eventually he 'comes down' and resumes what seems to be a stable period which may continue for a long time. During this time his Adult is in control of his behaviour, which appears to be realistic and appropriate.

Then for no reason of which he is aware he sinks into a period of extreme depression. The ok has disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared. Life seems empty, his energy is gone, and his Parent has returned with stored-up criticisms and old oppressions. Again the Adult is impaired, and the person is immobilized in his depression.

The manic-depressive differs from others who experience ordinary everyday highs and lows by the fact that these mood shifts seem to be unexplainable. Also these mood shifts are periodical and recurring.

To understand what is operating in the manic-depressive cycles it is essential to understand that both the omnipotence of the manic phase and the unworthiness of the depressive phase are feelings which are recorded in the Child. Both are responses to archaic recordings in the Parent In either phase the internal dialogue is Parent-Child. In the depressive stage the Parent is 'beating on the Child', and in the manic stage the Parent is applauding.

As in the analysis of all feelings, it is essential to ask, What was the original transaction? In the manic-depressive personality we frequently find a strong, if not overbearing, Parent, which contains contradictory commands and permissions recorded very early - probably, on the basis of Piaget's observations, during the first two years of life - when the Adult in the little person is first engaged in working out a system of cause-and-effect. At this crucial time if there are overwhelming inconsistencies and contradictions, the child may give up on an intellectual elaboration of the structure of causality (it doesn't make sense any way I took at it) and may instead come to regard what happens to him as a matter of time instead of the relationship of objects and events. The manic-depressive individual cannot report what precipitated either his high or his low, as was the case in the beginning. His mood is as unpredictable now as it was then, because the punishing and praising parents were unpredictable. Freida Fromm-Reichmann noted that a person who shows manic and depressive swings was, as a rule, brought up under the shadow of great inconsistency. The Adult in the little person could not make sense of the periodic changes in his parents, so the Adult abdicated, leaving with a final attempt at formulating a position: I'm not ok and I'm not sure about you. The child did come to recognize, however, that 'it's about time for something to happen' or 'all good things must come to an end'. They did then; they will now.

The fact that there were good things, very good things, which replay in the manic phase, would seem to indicate that the parent (usually mother, since she was the most influential person in the first two years) did, in fact, provide great stroking and approval in addition to crushing rejection. Her response to the child was not primarily related to what the child did, but to her own shifts in mood or dramatic changes in personality.

Consider how difficult it is for a two-year-old boy to understand what is going on when mother shifts periodically and totally from one kind of a person to another kind of a person. A number of reasons can account for this kind of change. One is alcoholism. Mother is 'high'. She cuddles and strokes him and tickles him until he screams. She plays tag with him around the table. She throws him in the air. She claps her hands and laughs hysterically as he swings the cat by the tail. Wheel Life is glorious! Then mother passes out. For hours the little boy is abandoned. He is hungry. He is empty. She is gone. The stroking is gone. How can he get it back? What happened? He doesn't know. Later she wakes up sick. She can't stand the sight of him. She pushes him away. He cries and comes to her again. She hits him. What happened? What did he do? It had felt so good. Now it's so bad. He screams himself to sleep. Tomorrow comes. Mother is high again. Here we go. Last night it was bad. Now it's good again. And of course it will get bad  again. I don't know why, but in time-, everything will change. It's terribly good (manic) and terribly bad (depressive). Terrible describes both states because of the experienced reality that change will come suddenly, totally, and unpredictably.

Other conditions in the parents produce these kinds of shifts - drug addiction, religiosity (excessive, excluding, mystical religious preoccupation), or psychosis; or, mother may have had a manic-depressive personality, responding not to alcohol, but to old recordings, which she is now reproducing in her youngster. Manic-depression runs in families. It is easy to see how it is transmitted. In confusing settings such as these the child's not ok was magnified. Possible salvation was seen in trying to placate the parent: I can be ok if. But the if kept changing. (Last night when I swung the cat by the tail she smiled and hugged me. This morning I did it again, and she beat me.) As the child grows older these kinds of inconsistent responses are reinforced. The child is severely punished for using 'bad' words; but that night he hears his drunken father regale the boys at the poker party with tales of his boy's four-letter prowess, finally calling on the youngster, insisting (against the prior injunction) to 'tell Uncle Harry the joke you told'.

The manic-depressive personality thus can be seen as a person whose developing Adult was shut out of the early process of constructing a system of cause-and-effect with relation to parental approval or rebuke. Since in the early years this approval or rebuke was demonstrated most frequently by oral gratifications or denials, the mood swings of the manic-depressive grownup also are related to the 'life is rich' feeling of the manic phase and the 'life is empty' feeling of the depressive phase.

As in the treatment of all emotional problems it is necessary to engage the Adult in the examination of feelings and to encourage the Adult to ask why? The greatest difficulty in treating the manic-depressive personality is that very early the child gave up asking why, in fact decided never to ask again. Fromm-Reichmann notes that manic depressives have a 'lack of ability for correct observations, a lack of interest, early training, and talent for introspective observation and understanding'.

These observable traits are products of the early decision. Treatment consists in returning the Adult to its once-abdicated executive position with regard to causality. Since the boundary has broken down between Adult and Child and the person is overwhelmed by feelings, it is often necessary to give the patient assistance through the administration of either tranquillizing or antidepression drugs, or electric shock therapy. Once the Child is calmed, the Adult begins to function and can be helped to uncover the reasons for his 'unexplainable' mood shifts. In the beginning the child was at the mercy of 'them'. Now the person can come to recognize that what he does can determine praise or rebuke. The praise or rebuke he receives today may not be as intense as that which he received in childhood - praise may not produce the manic high or rebuke the depressive low - but he is free of the extreme anxiety of unpredictability, which is present even in the manic phase.

There is a type of bland individual whose recordings in the Parent and Child are so insipid that he intrinsically lacks the raw materials for a colourful personality. This most often expresses itself clinically in the person who has a vague depression (happiness is for other people) or simply is bored with life. His parents were dull, inarticulate, and ambivalent. There was rarely punishment and rarely reward. There was little enthusiasm about anything. As a little person he was not exposed to the excitement of an external world, he seldom had relationships with other children, and though he was a 'good' boy, in that he didn't cause particular trouble, he was not a child that anyone would notice. His Adult correctly perceived reality, but the reality itself was dull. He may well have grown up to have an emancipated Adult but one that sees no positive value in reaching out to other people. (This kind of value is generally first seen in the Parent, if indeed it is a value of the Parent.) His personality is much like a computer. While others enjoy themselves at a party he leafs through a magazine in a corner doing the only thing he knows how to do - sift data. If he ultimately comes to treatment his question may be something like, 'Isn't there really more than this?' Though he is no problem to society, he is a problem to himself. His reality is limited in the same way that his reality was limited early in life.

In a sense Alfred North Whitehead's statement applies here: 'Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness'. If 'moral' is thought of in terms of a value system and if 'not being a bore' or 'being interesting to other people' or 'being creative and productive' are seen as positive values, it is dear that a person whose earliest impressions of life were dull will, unless some spectacular relationships appear, be dull himself.

It is true there are other reasons for boredom and for being a bore. A little person who begins life with vast curiosity about why smoke goes up, why rain comes down, who made God, and who made me and who consistently is given pat answers that only add to his confusion and turn out later to be wrong, eventually quits asking, quits exploring, quits being interested, and begins being bored. His computer begins shutting down on vast areas of interest because the answers to his questions have only added to his confusion.

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This type of boredom is often evidenced among high school and college students in the setting of the church in which they grew up. Their boredom grows from the simplistic answers they frequently are given in the quest for truth, the inhibitions which are imposed on their following truth (evidential, observable data) where it takes them, and the edict that they must choose between truth and faith, as if these were mutually exclusive. Not all clergymen give simplistic answers; yet unexamined dogma still persists as the rule in many religious communities. This will be further elaborated in Chapter 12, 'P-A-C and Moral Values'.

In the foregoing we have seen how people differ by virtue of different structural arrangements of Parent, Adult, and Child. Most of these differences have appeared as clinical problems. We differ also in 'healthy' ways. The definition of health is an emancipated Adult that is consistently in charge of every transaction. This means that in every transaction the Adult takes data from the Parent, from the Child, and from reality and comes up with a decision as to what to do. The richer the fund of data to be drawn from, the more possibilities for fulfilment exist. The little child whose early experiences included unhampered exploration of the pots and pans, the mud along with the daisies, pets, friends, trips to the farm, evenings of story-telling, tradition surrounding holidays, toys to manipulate, records to listen to, and open and friendly conversations with unhurried parents will have a far richer fund of data in his Parent and a great many more positive feelings in his Child than the little person who is isolated and overprotected. The little person who early tests ways of overcoming the not ok position strengthens his Adult and is encouraged to further exploration and mastery. He then becomes a 'bright child', bringing to himself the praise and self-confidence which inspire him to be brighter. The fact that he brings credit to the family does not minimize the fact that he brings credit to himself, unless, in the process, his parents apply undue pressure and put demands upon him that are truly not in his self-interest.

Through understanding our own P-A-C, we can come to understand not only what is in the Parent and the Child, but also what is not there. If the girl who bemoans the fact that 'I am plain and dull... that's just the way I am' can appreciate the deficiency in her Parent and Child because her introduction to life was plain and dull, she can then be free, with her Adult, to reach out to reality to discover what is not plain and dull. It may take her a while to catch up, and she won't turn into the life of the party overnight, but she can at least be helped to see that she has a choice. It has been said that blaming your faults on your nature does not change the nature of your faults. Thus, 'I am like that' does not help anything. 'I can be different' does.