by Richard G. Erskine in
in Life Scripts: A Transactional Analysis of Unconscious Relational Patterns. Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.
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Life Scripts: A Transactional Analysis of Unconscious Relational Patterns
Page: 1 | CHAPTER ONE |
Page: 1 | Life scripts: |
Page: 1 | a complex set of unconscious relational patterns |
Page: 1 | Scripts are often developed by infants, young children, adolescents, and even adults as a means of coping with disruptions in significant dependent relationships that repeatedly failed to satisfy crucial developmentally based needs. |
Page: 1 | Life scripts are a result of the cumulative failures in significant, dependent relationships! |
Page: 1 | life scripts are unconscious systems of psychological organization and self-regulation primarily formed from implicit memories |
Page: 2 | Eric Berne, in articulating the theory of transactional analysis, termed these unconscious patterns, |
Page: 2 | “script” |
Page: 2 | Fritz Perls, who co-developed Gestalt therapy, also described such self-confirming, repetitive conclusions and patterns (1944) and called it a “life script” |
Page: 2 | Alfred Adler referred |
Page: 2 | to these |
Page: 2 | as “life style” |
Page: 2 | Freud used the term “repetition compulsion” to describe similar phenomena |
Page: 3 | In psychoanalytic self-psychology the phrase “self system” is used to refer to recurring patterns of low self-esteem and self-defeating interactions |
Page: 4 | “script cure” involves an internal reorganization and new integration of affective and cognitive structures, undoing physiological retroflections, decommissioning intro-jections, and consciously choosing behaviour that is meaningful and appropriate in the current relationship or task |
Page: 5 | Injunctions and decisions: explicit memory |
Page: 6 | The script system provides a model of how a life script is formed from explicit decisions, implicit and pre-symbolic experiential conclusions, fixated patterns of self-regulation, and/or introjec-tions, |
Page: 6 | The script system describes how the life script is operational now as core beliefs about self, others, and the quality of life. |
Page: 7 | Implicit memory: cumulative misattunements and experiential conclusions |
Page: 7 | Not all life scripts are based on parental injunctions or script decisions, |
Page: 7 | conclusions based on lived experience account for a major portion of life scripts. |
Page: 8 | Implicit script conclusions may unconsciously express developmental needs that were not satisfied, |
Page: 8 | Children who grow up with, or go to school in, an environment of psychological neglect, prolonged affective misattunements, or repetitive ridicule, |
Page: 8 | fail |
Page: 8 | to develop a sense of competency, self-definition, or the capacity to make an impact on others. |
Page: 8 | The result may be a pervasive sense of shame and the conviction that “something’s wrong with me” |
Page: 9 | Cumulative trauma |
Page: 9 | repetitive negative or neglectful events, recognized that relationship failure is the primary cause. |
Page: 10 | “A severe consequence of cumulative trauma,” says Lourie (1996), “is the loss of trust in and knowledge of self resulting from the vast assortment of parental misattunements … that the child endures” |
Page: 11 | The person may lose contact with his or her own sensations, feelings, needs, thoughts, or memories, as well as interrupting interpersonal contact with others. |
Page: 11 | serve to distract the person from the implicit memory of loneliness, emptiness, and misattunement that the child may have actually experienced. |
Page: 11 | The experience of prolonged neglect of these relational-needs interrupts internal contact and forms the core of implicit script conclusions. |
Page: 12 | Life scripts that have an origin in either acute or chronic trauma, or even cumulative neglect, are almost always physiological— |
Page: 13 | An effective and complete psychotherapy aimed at script cure must identify and ameliorate the physiological restrictions, inhibitions, and body tensions that interfere with affect, expression of current relational-needs or the maintenance of good health. |
Page: 14 | Many aspects of a person’s life script may be the result of intro-jecting parents’, teachers’, or significant others’ feelings, bodily reactions, attitudes, script beliefs, behaviours, and relational patterns. |
Page: 16 | Elizabeth: an unconscious search for love |
Page: 16 | The following case example of Elizabeth’s unconscious search for her mother’s love is an illustration |
Page: 16 | Our psychotherapy focused on making her unconscious affect and physiological experience conscious and attending to her developmental needs for a dependable, consistent, |
Page: 17 | Elizabeth’s longing for love was unconscious. She was only aware of the emptiness inside |
Page: 18 | She expected me to be critical of her. |
Page: 18 | During this phase of therapy, she became conscious of having made an explicit script decision between the ages of ten and twelve to be cautious of everyone because “people are critical”. |
Page: 19 | By the third year of therapy, I gently and persistently enquired about Elizabeth’s early relationship with her depressed mother. |
Page: 19 | Elizabeth had no concept of relational-needs, only the longing, empty searching for “something”. |
Page: 20 | I was facilitating her identification and understanding of the unconscious script conclusion that “life is an empty search”. |
Page: 20 | Putting this unconscious conclusion into words in a number of sessions became important |
Page: 20 | it gave meaning to her longings, emptiness, and search |
Page: 22 | life scripts are a desperate and creative attempt to self-regulate while managing and adjusting to the failures that occurred in significant and dependent relationships throughout life. |
Page: 23 | Script cure is the result of an integration of affect, cognition, and physiology so that important aspects of one’s life are available to consciousness, and that behaviour, health maintenance, and relationships are the result of flexible choice rather than compulsion or inhibition. |
Page: 55 | When parting is not such sweet sorrow: “Mourning and melancholia,” projective identification, and script analysis1 |
Page: 55 | Helena Hargaden |
Page: 56 | A relational understanding of projective identification |
Page: 58 | Duncan’s earliest experiences |
Page: 59 | The theory of projective identification provides a framework for thinking about experiences that, by their very nature, require us to think the unthinkable, while a relational perspective endorses the role of mutuality in this transferential process. But theory can never prepare us for those times when we are caught up in the eye of the storm. |
Page: 60 | For instance, the theme that stalked the therapy from day one was the issue of ending. |
Page: 64 | How to convey those moments of meeting? |
Page: 66 | the main difference is that melancholia is unconscious: “that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious” (Freud, 1917e, p. 254). |
Page: 239 | CHAPTER ELEVEN |
Page: 239 | Life scripts: an existential perspective Birgitta Heiller and Charlotte Sills |
Page: 240 | for the purpose of our argument, the existential context into which Berne placed the concept of script has been all but lost. We propose to consider “script” from a different angle: as an attempt to come to terms with existential realities. People make choices in response to external events, genetic givens, bad or good “luck”. The parental programming of script can help children manage the unmanageable, thereby containing both the daemonic and the constructive, as Berne implied in the above quote. Crucially, we pose that the children of each generation are asked to struggle with the existential questions that their parents could not accept or tolerate. |
Page: 240 | With our shared interest in relational, or “two-person,” psychology (Stark, 1999), we will also take a relational lens on the existential perspective. |
Page: 291 | CHAPTER THIRTEEN |
Page: 291 | The script system: an unconscious organization of experience |
Page: 291 | Marye O’Reilly-Knapp and Richard G. Erskine |
Page: 291 | The script system |
Page: 291 | The script system was designed to provide a way to analyse how the script is active in life today. |
Page: 292 | the script system identifies how the decisions, conclusions, reactions, and/or introjections are unconsciously opera-tionalized in current life as core beliefs, overt behaviours, fantasies and obsessions, internal physical sensations, and reinforcing memories. |
Page: 292 | Script beliefs |
Page: 292 | Script beliefs are often a condensed expression of an unexpressed life story. |
Page: 292 | Script beliefs, in and of themselves, are not pathological; rather, they represent a desperate, creative process of meaning making. |
Page: 292 | script beliefs provide an unconscious organization of experience. |
Page: 292 | They become the self-fulfilling prophecy through which the person’s expectations are inevitably proved to be true because they create a sequence of “repetitious relational experiences” |
Page: 293 | (a) to avoid re-experiencing unmet needs and the corresponding feelings suppressed at the time of script formation, |
Page: 293 | (b) to generalize the unconscious experience of self in relationship with others, |
Page: 293 | (c) to create a homeostatic self-regulation, and |
Page: 293 | (d) to provide a predictive model of life and interpersonal relationships |
Page: 293 | life script |
Page: 293 | does provide psychological balance and homeostasis; |
Page: 293 | it maintains continuity with the past while it also provides the illusion of predictability |
Page: 293 | Any disruption |
Page: 293 | in the predictive model of the script system produces anxiety. |
Page: 293 | To avoid |
Page: 293 | discomfort, |
Page: 293 | people organize current perceptions and experiences |
Page: 293 | to maintain a life script and to justify their behaviour |
Page: 301 | therapy continued, |
Page: 301 | After two years, he was able to articulate the narrative of his life script. |
Page: 304 | Because of the homeostatic self-stabilizing function of life scripts, reinforcing experiences serve as a feedback mechanism to further strengthen script beliefs |
Page: 304 | Memories that negate the script beliefs tend to be rejected or forgotten because they would challenge the beliefs and the whole self-regulating, homeostatic process. |
Page: 306 | Each person’s set of script beliefs provides a subjective self-regulating mental framework for viewing self, others, and the quality of life. |
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