How The Core Concepts Were Assembled
by Claude Steiner
The examination of the core concepts and
competencies of transactional analysis began during Gloria Noriega’s
presidency and, as promised in his candidacy statement, the process was
continued by George Kohlrieser when he honored me with his appointment as Chair
the Presidential Task Force to Define Core Transactional Analysis Concepts.
At the ITAA conference in April 99 in
Hawaii, the Task Force was changed from a Presidential Task Force to a Task
Force of the Development Committee under the Chairmanship of Curtis Steele.
This clarified the goal of the project, namely to produce a document which can
eventually be published and become part of the ITAA’s collection of
products on sale to the public.
When I was assigned this project it was
not clear what the difference between core concepts (a recently developed
notion) had in common with the venerable notion of canon which was advanced by
Eric Berne in Structure and Dynamics of
Organizations and Groups.
It quickly became clear, however, that it
was not our task to define the canon, which in is being worked out by the
Training and Certification Council of the ITAA, but to gather, in a crisp,
brief, yet sophisticated statement, an understanding about what transactional
analysis is, as it exists in the hearts and minds of the ITAA membership,
today.
This implied that the core concepts would
not include all of Berne’s ideas, nor necessarily all the ideas that have
been added to the body of knowledge that is TA today. It was to be, in a way, a
common denominator of ideas, those ideas with which the majority of ITAA
members are comfortable; in short a consensus about transactional analysis with
which, most in our organization can agree.
The purpose as we saw it was to collect in
one place a list of concepts and a narrative that weaves them together in a
manner which would make TA understandable to professionals, students and lay
people who are unfamiliar with TA and have an interest in acquiring a clear
conception of what it, in fact, currently is.
The process was approached in five
steps:
- Assembling the
task force. This was actually the most painstaking portion of the process.
I hand-picked a group of knowledgeable, e-mail capable member/veterans from
five continents and approached them to join the Task Force. A number of members
I approached declined for a number of reasons, disagreement with the process
being one of them. Eventually I received agreement from a group of seven listed
on the cover plus Claudie Ramond from France who was not able to maintain
Internet contact and eventually dropped off.
- Collecting
candidates for core concepts. We collected nine different lists of
potential candidates for core concepts. The first list was collected at the
Hawaii ITAA conference in 1999. We also collected lists from each member of the
Core Concepts Task Force, from ITAA forum members on the Internet and from any
member of the ITAA who chose to supply concepts that he or she considered to be
core concepts of Transactional Analysis.
- Ranking and
choosing core concepts. Every concept mentioned was listed and the task
force members plus several outsiders were asked to rank the concepts on a scale
of 1-5 as to their appropriateness as core concepts. This yielded a list of 41
concepts which received clear approval with only a few ambiguities to be
resolved, namely that some concepts that had received the EB award did not rank
high enough to qualify as core concepts. In an ensuing discussion the Task
Force came to a provisional agreement as to what concepts to include in the
narrative.
- Writing the
Narrative. With the core concepts in hand I proceeded to weave the
narrative that you read in the following pages. I did this in three parts, each
part being sent back to Task Force members and posted to an interested
discussion group on the internet. Every query, objection and suggestion was
read and considered and the large majority incorporated to some extent into the
final product. Further feedback was requested at the SF99
conference.
- Completion of the narrative and translation.
After final comments were collected and introduced into the document the
result was translated by native speaking transactional analysts into several
languages.
Finally the completed document and translation were presented
to the ITAA Board of Trustees at the Halifax 2000 conference in August 2001 and
permission was obtained to post the documents on the ITAA web site.
(Core Concepts)
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