| Transactional analysis (TA) and redecision therapy (RT) have, at their core, the concept that two types of parental messages, injunctions and drivers, play a crucial role in shaping our lives, with injunctions playing the more pernicious role. The investigator posits that if injunctions are operational social realities, there must be some phenomenological consistency, some observable evidence from which their existence can be consistently inferred, and that persons trained to recognize injunctions should agree with one another that a given person in a given situation is operating under a given injunction.;In order to investigate this hypothesis, two participants were given similar in-depth interviews. The interviews were videotaped and their texts were transcribed. Thirteen TA experts were given copies of the typed transcripts and videotapes. They were asked to indicate how strong they perceived the evidence to be that each participant operated under each of 12 injunctions and to mark the printed transcripts where they saw evidence of each injunction.;In spite of significant agreement among the experts on the existence or nonexistence of several injunctions, the results did not confirm the hypotheses. Most experts identified several injunctions at work in each participant, and there was no significant agreement among the experts as to which injunctions were operating for a given participant. Furthermore, the experts did not identify the same transcript passages as indicating the presence of injunctions.;This apparent failure to confirm the presence of injunctions as observable phenomena on which trained evaluators can agree may be due to limitations in the study. One of these limitations aligns with the belief of redecision therapists that a child plays an active role in accepting and interpreting an injunction. If that is true, it would indicate that a therapist needs the active cooperation of a participant to identify injunctions than is possible in a semi-structured interview.;The author posits additional interpretations of the data: (1) It would be not inconsistent with the data to surmise that most children receive most injunctions and that most of us labor under many of them. (2) Experts' selections of injunctions may reflect their own personal world experiences or varying professional understandings of injunctions. (3) The broad nature of injunction categories may forestall experts from identifying them in cases where the injunctions are at work in a more limited way. (4) The tendency of some participants to idealize parent figures may indicate that therapists must take care not to imply they are blaming a parent as they go about working with the participant to uncover which injunctions are at work.;Each of these interpretations point to fruitful ground for future study. |
