The document discusses the concept of autonomy in the context of transactional analysis, emphasizing self-governance, responsibility, and the ability to make independent choices. It outlines essential components of autonomy, including awareness, spontaneity, and intimacy, and highlights the challenges individuals face in achieving true autonomy due to societal conditioning. Additionally, it connects autonomy with the development of an integrated adult ego state, aligning with theories from various psychologists.

1. Autonomy

2. Prepared By
Manu Melwin Joy
Research Scholar
School of Management Studies
CUSAT, Kerala, India.
Phone – 9744551114
Mail – manu_melwinjoy@yahoo.com
Kindly restrict the use of slides for personal purpose.
Please seek permission to reproduce the same in public
forms and presentations.

3. Content
• Introduction.
• Autonomy.
• Awareness.
• Spontaneity
• Intimacy.
• Integrated Adult.

4. “Man Ultimately decides for himself!
And in the end, education must be
education towards the ability to
decide. “
Victor Frankl

5. Autonomy
• Achieving autonomy is
the ultimate goal in
transactional analysis.
• Being autonomous
means being self
governing, determining
one’s own destiny, taking
responsibility for one’s
own actions and feelings
and throwing off patterns
that are irrelevant and
inappropriate to living in
the here and now.

6. Autonomy
• Every one has the
capacity to obtain a
measure of autonomy.
• But in spite of that fact
that autonomy is a
human birthright, few
actually achieve it.

7. “Man is born free, but one of the first things he
learns is to do as he is told and he spends the
rest of his life doing that. Thus his first
enslavement is to his parents. He follows their
instructions forevermore, retaining only in some
cases, the right to choose his own methods and
consoling himself with an illusion of autonomy.“
Eric Berne

8. Autonomy
According to Berne, autonomy is manifested
by release or recovery of three capacities.
Awareness
Spontaneity
Intimacy

10. Awareness
Awareness is the capacity to see, hear, feel,
taste and smell things as pure sensual
impressions, in the way a new born infant
does.

11. Awareness
• Awareness is knowing what is
happening now.
• An autonomous person is aware.
• This person peels away the layers
of contamination from the Adult
and beings to hear, see, smell,
touch, taste, study and evaluate
independently.

12. Awareness
• Knowing that life is temporal, an aware person
appreciates nature now.
• An aware person experiences that part of the universe
know to the self, as well as the mystery of those
universes yet to be discovered.

13. Awareness
• An aware person is all
there and fully aware.
• People who are aware
know where they are,
what they are doing and
how they feel about it.

14. “If we could first know where we
are and whither we are tending, we
could better judge what to do and
how to do it.“
Abraham Lincoln

15. Awareness
• The first step to integration is
awareness, with the Adult as
executive.
• A person who becomes aware
of acting like a tyrant or a sulk
can decide what to do about
this behavior – whether to
knowingly keep it, own it and
be it or whether to throw it in
the pail along with the rest of
the garbage, if that is what he
or she decides it is.

16. “Everything is grounded in
awareness.“
Frank Perls

17. Spontaneity
Spontaneity means the capacity to choose from a
full range of options in feeling, thinking and
behaving.

19. Spontaneity
• An autonomous person is
spontaneous and flexible –
not foolishly impulsive.
• This person sees the many
options available and uses
what behavior seems to be
appropriate to the situation
and to her or his goal.

20. Spontaneity
• A spontaneous person is
liberated, making and
accepting responsibility by
personal choices.
• He uses or recaptures the
ability to decide
independently.
• Within realistic limitations,
the person knowingly take
responsibility for a self
imposed destiny.

21. “Decisionless is evil – evil is the aimless
whirl of human potentialities without
which nothing can be achieved and by
which , if they take no direction but
remain trapped in themselves, everything
goes awry .“
Martin Buber

22. Spontaneity
• A person must do more than
make a decision. Unless the
person acts on that decision, it
is meaningless.
• Only when one’s inner ethics
and outward behavior match
is a person congruent and
whole.
• A spontaneous person is free
to do his own thing but not at
the expense of other through
exploitation and / or
indifference.

23. Intimacy
• Intimacy means open
sharing of feelings and
wants between you and
another person.
• It is expressing the natural
child feeling of warmth,
tenderness and closeness
to others.
• Many people suffer from
an inability to express
such closeness.

24. “…Americans need so many more therapist
than the rest of the world need because they
just don’t know how to be intimate – that they
have no intimate friendships, by comparison
with the Europeans and that, therefore, they
really have no deep friends to unburden
themselves.”
Abraham Maslow

25. Intimacy
• Autonomous people risk
friendships and intimacy
when they decide it is
appropriate.
• This does not come easy to
people who have restricted
their affectionate feelings
and are not in the habit of
expressing them.
• In fact, they may feel
awkward, even phony, when
they first try to go against old
programming.

26. Intimacy
• In the process of
developing the capacity
for intimacy, a person
becomes more open –
learns to let go,
becomes more self
revealing by dropping
some of the masks – but
always with the
awareness of the Adult.

27. Intimacy
• Autonomous people
are concerned with
being.
• They allow their own
capacities to unfold
and encourage
others to do the
same.
• They are not
concerned with
getting more, but
with being more.

28. Autonomy
• Berne implied that
autonomy was the
same thing as freedom
from the script.
• It can be defined as the
behavior, thinking or
feeling which is a
response to here and
now reality, rather than
a response to the script
beliefs.

29. Autonomy
• Does autonomous
means being in adult
all the times?
• An autonomous
person engages in
problem solving
instead of passivity.

30. Integrated Adult
• People moving toward
autonomy expand their
personal capacities for
awareness, spontaneity
and intimacy. As this
occurs, they develop
integrated adult ego
states.
• Filtering more and more
Parent and Child material
through their Adult and
learning new behavior
patterns are parts of the
integrating process.

31. Integrated Adult
• The person in the process of
integration takes
responsibility for everything
he or she feels, thinks and
believes and also either has
or develops an ethical
system of life – Ethos.
• In addition, the person
develops social graciousness
and experiences the
emotions of passion,
tenderness and suffering –
Pathos.

32. 0
P
A
C
Unaware and
contaminated
Adult
0
P
A
C
Adult
awareness of
Parent and Child
0
P
A
C
Adult
Re –alignment and
De - contamination

33. 0
P
A
C
Adult
Filtering of
behavior
0
P
A
C
Integration
process

34. Integrated Adult
• The integrated Adult appears
to be similar to what Erich
Fromm calls the fully
develop person and to what
Abraham Maslow calls the
self actualized person.
• In addition to using their own
talents and intellects,
Maslow claims, self
actualizing people take
responsibility for others as
well as for themselves and
have a childlike capability for
awareness and pleasure.

35. “ To be nobody but yourself in a world
which is doing its best, night and day, to
make you everybody else – means to fight
the hardest battle which any human being
can fight; and never stop fighting.”
E E Cummings

36. Thank You

37. Other TA topics available on slideshare
1. Strokes - http://www.slideshare.net/manumjoy/strokes-24081607.
2. Games People Play - http://www.slideshare.net/manumjoy/psychological-
games-people-play.
3. Structural Analysis - http://www.slideshare.net/manumjoy/the-ego-state-model.
4. What is TA? - http://www.slideshare.net/manumjoy/what-ta-is
5. Cycles of Development - http://www.slideshare.net/manumjoy/cycles-of-
developement-pamela-levin-transactional-analysis.
6. Stages of Cure - http://www.slideshare.net/manumjoy/stages-of-cure.
7. Transactions - http://www.slideshare.net/manumjoy/transactions-33677298.
8. Time Structuring - http://www.slideshare.net/manumjoy/time-structuring.
9. Life Position - http://www.slideshare.net/manumjoy/life-position.
10. Autonomy - http://www.slideshare.net/manumjoy/autonomy-33690557.
11. Structural Pathology - http://www.slideshare.net/manumjoy/structural-pathology.
12. Game Analysis - http://www.slideshare.net/manumjoy/game-analysis-33725636.
13. Integrated Adult - http://www.slideshare.net/manumjoy/integrated-adult.
14. Stroke Economy - http://www.slideshare.net/manumjoy/stroke-economy-
33826702.