I'm OK – You're OK

I. What has become of a bestseller

In 1967, Harper & Row in New York published a slim book by an American psychiatrist who, until then, had been unknown outside professional circles. The author, Thomas Anthony Harris, had completed his medical studies at Temple University, served as a naval physician, risen to become Chief of the Psychiatry Branch of the US Navy, and for years had run his own practice in Sacramento, California. His book bore the curious title I'm OK — You're OK. It sold slowly at first. Five years after publication, in 1972, it suddenly climbed onto the New York Times bestseller list, remained there for almost two years, and subsequently sold worldwide more than fifteen million copies in twenty-five languages. For roughly a decade it was among the most influential self-help books of the Western world.

Today, hardly anyone still knows it. Anyone who tries to give it to younger readers will often meet polite incomprehension. The book looks old. It speaks in a tone that the times have left behind. It contains examples from American family life of the early seventies that seem foreign today — men in neckties, housewives at ironing boards, children on fixed routes to school. And yet the text holds, once one breaks through its surface. What it says is not outdated. It is only packaged in a language that needs to be newly translated today.

This essay tries to lay bare the central point of the book in such a way that it can stand on its own feet. Without the dust jacket of the German Rowohlt edition of 1975, without the conversational tone of the American original, without the didactic examples that today are more likely to repel than to attract a reader. What remains when the packaging is removed? What remains is a tool that few tools of popular psychology surpass.

II. Eric Berne in the background

The theoretical foundation of the book does not come from Harris. It comes from Eric Berne, a Montreal-born, Yale-trained psychiatrist who in the fifties and sixties developed his own school of psychotherapy in San Francisco: Transactional Analysis. Berne had turned away from orthodox psychoanalysis, finding its vocabulary too opaque and its treatment practices too prolonged. He sought a language patients could understand without years of consultation with an analyst. His most famous book — Games People Play, 1964 — became a worldwide success but opened up only part of the theory.

Harris, a friend and colleague of Berne's, was the first, six years after Games People Play, to translate the full structure of transactional analysis into a language fit for daily use. What Berne had formulated as a specialist for specialists, Harris brought to the reading tables of the middle class. Berne supplied the substance; Harris supplied the effect. Together, for about two decades, they carried a movement that today has largely receded, but whose concepts have entered ordinary language — the talk of the inner child, of life scripts, of games between adults, is a late echo of this movement.

III. The three ego states

The first central construction Harris presents is that of the three ego states. In every person, according to Berne and Harris, three different modes of functioning are active. These are not philosophical concepts. They are observable patterns of behaviour and feeling that at different moments take over the controls.

The Parent ego state is the inner repository of all the messages a person took in during the first five or six years of life from caregivers. It contains the rules, the prohibitions, the moral judgements, the tones of voice, the gestures of the adults who surrounded the child. These recordings are not filtered. They are stored exactly as they came in. Whoever speaks as an adult in the Parent mode is not, in fact, speaking for themselves. They are playing back a tape from the first years of life. Harris formulates it clearly in the English edition: the Parent is a huge collection of recordings in the brain of unquestioned or imposed external events that, once recorded, are not later erased.

The Child ego state is the parallel recording of what the child felt during the same years. It is the reactions, the fears, the joys, the shames, the enthusiasms the small child experienced in the situations its parents shaped. These traces, too, remain. They, too, are reactivated again and again in adult life — usually without the person noticing.

The Adult ego state, the third, is the only mode that does not play back a recording. It is the function that takes in present data, examines and evaluates them, and arrives at its own conclusions. It is what most people mean when they speak of themselves — though it is often the weakest of the three ego states, because the other two are louder and more densely present in the foreground.

The point of the construction is not that these three ego states exist. That would be mere classification. The point is that they continuously communicate between people — and that most interpersonal conflicts are not conflicts between people but between ego states that miss each other.

IV. The four life positions

The second central construction is that of the four life positions. They are the core of the book and the reason it was necessary at all, after Harris had departed from Berne in important respects. Berne had used the term position in his writings but had not systematically developed it. Harris developed it. The four positions are:

First: I'm not OK — You're OK. This is, for Harris, the universal starting position of every human being. It arises in the first years of life, in which the small child inevitably experiences itself as small, helpless, and dependent on others, while those others appear large, competent, and powerful. The recording of this early asymmetry endures throughout life. Most people, Harris argues, remain in this position. They are successful, educated, sometimes even powerful — and carry deep within themselves the unconscious conviction that the others are really OK and that they themselves are not quite OK. This is the position that causes most of the suffering in the modern world.

Second: I'm OK — You're not OK. This is the position that emerges when a child has been so badly mistreated that it can only survive by reversing the inner position. It excludes its caregivers as not OK and asserts itself against them. From the outside this position looks like self-confidence. It is not. It is the last defence of a child that has experienced the world as hostile, and it produces in adult life the suspicious, the must-be-harder-than-others, the persecutors, and the tyrants.

Third: I'm not OK — You're not OK. This is the most hopeless of the four positions. It emerges when a child grows up so completely isolated and uncared for that it builds trust neither toward others nor toward itself. This position lies at the root of many depressions, many addictions, many lives in which someone destroys both themselves and others.

Fourth: I'm OK — You're OK. This is the only position not taken in childhood. The first three result from experiences the child passively absorbed. The fourth is a decision that must be made in adult life. It demands that the Adult ego state become strong enough to examine the recordings from childhood and replace them with one's own present data. It is not reached through a one-time epiphany but through patient, often lifelong work on oneself.

Harris formulates a sentence in the English edition that carries the point: The first three positions are unconscious, having been made early in life. The fourth, I'm OK — You're OK, because it is a conscious and verbal decision, can include not only an infinitely greater amount of information, but the willingness to play with new ideas, fresh approaches, new questions, and creative answers.

V. Why the construction holds

What still carries Harris's book more than half a century later is not its theoretical elegance. The theory is coarse-grained. It recognises only three ego states where real personality knows dozens. It recognises only four positions where real lived experience knows gradations and combinations. It recognises no differences of gender in socialisation, no class differences in upbringing, no cultural variations in family structures. It is a roughly simplified map of a complicated landscape.

The book holds anyway — and perhaps because it is so coarse-grained. It does not offer a complete theory of the human psyche. It offers a tool that can be understood in an afternoon and applied throughout a life. That is a rare quality in psychological literature. Most books are either too simple to explain anything or too complicated to be understood without a teacher. Harris struck the narrow middle.

The tool he offers has three properties that make it suitable for daily use. First, it is verbal — it can be applied with words, without needing images, dreams, or bodily exercises. Second, it is relational — it refers to encounters with others, not to isolated self-reflection. Third, it is non-pathologising — it does not divide people into healthy and sick but describes modes that every person has and between which everyone shifts. This makes the book democratic in the best sense: it claims no one as permanently sick, and it releases no one into a definitive health.

VI. Where the book reaches its limit

It would be too friendly a reading to ascribe only strengths to the book. It has clear limits, and they should be named, because today they matter more than they did at the time the book was written.

First, Harris understands the individual as the carrier of the four positions. He does not understand that societies can systematically push whole layers of their members into one of the first three positions. The I'm not OK — You're OK position of an industrial worker who feels small toward his supervisor is not only the result of his personal childhood. It is also the result of an economic structure that teaches him every day anew that he is the small one and the other is the big one. Whoever does not read this structural component along with the rest applies Harris incorrectly.

Second, Harris understands growing up as an individual achievement. He does not understand sufficiently that this achievement requires conditions that not every person finds in every life situation. Whoever works in a low-wage sector and on the side raises three children does not have the same conditions for working on their own Adult ego state as a wealthy member of the middle class with a therapist and free time. This asymmetry does not appear in Harris's book.

Third, Harris is, in his trust in reason, optimistic in a way the following decades have shaken. He believes that anyone who has reached the fourth position can also hold it. The experiences of the last fifty years — the economic crises, the ecological threats, the political erosions — suggest that the fourth position remains labile, that it is repeatedly recaptured by the first three, that the Adult ego state has trouble asserting itself even in adult life. That was less visible in 1967 than it is today.

Where the book is in need of supplement, other books fill the gaps. Erich Fromm's To Have or to Be of 1976 brings in the social dimension that Harris lacks. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning of 1946 brings the dimension of meaning-giving life that is not strong enough in Harris. Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction of 1979 brings the structural asymmetry that Harris overlooks. Harris alone is not sufficient. Harris together with two or three other voices yields a library that can help an adult reach and hold the fourth position.

VII. Whom it can still serve today

Anyone who reads the book today will first be repelled by the language. The original American is conversational in a way that has since become almost archaic. The examples are old. The psychological vocabulary hovers between technical and chatty without committing to either tone. Whoever expects a literary book will be disappointed.

But whoever is looking for a tool will find one. It is a tool for people who suspect that their reactions to encounters are not their own but repetitions of old recordings. It is a tool for people who repeatedly find themselves in the same conflicts in relationships and do not understand why. It is a tool for people who feel grown up and yet notice that a part of them is constantly a frightened child or a stern father or an anxious mother. It is a tool for naming, distinguishing, and thereby making these parts manageable.

For such readers Harris's book is still one of the best tools that exist. It demands no therapy, no teacher, no community. It demands only an afternoon of attention and the willingness, a few days later when the first conflicts arise, to think back to the four positions and to ask which one one finds oneself in — and which one the other is in. That is not everything. But it is much more than most books offer.

Whoever passes the book on today gives not a work. They give a tool that is of little use without its packaging and worthless with it. The packaging is 1972. The tool is timeless. Whoever can give it in such a way that the recipient receives the tool and is allowed to discard the packaging has done something good.