Script Analysis

Script analysis is the method of uncovering the 'early decisions, made unconsciously, as to how life shall be lived'. It is one of the five clusters in transactional analysis, involving 'a progression from structural analysis, through transactional and game analysis, to script analysis'. Berne focused on individual and group psychotherapy but today, transactional analysis and script analysis is considered in organisational settings, educational settings and coaching settings.

The purpose of script analysis is to aid the client (individual or organizational) to achieve autonomy by recognising the script's influence on values, decisions, behaviors and thereby allowing them to decide against the script. Berne describes someone who is autonomous as being 'script free' and as a "real person". For organizations, autonomy is responding to the here and now reality, without discounting the past, the present or the possibilities for the future.

Script analysis at the individual level considers that 'from the early transactions between mother, father and child, a life plan evolves. This is called the script...or unconscious life plan'. Script analysts work on the assumption that a person's behavior is partly programmed by the script, 'the life plan set down in early life. Fortunately, scripts can be changed, since they are not inborn, but learned'. Many of these same people developing a life plan, start businesses or work into leadership positions in organisations. Owners and CEO's bring with them their life script – and have tremendous influence on the fate of the organisation.

Eric Berne introduced the concept of the script in 'the first complete presentation, and still the fundamental work on transactional analysis...Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy [1961]', since when 'definitive studies of the origins and analysis of scripts are being conducted by a number of Transactional Analysts'.

In that work, Berne described 'a true long-term script, with all three aspects of protocol, script proper, and adaptation'. For Berne, 'the household drama which is played out to an unsatisfactory conclusion in the first years of life is called the protocol...an archaic version of the Oedipus drama'. Thereafter 'the script proper...is a unconscious derivative of the protocol', which in later life, as 'compromised in accordance with the available realities...is technically called the adaptation '.

Berne himself noted that 'of all those who preceded transactional analysis, Alfred Adler comes the closest to talking like a script analyst,' with his concept of '"the life plan...which determines his life-line"'.

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