The Second Order Parent - (P2)
Portions of this ego state are copied whole from others. It is essentially a collection of traditions and values upon which decisions regarding nurture and protection of self and others are based. P2 exists mostly as recordings of the behaviors of the person's parents, grandparents, older siblings, and other early parental authority figures tagged and cross-referenced with various feelings and value judgements. It is not a dynamic cognitive or emotional construct like the Adult and Child, but rather, it is an association matrix for governing behavior and forms part of what is colloquially referred to as the conscience. P2 develops gradually over time to take over for the Primitive Parent (P1) in the Child. The developmental diagram, shown previously, represents a near-ideal scenario. In most cases, however, it probably grows in fits and starts. Sex-role programming in men and other influences may cause underdevelopment and partial or total exclusion of P2 from the personality. When growth does occur, it may be by either active or passive processes, and may continue through adulthood and later life as a person's experiences either add to or subtract from its repertoire of behavior when new information, role models, and challenges requiring nurture and/or protection skills are encountered.
The tendency toward the development of the second order Parent is genetic but the actual behaviors are learned. Positive affirmative teaching, rules for caring for self and others, along with controlling, limiting, and disciplinary modes are contained within this ego state. It appears that, with practice, selection for appropriateness between conflicting messages recorded from different sources can be mediated through the Adult. This is important, if we wish to prevent making the same mistakes as our parents. Many signs have been described in other works on TA that indicate that P2 is in the executive of the personality. The most salient features are rigid posture and an abundance of judgmental terms such as "should" and "ought" finding their way into conversation.
In many persons the boundary between the Parent and the Adult may become indistinct or confused and contamination of the Adult with delusions is said to have occurred. Delusions then are "things that a person treats as though they were her own ideas, based upon observation and judgement, whereas, in reality, they are ideas imposed upon her by her parents, which are so ingrown that she thinks they are part of her real self".(1) A strong, healthy, and balanced Parent, combined with an Adult free from contamination, are prerequisites for effective self-care and for parenting for autonomy and self-esteem.
The Second Order Adult - (A2)
This is a person's rational awareness. In terms of the Five Selves, this ego state corresponds to the half of the intellectual self concerned with linear thought and association. Sensory data are perceived, interpreted, and conscious responses are formulated by A2. Decisions which require logic and calculation are based in the Adult which gathers and processes information into conclusions and predictions. Steiner describes its perceptions as "diagrammatic, black and white, often in two dimensions, and from several points of view at once."(2) Activities which normally occur with A2 in the executive include planning, evaluating, calculating, lecturing, and non-emotional parts of discussions. The Adult doesn't experience emotion directly, but may be aware of feelings associated with the Parent and the Child ego states.
A2 normally begins to grow around the end of the first year of life with the beginnings of language skills. It develops rapidly between then and the onset of adolescence taking over conscious control steadily from A1. The Adult continues to develop at varying rates throughout life. Sex-role programming, especially in women, may, in some cases, retard its development. This may result in its partial or total exclusion from the personality if a person's ability to think for herself is discounted by significant others early in life.
This ego state is quite commonly contaminated with parental programs (delusions) and/or ideas from the Child (illusions) and decontamination of the Adult is a major mandate in therapy. Finally, the second order adult acts as a mediator for the other ego states and shares its language and interpretive skill with them. Many believe that A2 should be the strongest ego state and in general control of the personality for proper functioning.
The Second Order Child - (C2)
The Child is principally the functioning remnant of one's early personality as a youngster before primary control shifted to the Adult and Parent. Since it is a complete human personality unto itself, it also contains three subdivision corresponding to the Parent, Adult, and Child of the youngster generally before ten years of age. Each of the three first order ego states contained within the Child grew at different rates and may have ceased forward development at different times. Therapists have developed techniques for determining the relative ages of the components of the Child. The Child has its own internal seat of executive control allowing only one of its inner ego states to dominate its character at any given instant. Local information processing is via the Adult in the Child (A1) though it may have some access to information from A2. When the Child assumes conscious control of the personality, it borrows the speech machinery from the Adult. The "software" which it uses to run this faculty, however, are the limited vocabulary and language skills of childhood which is apparent in its childlike manner of expression. Posture is more relaxed and its forms are less inhibited than with the "grown-up" ego states.
The Child adds color and excitement to our lives as well as oppression. Child ego state behavior may be either compliant, rebellious, or free and uninhibited by the strictures of social control. Often it becomes excluded from the personality, however, in favor of "maturity." Since tremendous psychological energy is invested in the needs and desires of our internal Child, exclusion may trap titanic forces over time which may slowly warp the personality or even come exploding forth into our lives with disastrous results. Nervous physical behaviors such as tics and twitches, usually indicate that feelings within the Child which it needs to express are being suppressed. If the boundaries are not distinct, ideas from the Child may contaminate the Adult where these illusions may be accepted as mature and rational. The person may expend a great deal of energy attempting to justify them as such. Decontamination of the Adult and deconfusion of the Child must be undertaken in therapy. It is absolutely essential, if a person is to maintain autonomy, spontaneity, a healthy capacity for enjoyment, and intimacy within relationships, that the person get in touch with the inner Child and nurture the expression of its feelings.
The First Order Child - (C1)
The Child within the Child ego state is often called the Natural Child. This is our original autonomous and spontaneous humanity with which we were born and which defined us before our potential became attenuated and restricted by the socialization process. Of the six ways in which people structure time, intimacy is the most genuine method of relating to others and produces a much higher number of strokes in a given amount of time. It is free of the defenses built into other types of time structuring and has the greatest potential for increasing well-being. Intimacy flows from the Natural Child, as does the capacity for spontaneous self-expression.
In order to maintain our own OK'ness and to effectively invite OK'ness in others, we must cherish and nurture this beautiful child within. If we peal back the layers of the onion of socialization, this Child is who we really are. The essence of the person. For this reason, we should look at this ego state slightly differently from the others; not as something so much that grows inside of us, but rather, as something that has always been there and with which it is crucial that we maintain conscious contact.
It appears that the first order Child is often more than a single entity. It may contain several distinct personality aggregates corresponding to the child that we were during the major transitional periods of very early childhood. As a person becomes adept at the use of the inward eye of introspection, he may discover discreet childlike entities within, perhaps a neonate, an infant, and a toddler. These are the persons we were when we could have become anything that we desired. Developing an understanding and loving contact with this tiny inner person is the key to unlocking the totality of our human potential.
The First Order Adult - (A1)
The Adult within the Child ego state is a youngster trying to understand and organize its experiences. Commonly referred to as the Little Professor, it is the source of intuition and of the creative awareness. It was the mediator of childhood that sought to reconcile the autonomous tendencies of the Natural Child with what it perceived as the reality of its small world and with the information programmed in by its parents. By way of this process the Little Professor constructs the life script that will define the behavior of the adult person.
Because of gestalt type processing, A1 can detect the feelings of others with remarkable speed and accuracy. For this reason, it seems to have a most extraordinary understanding of the various aspects of interpersonal relationships – manifest in the ability to easily discern the hidden meaning behind communication and the ulterior motivations behind behavior. The first order Adult (A1) often catches that which slips past the second order Adult (A2).
In other circumstances, however, it may operate with incomplete information and thereby make errors of extrapolation when complex information is required which it may not possess. The artificiality and dysfunctionality of scripted behavior is a direct result of theses types of errors as we will see presently. It is important, within the therapeutic context, to determine the age of the Little Professor. The more developed A1 is; the more efficiently the person may begin to understand his/her script and assume responsibility for deprogramming it from the personality.
The First Order Parent - (P1)
There exists more controversy regarding this ego state among different schools of TA ideology than with almost any other subject. The Parent within the Child is essentially the conscience of the youngster we once were. In other words, it is a recording of a very young person's perceptions of the rules of behavior from observation of its parents. It also contains a self-image and a world-view programmed into the child by the words and actions of mother and father.
To a very small child, its parents seem huge, powerful, and somewhat mystical beings. Their harsh and oppressive behaviors have a much greater impact upon its small mind than the milder, more positive ones, because of the fear they inspire. Hence, it is just these very phenomena that often predominate within the programming of P1. This can result in a grossly distorted world-view and self-image for the offspring. Powerful injunctions, attributions, and drivers from the critical Parent or angry, confused, or fearful Child of the mother or father carry immense weight for the youngster who has no frame of reference from which to properly evaluate this type of behavior. Also, there may exist considerable discrepancy between the message perceived by the child and the one the child's parent may have intended. When these sorts of messages are continually reinforced over months and years, the oppressive influence upon the developing personality can be enormous. If the injunctions were against feeling, loving, of trusting others, or of one's own ability to think or right to exist, the later life behavior may be quite self-destructive.
This communication gap can be seen in the following examples. A person, tired from a days work, angry or confused from an argument, might admonish a child "don't run and make noise in the house!," which could by internalized by the child as "don't be happy, or have fun, or be spontaneous!" Very young children are not fully capable of controlling their behavior and these could be age-inappropriate demands which will stifle spontaneity. For a balanced parent whose own needs have been met, these antics are a source of joy and wonder rather than irritation. "Not now Johnny!," harshly intoned without explanation, may be understood as "go away, your needs are an inconvenience to me!," or, more seriously with emotional distancing, as the injunction don't exist! One can readily imagine the destructive effects to self-image and esteem of "you're a very bad girl(boy)!" or attributions of evilness or "sinfulness."
Poor parenting is transmitted across the generations from P1 of the mother or father to P1 of the youngster. The scared, angry, or cruel nature of P1 in the Child ego state of the parents may contain enough energy to dominate their personalities when they are emotionally overextended, creating a nasty spirited pseudo parent from this P1 dominated Child ego state which can be responsible for a great deal of powerful negative programming in the youngster. As Steiner puts it, "P1 is a little child trying to act like a parent, whereas, P2 is a parent."(2) In behavioral terms, P2 is confident, competent, and loving in its nurture and protection. If fearful, angry, or confused, the primitive Parent within the Child often fails in the attempt to nurture or protect, becoming instead a "Pig-Parent" and inviting not-OK'ness in others.
Many uncomplimentary names have been bestowed upon this misunderstood child ego state such as: witch, ogre, electrode, and pig-parent. The term "adapted child" is somewhat better because it at least leaves open the idea of a "little angel" as well as a "little devil." Some groups such as Steiner's Radical Psychiatry group view P1 as a fixated ego state; not easily altered, or perhaps, not even worth the effort, even if it is possible to modify its nature. This is probably because the impacted and ingrown nature of the programming is resistant to the tools that have been tried and new tools may be necessary. I cannot believe that effectively "throwing away" a natural part of the personality is a beneficial or even an entirely rational approach. Of course, in many cases, some therapeutic intervention is in order to prevent P1 from exerting its influence over the rest of the personality until modification is possible. It seems to me, however, that, just as the creative and intuitive abilities of A1 compliment the linear logic of A2, there must be a similar complimentary relationship that should exist between P1 and P2. I believe that a certain amount of the magical thinking, quixotic idealism, and heroic sense of justice that defines the conscience of a well-nurtured child could be a valuable source of visionary planning skills for the adult human being.
On Homunculus and Characterization of Ego States
The term homunculus is from the Latin diminutive Homin, meaning "little man," and it appears in several contexts throughout the scientific literature. More specifically, it has been used critically to deride certain interpretations of TA personality structure theory which seem to personify ego states as little people inside our heads. While it is certainly true that ego states are not people as such, they are subsets of the personality at large. They are coherent aggregates of thought and emotion that can act and respond as discrete entities, and they are capable of assuming conscious and independent control of the personality, producing characteristic patterns of behavior.
One of my ego states is one facet of me as a person – an incomplete version (much like a cartoon characterization) of me which is responsible for certain aspects of my behavior. If each of these incomplete images is layered, one atop another, like a stack of film transparencies, and "held up to the light," so to speak, the composite image that results is the whole personality that defines me. Because of this, I believe that it is not only not harmful, but that it is, in fact, quite useful for a person trying to achieve self-understanding to try to see each of their ego states as an individual character, to envision its origin and development during childhood, to understand which thoughts and feeling reside there, to recognize how this entity provides for a certain part of his or her personality, and, most importantly, to come to an understanding of how the nature of this ego state and its effect upon behavior may be modified to bring about some change that is desired.
No doubt, there will be those who disagree with my thinking here, but I strongly encourage characterization of ego states as an important and effective part of the self-explorative therapeutic process.
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