ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how certain alternative psychological and social positions already embraced within transactional analysis are likely to clash with the contextual picture of people and their problems that the wider book presents. The first position, identified as the myth of internal sufficiency, holds that people always and already have inside them what they need to autonomously overcome their difficulties. Whilst appreciating the historical and clinical reasons for this picture being adopted, the chapter argues that its adoption leads us to downplay how much context contributes to our efficacy whilst simultaneously downgrading outsight and learning as pathways to change. The second position, referred to as liberal scepticism, takes itself to follow postmodernism in seeing the path to liberation as requiring the tearing down of truth claims and a subsequent celebration of pluralism. The chapter raises concerns about the consequences of embracing such a position for the prospect of a necessary, enabling and authoritative social awareness. It concludes by proposing that a vision of selfhood drawn from pragmatist philosophy of a situated self with inescapable responsibility for its beliefs about the world offers a more plausible support for autonomy and social and political awareness.
