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Cultural Parent

Culture can be understood as patterns of thought and emotion shared by a group that guide behavior, both explicitly and implicitly. Cultural scripts and norms are deeply ingrained and can powerfully influence individuals without their awareness. When a group forms a community, they develop a shared 'personality' including etiquette (values), technicalities (procedures), and character (emotions) similar to an individual's ego states. This cultural personality can prevent full self-expression and be viewed as contaminations that interventions could help raise awareness of and decontaminate.

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Saiprabha Koneru
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290 views2 pages

Cultural Parent

Culture can be understood as patterns of thought and emotion shared by a group that guide behavior, both explicitly and implicitly. Cultural scripts and norms are deeply ingrained and can powerfully influence individuals without their awareness. When a group forms a community, they develop a shared 'personality' including etiquette (values), technicalities (procedures), and character (emotions) similar to an individual's ego states. This cultural personality can prevent full self-expression and be viewed as contaminations that interventions could help raise awareness of and decontaminate.

Uploaded by

Saiprabha Koneru
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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THE IMPACT OF CULTURE ON INDIVIDUALS AND GROUPS

Introduction of Culture
Berne developed a concept of group culture, which is based on his model of individual personality and is in
tune with many anthropological views of culture.
What is Culture (as cited in Drego,1983)
o Ruth Benedict (1934) sees similarity between culture and an individual, as a consistent pattern of
thought and emotion.
o Klukhohn & Murray (1956): The historically created designs for living; may be explicit and implicit,
rational or irrational and are potential guides for human behavior.

According to Kohlrieser (1999), cited in Shivanath, S., & Hiremath, M., p.171, 2003, out of awareness
individual script beliefs and cultural norms are taken for granted, and how they influence the individual.

Cultural Scripting can be a much greater influence to overcome than personal scripting since it’s reinforced
everywhere in society, p.169, Shivanath, S., & Hiremath, M., 2003.

'Personality' of a Culture (Drego, 1981)


E
When a group of persons form a community, they share
Parental values, Adult procedures and Child emotions, which T
Berne (1963) names Etiquette, Technicalities and Character

respectively. C
The TA method of seeing personality through Parent, Adult - Etiquette, what one’s supposed to do
and Child can be applied to the study of a culture as we look - Technicalities, what one has to do
at the PAC of the culture (Berne, 1963, p. 110). - Character, what one might like to do

The following is a start in the investigation of ego states of a culture ((Drego, 1981):
- Etiquette: Culturally inherited beliefs, ideologies, values, rules, beliefs about life/death, about good/evil,
about being male/female, superstitions, customs, rituals, prejudices, expectations, reward and
punishment, etc.
- Technicalities: Culturally inherited knowledge, techniques, and distribution, economic processes,
planning and organizations, distributions of political power, etc.
- Character: Culturally inherited ways of experiencing and of acting out love, hatred, pleasure, pain,
acceptance, rejection, obedience, resistance, freedom, identity, fear, hope, and the culturally inherited
ways of sabotaging or deviating from the cultural etiquette.

The Cultural Parent (Drego, 1981 as cited in Drego, 1983)


P
The Cultural Parent contains the conscious and unconscious P A
boundaries of acceptable behavior, whether or not what is C
acceptable is harmful or helpful to the individual.
A
The Cultural Parent is formed in the family and early socio-cultural
environment.
C
The more closed the Parenting process, the fewer options will the
child look for while growing up and the more the child will re-live the
Cultural Parent program of being oppressed or oppressing. The Cultural Parent,
This is the process that is shaken up by consciousness-raising and Drego, 1981
by those movements that work for a reversal of old structures.
The Cultural Parent messages prevent individuals from living their lives fully and in the here and now and
can be viewed as Cultural Contaminations.

P


A

Cultural Contaminations
Diagram depicted by the presenter

Interventions can focus on awareness and decontamination of beliefs / thoughts / feelings that are culturally
inherited.

References

Berne, E. (1963) The Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups. New York: Lippincott.

Drego, P. (1983) The Cultural Parent, Transactional Analysis Journal, 13(4), 224- 227

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