Thomas Harris; Psychiatrist Wrote ‘I’m OK--You’re OK’

Thomas Harris, the transactional analyst who tried to emancipate the obtuse jargon of psychiatry and in the process brought forth the hugely successful book “I’m OK--You’re OK,” is dead from a heart attack.

His family announced over the weekend that he had died Thursday in a Sacramento nursing home. He was 85.

Harris was a career Navy psychiatrist who after retirement began to agree with those who found the language of psychiatry muddled, its purposes clouded and many of its results questionable.

He became aware of Dr. Eric Berne’s concept of transactional analysis as a practical answer to those objections. Berne was the author of “Games People Play.”

“Berne,” Harris wrote in the preface to “I’m OK--You’re OK,” published in 1969, “has created a unified system of individual and social psychiatry that is comprehensive at the theoretical level and effective at the applied level.”

Transactional analysis is a positive approach to mental distress that accentuates personal worth, as opposed to traditional analysis, which examines a person’s past in seeking clues to current behavior.

The Freudian terms id, ego and superego are recast as child, adult and parent.

The key to transactional analysis, Harris said, “is the precision . . . because, in a language anyone can understand, it identifies things that really are . . . experiences that really happened in the lives of people who really existed,” and how people behave in relation to others.

“I believe it was the best explanation to that point of the new system of transactional analysis, which attempted to reduce behavior to a manageable unit of observation. We don’t just analyze you, we don’t just analyze me, we analyze what goes on between you and me,” said his wife and colleague, Amy Harris.

Thomas Harris was stationed aboard the submarine tender Pelias when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He sustained ear injuries during the attack that plagued him his entire life, but he never let his ailments dim his cheerful demeanor.

He served as chief psychiatric officer aboard the hospital ship Haven during the Battle of Okinawa, and later in 1945 went to Nagasaki, where he helped rescue American prisoners of war after the atomic bomb blast.

He retired from the Navy in 1954 as a commander, then took the position of chief of Washington state’s Department of Institutions, where he was credited with playing a pivotal role in quelling a riot at the maximum-security prison at Walla Walla. The ebullient Harris later quipped that the riot marked his “first intensive group therapy.”

He spent the last 40 years in Sacramento in private practice. Harris is survived by his wife and four children.