Suicide a hoax; I'm OK-You're OK

"I need more sex, OK? Before I die I wanna taste everyone in the world." 
--ANGELINA JOLIE

By Alex P. Vidal

NEW YORK CITY -- Before my late friend Edwin's shocking disclosure of Dr. Thomas Harris' alleged suicide came, my philosopher-lawyer friend Ernie Dayot, 84, had already recommended the book, I'm OK-You're OK, in mid 90's in Iloilo City, Philippines.
Edwin was a poetry writer and once did a publicity for future Ilonggo youngest billionaire Edgar Sia II's businesses in Iloilo City.
Dayot, the "Socrates of Iloilo," goaded me to read the book written by Harris and compare the views of Segmund Freud, Somerset Maugham, and Eric Berne (founder of Transactional Analysis) on the impression of human nature, which has been expressed mythologically, philosophically, and religiously.
Meanwhile, I found out that Harris' suicide was a hoax. 
The American psychiatrist from Sacramento, California died of natural cause on May 6, 1995, not of suicide. I failed to correct Edwin, who died in 2008.

THEORIES

Harris translated startling theories into easily-understood language and adapted key ingredients of successful behavior change into practical advice, after helping countless numbers of people help themselves establish mature, healthy relationships.
He observed that there have been many reports of a growing impatience with psychiatry, with its seeming foreverness, the high cost, its debatable results, and its vague, esoteric terms.
"To many people it is like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there," Harris warned. 
"The magazine and mental-health associations say psychiatric treatment is a good thing, but what it is or what it accomplishes has not been made clear. Although hundreds of thousands of words about psychiatry are consumed by the public yearly, there has been little convincing data to help a person in need of treatment overcome the cartoon image of psychiatrists and their mystical couches."

MEANINGS

One difficulty with many psychoanalytic words is that they do not have the same meanings for everybody, according to Harris. 
"The word ego, for instance, means many things to many people. Freud had an elaborate definition, as has nearly every psychoanalyst since his time; but these long, complicated constructions are not particularly helpful to a patient who is trying to understand why he can never hold a job, particularly if one of his problems is that he cannot read well enough to follow instructions," he explained.
Harris explained: "There is not even agreement by theoreticians as to what ego means." Vague meanings and complicated theories, he said, have inhabited more than helped the treatment process.
Harris cited Herman Melville's observation that "a man of true science uses but few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose; whereas the smarter in science...thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things."

PRECISION

Harried emphasized that "the vocabulary of Transactional Analysis is the precision tool of treatment because in a language anyone can understand, it identifies things that really are, the reality of experiences that really happened in the lives of people who really existed."
The most important question we will ever have to answer probably is, "Are you OK?" wrote Harris. 
Right now, whether we are aware of it or not, Harris said all the relationships with the most important people in our life "are strongly influenced by a combination of how you feel about yourself (OK or not OK) and what you think of them (again, OK or not OK)."