To ask the question: “Why is this person behaving in this way, in this place, at this time?” is to practise transactional biopsychoanalysis. If another person’s responses to you do not make sense, perhaps you remind them of someone. If another person conveys that your responses do not make sense, then perhaps he or she reminds you of someone.

During the time when our responses to others include parts of ourselves, we lack objectivity, and thus mental health.

The ‘adult’ of transactional analysis is the continuous process of balancing instinctual activations with injunctive inhibitions.

The advent of the internet has meant that it is now much safer to question objectivity, one’s own and other people’s, from moment to moment, than it is to extrapolate from past behaviour, because of the rapidity of change.

If another person’s responses to everyone do not make sense, consider covert physical disease, for example of the parietal lobes.