Let's go fly a kite! And off soars the Child Ego state, or your "inner child", on the end of a string. One of the main goals of transactional analysis is to look closely at the Child dancing on the end of the string, analyze the motivation for the behavior, and seek to improve his or her life. There is every possibility the kite-flyer may be an adult behaving in their Child Ego state, which makes the process of analysis even more interesting.

The music begins, and a group of boys stands on one side of the dance floor, and a group of girls. on the other. The boys dare one another to ask someone dance, and the girls wonder if anyone will ask them to dance. They have talked about the dance all week, dreamed about the dance all week, plotted and planned the dance all week, and yet there are so many stomachs tied up in knots about the dance, it makes one wonder; why dance at all?

Creative inhibition or impediments to this creative development may come in the form of "negative strokes", a Parent Ego operating from a Critical Parent posture, or from latent inhibition. Latent inhibition is the natural ability to resist or "tune out" a greater volume of stimulus than the person can handle.  For example, latent inhibition enables a person to "tune out" a faucet that drips to distraction, or a car left idling in the street.

It was Immanuel Kant who proposed that taboos, and thus personality and identity, could be liberated by Aufklarung, or "Enlightenment". Kant would argue that taboos are nothing more than self-imposed immaturity, resulting not first from a lack of cognitive abilities or understanding, but from a lack of the moral courage to exercise one's own thinking, reason, and wisdom independently from the influence of others.