There’s a school of psychology called Transactional Analysis which explores how people function from the perspective of whether they’re acting as a Parent, Child, or Adult. Psychologists being psychologists, they decided that typology wasn’t complex enough, so they elaborated on that and developed subcategories along the lines of Angry Child, Hurt Parent, and so forth. The idea is, you analyse someone’s interactions and see which of these personas emerges. As these things go, it’s got some half decent thinking in there that is all easily misapplied by people who get into TA and forget that those personas are descriptions, rather than anything real.

Anyway, I was involved in an event where a therapist wanted to get these concepts across to an audience of people with mental health problems. The danger to me was that it would sound super-theoretical, and that people would not latch onto the concept. Then I had an idea that seemed to be useful: instead of using abstract labels, why not bring the concepts to life by identifying them with Simpsons characters? Pretty much everyone is familiar with the show, and it struck me that it would be a fun and accessible way to bring the thinking of Transactional Analysis alive for this particular audience.

I’ve returned to The Simpsons as a teaching tool several times. The characters and world are so well defined that it’s easy to recognise yourself or anyone else in the mythology of the show. And because of this, it can be a very useful tool when developing a script. It’s all very well suggesting that writers learn from Shakespeare or the myths that predate the Bard, but let’s get real: most people have more experience of sitting in front of the adventures of Bart and family than of absorbing the finer points of classical drama.

Most recently, I utilised The Simpsons in working with a filmmaker who is developing a new script. The characters were half-baked, and to inspire him to find a new take on them I asked him to imagine that they were Simpsons characters. Silly, yes. But it helped. Realising that the protagonist’s girlfriend had connections with Lisa clarified that she needed to come across more sympathetically, and with intelligence. Two of his friends had echoes of Carl and Lenny, complete with homoerotic subtext. A crucial mentor figure had parallels with Professor Frink. And so on.

Working with those commonalities helped the filmmaker see his story in a new way, an important part of the script development process when the writer feels stuck. And it allowed other realisations to emerge in turn. The thing here isn’t to do with doing a Simpsons knock-off — it’s about helping a creator shift from being blocked to realising that they can make choices about their story. Once that flow is re-established, The Simpsons and other analogies can be forgotten, and the creator get on with being in whatever zone allows them to come up with ideas.

Using pop culture reference points works a lot better for me than delving into the canon. Even if you are working with someone who has Renaissance poets at their fingertips, there is often a self-consciousness about the process that can get in the way of the freed up thinking you’re seeking. So: Simpsons, not Shakespeare. And with similar intent, I have created a set of cards based on images from 1960s Fantastic Four comics that can be used to provoke ideas. Could so something similar with Tarot, for sure, and indeed have done. But there’s something about seeing Jack Kirby drawn superheroes — just as archetypal as any Tarot image — that frees things up for me, and the people I work with.