A game is an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome.
Eric Berne set out a working model of transactional analysis and put it to use on the repetitive exchanges of daily life. He reads each social encounter as a transaction between ego states he names Parent, Adult, and Child, and shows how the surface message often carries a hidden one underneath. A game, in his account, is a patterned run of these ulterior transactions that arrives at a predictable payoff for both players.
Most of the book is a catalogue. Berne describes and names dozens of these routines, among them "Why Don't You, Yes But", "If It Weren't for You", and "Now I've Got You, You Son of a Bitch", tracing the moves, the roles, and the emotional settlement each delivers.
For the consulting room it offers a plain vocabulary for the loops a patient repeats, a way to locate the concealed transaction beneath the stated one, and Berne's notion of the antithesis, the move that declines to play. First published in 1964, it drew transactional analysis into common use.
About the author
Eric Berne
Eric Berne (1910-1970) was a Canadian-born psychiatrist who trained in psychoanalysis and later practised in the United States. He founded transactional analysis, a model that describes personality through three ego states, Parent, Adult, and Child, and reads behaviour through the recurring social exchanges he called games and the longer patterns he named life scripts. His work gave clinicians an accessible vocabulary for interpersonal dynamics, drawing on psychodynamic ideas while attending to the observable transactions between people.
Details
- 1964
- English
- Penguin Life
- Penguin Life, 1964
- 176
- 9780241257470