What Do You Say After You Say Hello?
Script theory, published after Berne's death. The most substantial of the three.
A life plan based on a decision made in childhood, reinforced by the parents, justified by subsequent events, and culminating in a chosen alternative.
Berne sets out his fullest account of transactional analysis and its central claim: that each person forms a life plan in early childhood, under parental influence, and then lives it out through work, marriage, parenthood, and the manner of dying. Published in 1972, after his death two years earlier, the book gathers the clinical apparatus he built for reading that plan.
It works through the script matrix, the injunctions a child receives and the decisions made in answer, the parental programming Berne traced from the nursing period onward, and the dramatic patterns a script forces relationships into. For the consulting room, it supplies a vocabulary for what a patient enacts rather than only what they report. Berne shows how to read script signals in posture, phrasing, and the shape of a session, how to trace a pattern back to its childhood scene, and where the leverage sits for changing the outcome.
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
- 1972
- English
- Corgi
- Corgi, 1972
- 512
- 9780552176224