Scripts People Live Read online

  I also want to thank Fred Jordan, a kind and gentle man, whose occasional but well-timed reassurance and support made the anxious work of writing a large book easier, and whose eventual, thorough reading of it put it in its final present form.

  —Claude Steiner

  1974

  Introduction

  The Basic Assumptions of Transactional Analysis

  Eric Berne, known to millions for having written the book Games People Play, is nevertheless not commonly known for what I consider the most important fact of his existence. Namely, that he was a far-reaching pioneer, a radical scientist in the field of psychiatry.

  What I mean when I assert that Eric Berne was a radical is that he re-examined the basic assumptions held by psychiatry, and the investigations that he made resulted in ideas which were diametrically opposed to what was accepted as fact, in his day. Trained professionals, especially psychoanalytically trained ones, cannot accept his concepts without having to change, at the root—which is to say radically—what they have learned about what makes people tick, what makes them unhappy or causes dysfunction, and what it is that can bring about a change for them.

  Before I go into details I want to briefly state the three concepts which together set transactional analysis apart from the mainstream of psychiatry today:

  1. People are born O.K. Taking the position “I’m O.K., You’re O.K.” is the minimum requirement for good psychiatry and lasting emotional and social well-being.

  2. People in emotional difficulties are nevertheless full, intelligent human beings. They are capable of understanding their troubles and the process which liberates people from them. They must be involved in the healing process if they are to solve their difficulties.

  3. All emotional difficulties are curable, given adequate knowledge and the proper approach. The difficulty psychiatrists are having with so-called schizophrenia, alcoholism, depressive psychosis, and so on is the result of psychiatric ineptness or ignorance rather than incurability.

  PEOPLE ARE O.K.

  The first and most important concept, in my belief, which Berne introduced to psychiatry is embodied in his aphorism: “People are born princes and princesses, until their parents turn them into frogs.” Eric Berne presented many of his most radical ideas in the form of aphorisms which were veiled statements that disguised the implications of his thoughts from the minds of those who heard them in order to soften the blow of their meaning. Stated in this oblique way, the notion that people are born O.K. and that the seeds of emotional disturbance, unhappiness, and madness are not in them but in their parents who pass it on to them is made palatable to those who, faced with the full meaning of that assertion, would almost surely reject it.

  Stemming from “faith in human nature,” the conviction that people are at birth and by nature O.K., Berne developed the existential positions which have been recently popularized by the writings of Amy and Thomas Harris.1 Existential positions are feelings about oneself and others. The first position is: “I’m O.K., You’re O.K.” When people, due to circumstances of their lives, shift from the central position to the other three positions—namely, “I’m O.K., You’re not O.K.,” or “I’m not O.K., You’re O.K.,” and “I’m not O.K., You’re not O.K.”—they also become increasingly dysfunctional, disturbed, unhappy, and less able to function adequately in a social grouping.

  The “I’m O.K., You’re O.K.” life position is the position people need to have in order to achieve their fullest potential. It is not intended to promote the notion that all of people’s actions are acceptable. The existential position “I’m O.K., You’re O.K.” is a point of view about people apart from their actions and power, a point of view required in intimate, close relationships in order for emotional and social wellbeing to be possible. Berne implies that this attitude is not only a good point of view to hold but a true one as well.

  When a psychiatrist regards people from that position (I’m O.K., You’re O.K.—and so are your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, and your neighbor), he immediately places himself completely apart from most other psychiatrists and from his training. He no longer looks within the “patient” for a neurotic conflict, a psychosis, a character disorder, or some other diagnostic category of psychopathology, all of which were considered to be insulting by Berne; but he looks instead for what it is that this person is exposed to in the way of social interaction and pressures which make his behavior and feelings quite adequately explainable. Instead of seeing people seeking psychiatric help, no matter how disturbed, as not O.K. he thinks, “there but for the grace of God go I,” which implies a belief that it is external circumstances and not internal weakness that makes people into psychiatric “patients.” This approach is not new in psychiatry, since it was anticipated by Wilhelm Reich and Carl Rogers, and is the approach of Ronald Laing. It is, however, simply very much in disrepute and without support in psychiatric circles. The stance “I’m O.K., You’re O.K.” in psychiatry is quite extraordinary since most psychiatrists follow the medical model of illness in which the very first thing the physician does when confronted with a patient is to arrive at a diagnosis by looking at, speaking with, and examining exclusively the person to find what is wrong with him or her (“You’re not O.K., we need only figure out how”).

  The consequence of his belief in the basic soundness of people, is that transactional analysis shifts attention away from what goes on inside of people and instead devotes its attention to what goes on between people which is very often not O.K., that is, destructive and oppressive.

  Let me restate, in my own words, this first of the three basic assumptions of transactional analysis as follows:

  1. Human beings are, by nature, inclined to and capable of living in harmony with themselves, each other, and nature.

  If left alone (given adequate nurturing), people have a natural tendency to live, to take care of themselves, to be healthy and happy, to learn to get along with each other, and to respect other forms of life.

  If people are unhealthy, unhappy, uninterested in learning, uncooperative, selfish, or disrespectful of life, it is the result of external oppressive influences, which overpower the more basic positive life tendency that is built-in to them. Even when overpowered, this tendency remains dormant, so that it is always ready to express itself when oppression lifts. Even if it is not given a chance to be expressed in a person’s lifetime this human life tendency is passed on to each succeeding generation of newborns.

  COMMUNICATION AND CONTRACTS

  The second radical point of view advanced by Berne has to do with the way he related to the people he worked for. His views in that area were not veiled by aphorisms and jokes. Berne was vigorous in pursuing relationships with his clients in which he treated them as equals with equal responsibility (though, at times, different tasks) toward the common goal of psychotherapy and with equal intelligence and potential to contribute to the process.

  The language and mode of communication which he began to use when he introduced his methods was so unusual and unorthodox that it brought him into almost immediate conflict with other practitioners in the field. Specifically, he assumed that his patients could understand what he was thinking about them and that he could speak to them without speaking down to them. He rejected the usual psychiatric practice of using one language in speaking with people and another in speaking with psychiatric colleagues. As he developed the new concepts of his theory, he used, in every instance, words which were immediately understandable to most people. For example, when he observed that people act in three very distinct ways, he called those three modes the Parent, the Adult, and the Child, instead of calling them some other, more “scientific” name such as the exteropsyche, neopsyche, and archaeopsyche. When he began to speak about human communication and recognition he did not name the unit of interaction an “interpersonal communication unit,” but he called it a stroke. He did not call the troubles that people repeatedly have with each other “social dysfunction
patterns,” but he called them games. He did not call the way in which people live out their lives based on early decisions a “lifetime repetition compulsion,” but he called it a script.

  In doing this he made a very clear-cut choice to appeal not to his fellow professionals, who were in fact almost universally repelled by his new terminology and concepts, but to appeal to the people he worked with by providing them with a channel of communication in which he and they could all work together. This point of view was based on the belief that everyone, including people called “patients,” has at her or his1 disposal a functioning Adult ego state which only needs to be activated, and encouraged.

  The logical consequence of this point of view was that, for instance, he was willing to invite his clients to any discussion or conference that he had with another professional about them. He instituted the stunning practice of having inmates in a mental hospital observe the staff and trainees as they discussed their group therapy sessions.2 These discussions, in which the staff was under the close scrutiny of the patients just as the patients had been under close scrutiny by the staff, was based on another aphorism of Berne’s: “Anything that’s not worth saying in front of a patient is not worth saying at all.”

  It’s not surprising that many professionals who were subjected to this “fish bowl” approach to psychiatry found themselves extraordinarily uncomfortable. It forced them to face how much of what they said at staff conferences was mystified and glibly one-up to the people they were supposedly serving.

  A further extension of this approach was the all-important therapeutic contract (see Chapter 20). The therapeutic contract is simply an agreement between a person and her or his therapist which places responsibility on both parties involved. The client asks for help and gives full consent and cooperation to the process of psychotherapy, and the therapist accepts the responsibility for helping to effect the desired changes and for staying within the bounds of the contract. Without this agreement, according to transactional analysis, psychotherapy cannot properly occur. This excludes from the realm of psychotherapy those activities which are basically policing operations in which psychiatrists or mental health workers force people, whom they call “patients,” into weekly or daily brainwashing or sensory deprivation sessions without their approval or participation.

  It also excludes the many vague forms of “therapeutic” activities in which nothing in particular is offered and nothing in particular is expected—least of all an actual cure or remedy to the clients’ difficulties. Further, this approach implies that unlike medical knowledge, which is (correctly and incorrectly) seen as so complex that it cannot be understood by laymen, psychiatric knowledge can and should be made available and comprehensible to all parties involved.

  CURABILITY

  Berne believed that people with psychiatric difficulties can be cured. This means that not just the mildly neurotic, but the drug abuser, the severely depressed, the “schizophrenic,” everyone with a functional psychiatric disorder (that is, a disorder which is not based on an identifiable physical disease or gross, detectable chemical imbalance) was seen as curable. By curing patients Berne did not mean, as he often remarked, “turning schizophrenics into brave schizophrenics” or changing alcoholics into arrested alcoholics, but to help them, as he also often said, “to get back their membership in the human race.”

  The notion that psychiatrists could in fact “cure” the severe emotional disturbances of the people they work with was as radical and stunning a notion as has ever been introduced recently into psychiatry. Nevertheless, Eric Berne was adamant on this point. For transactional analysts whom he trained he gave the following rule: “A transactional analyst will try to cure his patient in the first session. If he does not succeed he will spend the next week thinking about it and then will try to cure him in the second session, and so on until he succeeds or admits failure.” The fact that psychiatrists have had no success with alcoholism, schizophrenia, and depression did not mean to Berne that those disturbances were incurable, as had been the psychiatric profession’s inclination to think; it simply meant that psychiatrists had not yet developed an approach which was effective with them. The usual cop-out of psychiatric professionals with respect to people that they cannot help (which is to ascribe them incurable or unmotivated status) was unacceptable to Eric Berne.

  I quote Berne from his last public address:1

  Another way that we (psychotherapists) get out of doing anything is the fallacy of the whole personality. ‘Since the whole personality is involved,’ (we ask) ‘how can you expect to cure anybody, particularly in less than five years?’ O.K. Here’s how. If a man gets an infected toe from a splinter, he starts to limp a little, and his leg muscles tighten up. In order to compensate for his tight leg muscles his back muscles have to tighten up. And then his neck muscles tighten up; then his skull muscles; and pretty soon he’s got a headache. He gets a fever from the infection; his pulse goes up. In other words, everything is involved—his whole personality, including his head that’s hurting, and he’s even mad at the splinter or whoever put the splinter there, so he may spend a lot of time going to a lawyer. It involves his whole personality. So he calls up this surgeon. He comes in and looks at the guy and says: Well, this is a very serious thing. It involves the whole personality as you can see. Your whole body’s involved. You’ve got a fever; you’re breathing fast; your pulse is up; and all these muscles are tight. I think about three or four years—but I can’t guarantee results—in our profession we don’t make any guarantees about doing anything—but I think in about three or four years—of course a lot of it is going to be up to you—we’ll be able to cure this condition.’ The patient says, Well, uh, O.K. I’ll let you know tomorrow.’ And he goes to see another surgeon. And the other surgeon says, ‘Oh, you’ve got an infected toe from this splinter.’ And he takes a pair of tweezers and pulls out the splinter, and the fever goes down, the pulse goes down, then the head muscles relax, and then the back muscles relax, and then the feet muscles relax. And the guy’s back to normal within forty-eight hours, maybe less. So that’s the way to practice psychotherapy. Like you find a splinter and you pull it out. That’s going to make a lot of people mad, and they’ll prove that the patient was not completely analyzed. And it’s not cricket to say, ‘Okay doctor, how many patients have you completely analyzed?’ Because the answer to that is: ‘Are you aware how hostile you are?’ So everybody’s writing papers. And there’s only one paper to write, which is called How to Cure Patients—that’s the only paper that’s really worth writing if you’re really going to do your job.”

  In this statement Berne, again in his usual veiled manner, makes a most startling analogy. Does he mean that psychiatry could be as simple a matter as pulling a splinter, given that we understood emotional disturbance as well as we understand infections? Did he mean that speedy cures can be effected of disturbances that involve the “whole personality”? Did he imply that psychiatrists are mystifying their patients and evading their responsibilities?

  I believe that he did, and his faith in this point of view has spurred me on to write this book.

  The above three basic principles are deeply imbedded in the fiber of transactional analysis. I have highlighted them because they are, to me, the most fundamental aspects of the theory. Of course, transactional analysis includes a great deal more than what I have said above, much of which I will discuss in the pages of this book. But the above three points are, to me, principles of transactional analysis that cannot be dispensed with without uprooting and disemboweling it.

  I’m O.K. You’re O.K. what’s your game give me a stroke Cha Cha Cha

  I am fearful that transactional analysis, which was originally created as a psychiatric theory and practice, will become, because of its popular appeal and features, a consumer item, sold at every counter, plasticized, merchandized, and made more and more palatable to larger and larger crowds of consumers. It is in danger of slowly losing its fundamental disting
uishing features and reverting to the more easily acceptable notions in which people are assumed to be born with defective personalities, in which psychiatrists treat people as if they were invalids, and in which people with emotional difficulties are seen as ill and often incurable.

  I observe that transactional analysis is in the process of being homogenized, reinterpreted, and thus destroyed by the mass market which is using it so as to make the largest amount of profit without regard for its scientific integrity. I expect, a bit facetiously perhaps, that soon there will be, across the country, transactional analysis gymnasia, churches, and hamburger stands, just as there are already transactional analysis do-it-yourself home therapy kits, record sets, Hawaii tours, and quickie workshops to improve business productivity. Not that gymnasia, hamburger stands, or do-it-yourself kits are to be disapproved of in themselves; but the ones I see so far have more to do with how to make a quick buck and add to the gross national product, than with Eric Berne’s transactional analysis.

  An example (of the changes being made in transactional analysis) appears in I’m OK—You’re OK, where Amy and Tom Harris introduce a subtle but fundamental shift. They list the unhealthy position “I’m not O.K., You’re O.K.” as being the first and “universal position” from which all people need to extricate themselves. With calm disregard for Berne’s firm stance on this point, the Harrises reverse one of Eric Berne’s fundamental points about people and re-establish the notion that people begin life not O.K., needing to rid themselves of their original sin.