SCRIPTS PEOPLE LIVE
ALSO BY CLAUDE STEINER
Games Alcoholics Play
Healing Alcoholism
The Other Side of Power
When a Man Loves a Woman
SCRIPTS PEOPLE LIVE
Transactional Analysis
of Life Scripts
Claude M. Steiner
With a New Foreword by the Author
Copyright © 1974 by Claude M. Steiner
Foreword to the Second Edition copyright © 1990 by
Claude M. Steiner
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Steiner, Claude, 1935–
Scripts people live : transactional analysis of life scripts / Claude M. Steiner; with a new foreword by the author,
p. cm.
Reprint. Originally published: New York : Grove Press, 1974.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9680-4
1. Transactional analysis. I. Title.
RC489.T7S73 1990
616.89′145—dc20 90-47229
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
I dedicate this book to Eric Berne,
teacher,
friend,
father,
brother.
CONTENTS
Table of Figures
Foreword to the Second Edition
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Basic Assumptions of Transactional Analysis
People Are O.K
Communication and Contracts
Curability
I’m O.K. You’re O.K. What’s Your Game Give Me A Stroke Cha Cha Cha
Eric Berne
Scripts
Eric Berne’s Script
Script Analysis
The Significance of Script Analysis in Psychiatry
SECTION 1 Transactional Analysis Theory
Chapter 1: Structural and Transactional Analysis
Structural Analysis
The Child
The Adult
The Parent
Voices in the Head
Exclusions and Contaminations
Transactional Analysis
Games and Payoffs
Stimulus Hunger
Structure Hunger
Position Hunger
Roles and Degrees
Chapter 2: Second-Order Structural Analysis
Egograms
SECTION 2 Script Analysis
Chapter 3: Oedipus Revisited
Chapter 4: The Existential Predicament of Children
Witches, Ogres, and Curses
Injunctions
Attributions
Witchcraft
Good Magic
Bad Magic
Chapter 5: Decisions
Time of The Decision
Form of The Decision
Frogs, Princes, and Princesses
Chapter 6: Transactional Analysis of Scripts
The Three Basic Life Scripts
Depression, or No Love Script
Madness, or No Mind Script
Drug Addiction, or No Joy Script
Transactional Analysis Diagnosis
Injunctions and Attributions
The Counterscript
The Decision
The Somatic Component
Chapter 7: Scripts: Tragic to Banal
A Script Checklist
Life Course
Counterscript
Parental Injunctions and Attributions
Program
Game
Pastime
Payoff
Tragic Ending
Therapist’s Role
Twenty Questions
Does Everyone Have a Script?
Chapter 8: Basic Training: Training in Lovelessness
A Fuzzy Tale
The Stroke Economy
The Stroke Economy Rules
Chapter 9: Basic Training: Training in Mindlessness
Awareness
Discounts
Discounts of Intuition
Discounts of Personal Emotions
Discounts of Rationality
The King (or Queen) Has No Clothes
Lying
Madness
Paranoia
Chapter 10: Basic Training: Training in Joylessness
Injunctions and Attributions for Joylessness
Chapter 11: Rescue: The Banal Scripting of Powerlessness
The Rescue Game
Powerlessness
The Rescue Triangle in the Nuclear Family
The Three Roles
Rescuer
Persecutor
Victim
Chapter 12: Competition: The Banal Scripting of Inequality
Individualism
Competitiveness
Scarcity
Power Plays
SECTION 3 Relationships
Chapter 13: Sex Role Scripting in Men and Women (by Hogie Wyckoff)
Structural Analysis of Sex Roles—Men
Structural Analysis of Sex Roles—Women
Sex Roles and the Family
Sex Roles and Relationships
The Sex Role Conspiracy
Combating Sex Roles
Chapter 14: Banal Scripts of Women (by Hogie Wyckoff)
Mother Hubbard
Plastic Woman
The Woman Behind the Man
Poor Little Me
Creeping Beauty
Nurse
Fat Woman
Teacher
Guerrilla Witch
Tough Lady
Queen Bee
Chapter 15: Banal Scripts of Men
Big Daddy
Man in Front of the Woman
Playboy
Jock
Intellectual
Woman Hater
Chapter 16: Relationships in Scripts
Tragic and Banal Relationships
The Three Enemies of Love
Sexism
The Rescue Game in Relationships
Chapter 17: Power Plays
Power
Power Plays
One-Up Power Plays
One-Down Power Plays
Pitched Battle
Analysis of Power Plays
SECTION 4 Therapy
Chapter 18: Myths of Therapy
Introduction
The Myth of the Value of One-to-One Individual Therapy
The Myth of the Uselessness of Common Sense
The Myth of Mental Illness and the Relevance of Medicine to Therapy
Chapter 19: How to Avoid Rescue
The Rescue Triangle in Therapy
How Not to Play the Rescue Game
Chapter 20: Contracts
Mutual Consent
Mutual Consent Implies Mutual Effort
Consideration
Competency
Lawful Object
; Chapter 21: Strategies of Script Analysis
Work
Game Playing
Antithesis or Command
Attack
Fun
The Gallows Transaction
Permission
Protection
Potency
Permission Classes
Marathons
Homework
Unloading Negative Feelings
Held Resentments
Paranoid Fantasies
Chapter 22: The Therapy of the Three Basic Scripts: The Therapy of Depression
Breaking Down the Stroke Economy
Faith in Human Nature
Stroke Starvation
Acceptance and Rejection of Strokes
Nurturing
Plastic vs. Warm Fuzzies
Touching
Organizing a Stroking Community
Exercises
Giving Strokes
Asking for Strokes
Self-Stroking and Nurturing Parent
Massage
Chapter 23: The Therapy of Madness
Accounting
Discount Power Plays
Accounting for Paranoia
Chapter 24: The Therapy of Joylessness
Breathing
Centering
SECTION 5 The Good Life
Chapter 25: Cooperation
Cooperation Rules
Two, Three, or More
Chapter 26: Child-Rearing for Autonomy
Raising Children for Autonomy: Ten Rules
Chapter 27: Men’s and Women’s Liberation
Sex Role Oppression
Men’s Trust Circle
Men’s Great Curses: Responsibility and Guilt
Liberated Relationships and Life Styles
Chapter 28: After Scripts, What?
Bibliography
Games, Scripts and Archetypes Index
Subject Index
Authors and Therapists Index
Table of Figures
1A Complementary Transaction
IB Crossed Transaction
1C Duplex or Ulterior Transaction
2A Mary, Five Years Old
2B Mary, Thirty-Five Years Old
3 Ego States, Their Names and Functions
4A Jack’s Egogram Before and After Therapy
4B A Relationship Egogram
5A The Script Matrix
5B The Script
6 How to Raise a Beautiful Woman
7A Script Matrix: A Young Man
7B Script Matrix: An Alcoholic
8 The Rescue Triangle
9 A Man: Male Sex Role Scripting
10 A Woman: Female Sex Role Scripting
11A A Woman and a Man: Sex Role Communication
11B A Woman and a Man: Become One
12 A Woman and a Man: Liberated Communication
13 Radical Psychiatry Center Action Rap
14A Work
14B Command or Antithesis
14C Fun
15A Permission
15B Protection
Foreword to the Second Edition
Scripts People Live was written in the 1960s at a time decidedly different from the present. Our country was a large, uncluttered space with plenty of opportunity and room for growth. Today young, middle-class Americans who are deciding what to do with their lives face a hard-edged, competitive world, a world in which there is less elbowroom and a smaller margin of error. Scripts People Live is a book about the choices people make and why they make them. Now, as then, this book explores life’s enduring decisions and helps people choose wisely among the alternatives.
The boundless American optimism of the fifties and sixties has been squeezed into today’s fearsome, self-seeking rat race. People entering the work force in the fifties could expect their real incomes to double over the next few years, while between 1973 and 1987 the median household income, in 1987 dollars, declined by $1,000. Images of plenty nonetheless linger in the collective unconscious, leaching disappointment and cynicism into people’s daily lives.
Our society is increasingly dividing into two large groups. For those who succeed in the race there is an endless supply of consumer goods and the opportunity to be insulated from the toxic condition in which those who “fail” must live. For the others the safety net is disintegrating, leaving a fearsome void. The poverty rate of families with parents under thirty is 35%. Where poverty resides, homelessness, drug addiction, madness, and despair hang on the gloomy horizon.
We are puzzled by the occasional example of children born in dismal, even terrifying conditions who grow up to be functioning, happy members of society while others born to wealth and ease cannot cope with life and die in defeat. We read in the same newspaper the story of a once-homeless woman who graduates with honors from Stanford University while a dead homeless man turns out to be the firstborn of a wealthy San Francisco family. These real life stories are seized upon by the hopeful on one hand and the cynical on the other and taken to mean that one’s environment, whether ghetto or upper class, is not relevant to one’s fate.
There is no doubt that the conditions we encounter in life limit our range of options. Some people are born into riches, some into poverty; some have large, nurturing families; others live with frightened, isolated mothers; some have reliable, sober parents and teachers; some have to cope with infantile, addicted care givers. Some never see violence, death, and abuse, while others witness them daily. Some have strict, disciplining parents, while others are left alone to do as they please.
Yet each young person still has to decide whether to take life lying down or seize it by the horns. Each individual has a spiritual core that exists independent of the environment and is equally crucial to his or her destiny. It is this spiritual core that is capable of withstanding agonizing hardship, struggling through adversity, making unfathomably wise decisions or inexplicable sacrifices and that propels and carries its owner through the worst of times. It is this book’s task to tackle the puzzle of human fate and to reveal what establishes people’s life scripts—how they are determined, and by what components, and how each person’s peculiar combination of spirit and circumstances contributes to the final path that life takes.
Some twenty years after it first appeared, this reprinting of Scripts People Live will be read by a new generation born into difficult fin de siècle realities. It speaks of the pressures we all have to deal with in our life journeys and the coping mechanisms passed down the generations by our elders. The theory in this book states that people’s scripts, or life paths, are fairly well decided upon early in life and then held to in what appears to be an inexorable manner unless an active process of redecision is undertaken. Children come to the conclusion that they will be happy or depressed, optimistic or miserly, winners, spendthrifts, or failures, healthy or alcoholic, lawyers, models, or blue-collar workers, unemployed or overworked, long-lived, sickly, or suicidal, and having decided, they will spend the rest of their lives endeavoring to make their decisions come true. Unless a conscious decision to modify one’s life in an active way occurs, the script will hold sway to the end. Psychotherapy, explored in this book, can serve to help people free themselves to make productive, autonomous, optimistic life plans based on the most up-to-date reality.
Since Scripts People Live appeared, it has helped millions of people understand their lives. The times have changed, but the fundamentals remain the same; I believe that Scripts People Live can help you make the choices that will maximize the quality of your life.
—Claude Steiner
1990
Preface and Acknowledgments
When I began writing this book, I intended it to be a revision of my previous book, Games Alcoholics Play, updated with respect to the therapy of alcoholics and expanded with respect to script theory. As the work proceeded, it quickly lost its intended character and became, instead, a whole new book on the Transactional Analysis of Life Scripts. I have reused some sections of Games Alcoholics Play,
but this book is mostly an extensive and concise statement of recent developments in script theory. Where I have used sections of Games Alcoholics Play, I have carefully weeded out two words which I no longer feel the necessity to use. The two words that I’ve taken out and which occurred hundreds of times in that previous book were the words “cure” and “patient,” both of which are, in my opinion, inextricably tied in with medical practice which, as I take pains to explain later, has nothing to do with the practice of psychotherapy, and the use of which perpetuates the notion that medicine and psychotherapy are in some way legitimately tied together when they are, in fact, not.
I have preserved the use of the word “diagnosis” against the objections of Joy Marcus who feels that “diagnosis” should have gone out with “cure” and “patient.” I have done so because I feel that diagnosis is not necessarily connected with medical practice, and is a word which I wish to claim for use in the detection and therapy of scripts.
I hope I make it clear in this book that Eric Berne was the spring whence the major ideas of script analysis originated and that, without his encouragement and support, I would never have come to write this book. I also extensively credit Hogie Wyckoff for her contributions to my political awareness, particularly in relation to sex role scripting. Her insights into women’s and men’s scripts were the beginning of the study of banal scripts, which led to further joint developments concerning power, competition, and cooperation.
I wish to thank Carmen Kerr for her careful reading and criticism of Section I on Eric Berne.
I also wish to thank Joy Marcus for her intensive reading of and numerous suggestions about Section III.
I want further to thank the members of the “body group” in which the understanding of the scripts for joylessness and the investigation of therapies regarding this script are slowly developing. Wyoming, Laura, Rick, Olivia, and Hogie, by openly offering their naked selves and willingly and openly regarding mine, have done much to help me understand the banal scripts which prevent us from fully enjoying and taking power over our bodies.
I wish also to thank the many people whom I worked with at the Radical Psychiatry Center from 1969 to 1972 and with whom I struggled and learned to understand power and its abuses, and with whose help I developed my ideas on cooperation.
Thanks are due to Marion Weisberg for suggesting the title Scripts People Live.
It is difficult to fairly acknowledge the contribution made by Susan Tatum, which could be easily stereotyped by saying she typed the various sections of this book. True, she did type and retype my writings, but to state her contribution in this way would be untrue and unreal; her thinking, her understanding, and her contributions are present throughout the pages of the book, and it is difficult to credit and value them completely. I also wish to thank Karen Parlette for her help in typing and putting together the last stages of the manuscript.
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