Scripts People Live

by Claude Steiner

  In an interview in The New York Times Magazine, November 22, 1972, this point of view is made clear. The interviewer writes: “The first position (I’m Not O.K., You’re O.K.) Harris maintains, in the face of much criticism, is the universal position occupied by the child, who is small, dirty, and clumsy in a world controlled by tall, clean, and deft adults. (Or so it seems to the child.) Here lies a critical theoretical difference between Harris and Eric Berne; for as Harris described it to me, Berne believed that we are born princes and the civilizing process turns us into frogs, while he himself believes that we are all born frogs.”

  Harris, whether he means to or not, retreats to the commonplace and demeaning notion that people are by nature tainted and therefore incapable of living life adequately without a large measure of authoritative, civilizing “help.”

  Transactional analysis is being used by banks and airlines and race tracks as a device taught to their employees to better deal with their customers. There might be nothing wrong with this if what was taught was, in fact, transactional analysis. But the fact is that transactional analysis is being corrupted and transformed to serve the needs of the banks, airlines, and race tracks, not only in subtle ways which strip it of its basic principles, but even in the very crudest ways.

  For example, in an article called “OTB Placating Losers with an EGO Triple,” again in The New York Times (March 21, 1973), we read:

  The T.A.C.T. system (Transactional Analysis for Customer Treatment) was purchased by OTB (Off-Track Betting) from American Airlines, which developed it from the theories found in I’m OK—You’re OK. According to the author, Dr. Thomas A. Harris, everyone’s personality is divided into three ego states: parent, adult and child.

  In the OTB training course, sellers and cashiers are taught to recognize which state a horseplayer may be in—and to react with the proper ego state of their own.

  For example, a customer who yells and threatens to punch the employee or stick a hand through the window would be in a child ego state. A customer behaving like a “parent” would be authoritative and demanding, likely to make sweeping statements. In the adult ego state, the decision-making part of the triad, the person would be calm and rational.

  “We try to swing the behavior on to an adult level,” said Erika Van Acker, director of training at OTB. “But sometimes you have to play a different role. If an angry customer is coming from a heavy child ego state, the clerk might want to go into a heavy parent ego state.

  “He might say something like, ‘This kind of behavior isn’t tolerated here.’”

  The terms “stroke” and “stroking” are very big in T.A.C.T. “Usually,” says Miss Van Acker, “all an irate customer needs is a stroke. Just be nice to them, and they calm down.”

  The reader might ask what is wrong with the above use of transactional analysis. Briefly, transactional analysis was invented for use as a contractual therapeutic technique. Berne was very suspicious and antagonistic to one-sided situations where one person held all the cards. Perhaps it was because of this that he enjoyed the game of poker where everyone starts with an even chance. In any case, transactional analysis was designed as a two-way, cooperative, contractual process; its onesided use as a tool for behavior control is an abuse of its potency, similar to slipping a customer a sedative in a coke so that he’ll buy a used car.

  I am afraid that within five years transactional analysis is going to be completely discredited because of such misuse and that its value will be discarded by any serious-minded person. It is one of my purposes to present a clear, sober, understandable exposition of transactional analysis which is true to the principles that Eric Berne postulated.1 The profound and radical are being taken out of transactional analysis. In this book I want to put them back in.

  Eric Berne

  Eric Berne was forty-six years old, a physician and a psychiatrist when he abandoned his training as a psychoanalyst after fifteen years of pursuing the title of psychoanalyst.

  He parted, as he said, “on good terms” when his 1956 application for membership as a psychoanalyst was rejected by the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. The rejection was probably quite painful to him but it spurred him to intensify his long-standing ambition to add something new to psychoanalytic theory.

  He never spoke about why he was rejected, probably because he was angry about it. I suspect that he was not submissive enough to psychoanalytic concepts (he certainly wasn’t when I met him two year later). His main bone of contention with psychoanalysis at that time was that he felt that an effective therapist had to be more active in his pursuit of his patients’ cures than psychoanalysts were allowed to be.

  For about ten years, he had been doing research on intuition. His interest in the subject started when, as an army psychiatrist, as he processed thousands of army discharges daily, he began to play a little game to entertain himself. The game consisted of an attempt to guess the profession of a dischargee after hearing the answer to these two questions: “Are you nervous?” and “Have you ever been to see a psychiatrist?”

  He found that he was able to guess the profession of the men, especially if they were mechanics or farmers, with remarkable accuracy.

  These findings led to the writing of a series of articles on intuition (see Dusay1 for a review of these articles) which culminated in the development of transactional analysis.

  As a physician he had been trained to diagnose “psychopathology” and to apply to his patients psychiatric views of what they were and to feel free to impose upon them what they “ought” to be. Thus, it was unusual for him to be “open-minded” to information detected by his intuition and to use it without prejudgment.

  This is when, as he often said, he put aside all the “jazz” he had learned and “began to listen to what the patients were saying.”

  Thus, Berne began to use his findings about intuition in his therapeutic work. Instead of using the notions and categories learned by him as a psychiatrist, instead of deciding that a person was, for instance, a “severe latent homosexual” or a “paranoid schizophrenic,” he “tuned in” to the person and gathered information by using his intuition.

  For instance, a man whom he would have diagnosed as a “severe latent homosexual” was seen by Berne’s intuition as a man who felt “as though he were a very young child standing naked and sexually excited before a group of his elders, blushing furiously and writhing with almost unbearable embarrassment.” He called this latter description of the man an “ego image”; that is, the therapist’s intuitive image of the person which in some way describes his ego.2 It is important to note here that the crucial difference between the ego image and the “severe latent homosexual” diagnosis is that the information about the ego image came mostly from his client, whereas the information about the “latent homosexual” diagnosis would have come mostly from Eric Berne and his psychoanalytic teachers.

  Berne continued to use ego images in his therapeutic hour, and found that relating to a person in terms of what he intuited about their feelings and experiences was much more effective in helping them than was relating to them in terms of the diagnosis that he would have made as a psychiatrist.

  He began to see in every patient an ego image which related to the person’s childhood, so that he gradually incorporated in every one of his psychiatric cases an understanding of the person’s childhood feelings as manifested throughout the interviews. One woman’s childhood ego image was “a little blond girl standing in a fenced garden full of daisies”; another ego image was “a boy scared riding in the passenger seat of a car while his angry father drives at top speed.”

  Eventually he saw that childhood ego images existed in every person, and he named them ego states. He saw then that the Child ego state was distinct from another “grownup” ego state which was the one that the person presented to the world and which was most obvious to everyone. Later he saw that there were two “grownup” ego states, one rational which he called the Adult and the other no
t necessarily rational, which he called the Parent, because it seemed to be copied from the person’s parents.

  He continued to observe his patients, and to disregard information learned in his training. He discovered the importance of strokes, and time structuring. He observed transactions, games, pastimes, and eventually scripts. By the end of the sixties his theory was almost completely developed.

  He eventually abandoned the use of psychiatric diagnoses. He often told a joke about the way that people are diagnosed: the person who has less initiative than the therapist is called passive-dependent and the person who has more is called a sociopath.

  He always maintained theoretical ties with psychoanalysis but these became increasingly less important in his thinking over the years and almost completely absent from his group work.

  At first he postulated that transactional analysis was useful in bringing about “social control,” that is, control over “acting out” while psychoanalysis did the real therapeutic job. Slowly he began to see transactional analysis doing the main job of “curing” the patients and psychoanalytic technique being used in the obscure work of script analysis. Later, even script analysis became non-psychoanalytic, and then psychoanalytic thinking only became manifest in an occasional case presentation.1

  Scripts

  In the early years of transactional analysis Eric Berne was still a psychoanalyst by method; that is to say, he still practiced one-to-one, on-the-couch psychotherapy with intensive personal analysis and scrutiny. The work he did during these individual sessions included script analysis. The theory of scripts was part of the transactional analysis theory from the very beginning. In his very first book on transactional analysis1 he said,

  Games appear to be segments of larger, more complex sets of transactions called scripts … A script is a complex set of transactions, by nature recurrent, but not necessarily recurring since a complete performance may require a whole lifetime … The object of script analysis is to ‘close the show and put a better one on the road.’

  Berne thought scripts were the result of the repetition compulsion, a psychoanalytic concept which postulates that people have a tendency to repeat unhappy childhood events, and he felt that the task of script analysis is to free people from their compulsion to relive the situation, and start them on some other path. Berne was of the opinion that group therapy was quite useful in providing information about the script so that a few weeks in the group may have yielded more information than many months on the couch. Yet he felt that “since scripts are so complex and full of idiosyncracies, however, it is not possible to do adequate script analysis in group therapy alone,”1 and it remained to find an opportunity in individual sessions to elucidate what was learned in group.

  Thus Eric Berne practiced script analysis from the very beginning of his discovery of transactional analysis, but he practiced it largely in individual sessions. Over the years he gradually abandoned the practice of psychoanalysis while retaining the formal, namely weekly or biweekly, individual sessions on the couch, during which he did script analysis.

  Occasionally Eric would present a segment of an ongoing script analysis; and these presentations tended to be about people who repeated certain long-term patterns over and over again on one hand, or people who seemed to have a script in which life had been programmed to last a limited number of years.

  Eric Berne’s Script

  I met Eric Berne one Tuesday evening in 1958 at his Washington Street office and home in San Francisco. I don’t recall the subject matter of that evening’s discussion, but I do recall very clearly that at some time after the meeting while I was having what was to become the usual 7-Up he came to me and said, “You talk well. I hope you’ll come back.”

  I did. And over the next years I became intimately acquainted with him. It was a slow, building relationship that took many years to warm up. There were some bad spots in it when I thought I would quit him, and many fine moments. During the last year of his life our relationship was solid, and I’m thankful that when he died it was clear to both of us that we had a deep, mutual love.

  Starting sometime in 1967 Eric Berne met with a group of interested persons, mostly mental health professionals, every Tuesday evening from 8:30 to 10:00 with refreshments afterwards. If you rang the bell earlier than 8:20 he would not answer it; the evening ended when everyone (except for Eric Berne, of course) went home sometimes as late as one or two in the morning.

  He was always there, except when he went on a lecture tour or vacation or (this happened very rarely) if he was sick. The seminars were led by him and many were tape-recorded. Every week’s topic was prearranged and whoever presented was expected to ask a question of the group. Eric Berne would fill in when there was no one to present and sometimes he cut presentations short if they weren’t going well. Sometimes he would read from forthcoming books, taking and using our feedback, sometimes he presented a meeting of one of his groups or one of the “cases” he was working with.

  During meetings and in general he allowed no mystifications, no hierarchical or professional pomposity—or “jazz” as he was apt to call it. When in the presence of such mystifying behavior he would listen patiently; then, biting on his pipe and arching his eyebrows, say something like, “This is very well and good; all I know is that the patient is not getting cured.”

  He cut through professional mystifications by insisting on short words, short sentences, short papers, short meetings, short presentations. He discouraged adjectives like “passive,” “hostile,” “dependent,” and encouraged the use of verbs in descriptions of human beings. He found words ending in “ic” (alcoholic, schizophrenic, manic) to be especially insulting.

  He did everything he could to insure that during working hours of scientific meetings his and others’ Adults were fully alert and maximally capable of performing their task. He discouraged physical stroking by therapists in groups, drinking coffee or alcoholic beverages during meetings, or allowing “bright ideas” (devious bids for attention) to intrude themselves into the proceedings. From scientific meetings he banned cop-outs (through excuses), glossing over (with big words), distractions (bright ideas and hypothetical examples), or slurping (of drinks).

  He spent every Tuesday and Wednesday in San Francisco where he had a private practice and a couple of consulting jobs and then he flew back to Carmel where he wrote and had a second practice. He spent his weekends in Carmel and went to the beach as often as he could.

  His main task seemed to be writing. I believe he put that ahead of all other things in life.

  He was a man of strong principles; in his book Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy the dedication reads:

  In Memoriam

  Patris Mei David

  Medicinae Doctor Et Chirurgiae Magister

  atque Pauperibus Medicus.

  This description of his father signifies to me what Eric’s life principles were.

  His ever-present goal was: “To cure patients.” Tied to this goal was his aversion of staff conferences and certain types of writing, the purpose of which, he felt, was to develop post hoc excuses or explanations for not doing the job.

  He was proud of his father’s dignified poverty as a country physician. He suspected persons whose eye was more than casually trained on making a dollar, and when he felt that making money was a primary reason in a person’s pursuit of transactional analysis he did not hesitate to chide and criticize them. He often tested us in San Francisco by openly announcing requests for TA speakers which carried no honoraria, and took arch notice of who accepted such engagements and who didn’t. He was self-conscious about his own earnings and became un concerned with small expenses (such as the extra 25¢ required at Carmel’s Highland Inn for Roquefort dressing or the cost of an extra fancy shirt) only after his accountant convinced him that unless he spent his money on himself it would be spent by Uncle Sam. He seemed to want to be poor and dignified. Dignity was of the utmost importance, so that while he was parsimonious wit
h his money he was not interested in cheap, bargain basement merchandise or “getting it wholesale.”

  He had a strong allegiance to the brotherhood of physicians, and always wanted to maintain ties with traditional modes. This prevented him from making Parental criticism of the medical or psychiatric professions as a whole, although his Child felt quite free to deride and make fun of the practices of individual members of it.

  On the other hand, he was devilish, witty, naughty. This had its most concrete but veiled expression in the irrepressible humor found throughout his writings, of which the article, “Who was Condom?”1 (yes, condom as in contraceptive) was a prime example.

  He was shy and he had a great interest in the fun-loving childlike part (the Child) of other persons. His theory came largely from his intuitive, Child ego state (see Chapter 1). He loved and admired children and the Child in others, but his shyness did not allow him to express or expose his own unless things were very safe. He loved to set up occasions for himself to get strokes and this is why we always had a “party” after seminars. He loved “jumping up-and-down” parties and was very nasty to people who got in the way of the fun by being stuffy or “grownup.”

  But, in my estimation, occasions where he got strokes and had fun happened very seldom for him and his life was work-oriented and driven by his main purpose: writing books about curing people.

  One of the brilliant ideas that Berne introduced is that people’s lives are preordained from early in life by a script which they then follow faithfully. I believe that Eric was himself under the influence of a life script that called for an early death of a broken heart. This tragic ending was the result of very strong injunctions against loving others and accepting others’ love on the one hand, and equally strong attributions to be an independent and detached individual on the other.