Scripts People Live

by Claude Steiner

  I know that even he would argue with me and remind me that coronary heart disease is hereditary and that he did everything he could to take care of his heart; he watched his diet, exercised, and had frequent checkups. Medically, he covered all bases. But, still, I feel otherwise, When I think of his death it has an eerie quality of having been a shocking surprise and yet no surprise at all. Some part of him and me knew it was going to happen and when. Another part of him pretended that it wouldn’t, and I went right along with the pretense.

  Berne was very interested in the phenomenon of life spans of predetermined length. On several occasions he presented cases in which a person expected to live only to his fortieth or sixtieth year, and, as can be readily checked in his last book, What Do You Say After You Say Hello?,1 he was especially fascinated by people who had a history of heart disease. In fact, he mentions almost no cause of death other than coronary disease. The meaning of this became completely clear to me only after he died; I knew that Berne’s father had died when he was eleven years old, and that his mother died when she was sixty years old of a coronary. Berne’s life span turned out to be a few days longer than his mother’s, and he died for the same reason. I believe that he had a limited life-expectancy script which he lived out just as planned. He never clearly stated his very conscious understanding of the possibility that he would die at age sixty, but in retrospect everything he said about coronary disease and limited life scripts points to the fact that he himself was under the sway of a limited life-span script and that he knew it. On his sixtieth birthday, at his birthday party, he told a group of us how he had finished the last two books that he wanted to write, and he was now ready to enjoy life. Yet, a couple of weeks later he announced that he was starting a new book; a psychiatry textbook for medical students. In my opinion, he gave himself no quarter right up to the last day of his life, and then, just as planned, his heart gave way.

  It is true that Berne took care of his heart in some ways, but in others he was unable to take care of it at all. I am filled with sadness when I think of how much he was loved and yet how little of this love benefited him; how little reached his heart to soothe it. Berne’s loving relationships were short-lived and did not give him the comfort which he needed and desired. He defended his detached and lonely stance and pursued his work alone. Thinking about it I can get quite angry just as one might get angry at someone who clearly neglects their physical health by eating too much or smoking. The fact is that Berne may have taken care of his heart medically (though he never stopped smoking his pipe, from which he inhaled the first puff whenever he lit it), but he failed to do so emotionally.

  He was not receptive to caring concern; he listened politely when someone criticized his stroking situation or his individualism and competitiveness, but he followed his own counsel to the end. When he required psychotherapy he did not work in a group or consult a transactional analyst, but worked with a psychoanalyst in individual psychotherapy.

  He was by no means completely passive with respect to his needs for love and human contact. He developed important concepts related to love. His theory was concerned with transactions between people, loving among them. He was interested in relationships. He developed the concept of strokes which publicly was the word for the “unit of human recognition,” but which we understand as the unit of human love. During the last years of his life he wrote the books Sex in Human Loving1 and What Do You Say After You Say Hello? Both of these were, in my opinion, partial attempts to break through his own personal script limitations. Unfortunately, his and my insights about strokes and scripts came too late to be of any advantage to him personally.

  In fact, in the early period of transactional analysis (1955-1965), Berne subtly and unwittingly discouraged us from studying strokes, intimacy and scripts. Intimacy, which is one of the ways in which human beings can structure time according to Berne, was defined by him as a situation that develops when there is no withdrawal, no rituals, no games, no pastimes, and no work. Intimacy was defined by Berne by exclusion. That is to say, it was not defined. Further, Berne believed that intimacy was a generally unattainable state, and that a person could consider themselves lucky if they experienced 15 minutes of intimacy in their lifetime. At a certain point at which the Carmel Transactional Analysis Seminar was investigating strokes and began to use techniques involving physical stroking, Eric Berne got quite alarmed and made the public pronouncement at one of the yearly conferences that “anyone who touches their patients is not doing transactional analysis.”

  Berne’s injunction against touching in groups had a measure of reason. He worried that Transactional Analysis would become, as Gestalt seemed to be rapidly becoming, a therapy in which therapists felt free to involve themselves sexually with the people in their groups. He was a highly conscientious therapist and felt that this kind of activity would interfere with the success of therapy and give transactional analysis a bad name. It was because of this that he did not allow his followers to touch the people they worked for and with. The injunction was not really meant to prevent stroking among people, but it did tend to have that effect. He himself was not effective in obtaining for himself the strokes that he needed. It is also interesting to note that in all of his transactional analysis writings (about 2000 pages’ worth) he devoted less than twenty-five pages to the topic of strokes.

  With respect to scripts, he had a similar veiled attitude. Those of us who heard his presentations about his script analysis work were quite mystified by it. It seemed a complicated, in-depth, almost magical process which only Eric Berne really knew; and one that we, the younger, more practical, less individual therapy inclined colleagues either did not find really interesting or thought to be too advanced and complicated. His discussions about scripts remained couched in psychoanalytic jargon and technique unlike all the other work. Scripts were unconscious, repetition compulsion phenomena, their therapy to be pursued in one-to-one therapy.

  It is my opinion that, as is the case with every great innovator, Eric Berne’s personal life script set a limitation to his life and to the full exploration of the phenomena that he was interested in. In his case, the fact that he had a life-limited script, based on injunctions that stood in the way of obtaining strokes, prevented him from fully exploring scripts and strokes theoretically and caused him to throw up subtle barriers for his followers. These barriers had eventual consequences for him; his own script was unclear to him and hence unavailable for change. The injunctions concerning strokes which kept his script operative and his heart aching went unchallenged. The distance he kept from those who loved him, and whom he loved, including myself, prevented us from comforting him; he slipped out of our lives. I still feel the gap he left —he could have lived to be ninety-nine years old on the sunny beaches of Carmel.

  Berne’s death came suddenly. On Tuesday, June 23, 1970, we had a lively debate at the weekly San Francisco Transactional Analysis Seminar. I had arranged to present a new paper called “The Stroke Economy” at the next meeting. Eric Berne looked healthy and happy.

  On Tuesday, June 30, when I arrived at the seminar I learned that he had been struck down by a heart attack. I visited him once at the hospital; he seemed improved. A second heart attack killed him on Wednesday, July 15.

  I cannot say that I am objective about Eric Berne’s death; when I think of him today, three years after he died, tears still well up in my eyes. Yet, I wished to record my thoughts on the subject.

  Script Analysis

  Berne’s brilliant insights into the fact that most people live out preordained lives, and the importance that strokes have in human behavior, are insights without which script analysis and stroke theory would have never had a beginning. I feel that my contribution to script analysis and work on the Stroke Economy would not have occurred without Eric Berne’s initial thoughts on scripts and strokes and, most importantly, without his constant, positive encouragement of me.

  I see my work with scripts and strokes as being a cont
inuation of Berne’s work where he, due to his own scripted limitations, could not use his Adult freely. My own limitations would have prevented me from going much further than tragic script theory, due especially to my own script limitations relating to the male sex roles that I was bound to. I believe that without the input of Hogie Wyckoff in relation to the Pig Parent, the Nurturing Parent, and sex role scripting, my own work would have stopped with the Stroke Economy.

  I am fortunate in that I have come to see how I, too, had plans to die in my early sixties. I have changed this plan and plan instead to live to be ninety-nine years old. I personally profit from my teachings by asking those I teach for feedback, criticism, and, when needed, therapy.

  My own work with scripts started in 1965 while I was working at the Center for Special Problems in San Francisco with alcoholics. I began to see that at least the scripts of alcoholics were neither unconscious nor difficult to detect. The result of my work with alcoholics was the development of the script matrix and, following the script matrix, the development of a coherent system for the analysis of scripts. Eric Berne was enthusiastic about my work and encouraged me throughout. I later felt that the study of strokes was extraordinarily important, and while I was quite willing to follow Berne’s injunction not to “touch patients” in therapy groups, I decided that strokes, especially physical strokes, needed to be studied anyway. I carried on my work on strokes outside of therapy groups and the result was the theory of the Stroke Economy.

  From 1965 to 1970 Berne enthusiastically pursued the development of script analysis based on the ideas of the script matrix and injunctions, and in that period of time he wrote What Do You Say After You Say Hello? (1972) in which he presents his own views. Unfortunately, I was not able, due to his death, to share with him the thoughts on strokes, banal scripts, and cooperation which are the main points of this book.

  The Significance of Script Analysis in Psychiatry

  When people find that their lives have become unmanageable, filled with unhappiness and emotional pain, they have been known to turn to psychiatry for an answer. Psychiatry, however, is not the principal form of counsel that is sought by most people—who generally tend to go to ministers, physicians, and friends before they resort to the use of psychiatric help. Most Americans distrust psychiatry and resort to psychiatric counsel only when too desperate to be able to avoid it any longer or when they encounter a psychiatric approach which they can relate to and appreciate.

  Mental health associations around the country are busy convincing people that they should make use of psychiatric services. Yet, most people avoid them, and when in emotional difficulty make do without any help, letting nature takes its curative course. The fact that people in emotional difficulties do not consult psychiatrists is seen by psychiatrists to be due to lack of judgment and is even interpreted by some to be the result of their will to “fall (and remain) ill.” In my mind, people have, so far, shown good judgment in their rejection of the psychiatric help that is available to most.

  Of the few who do consult psychiatrists, most (in my opinion) are not harmed. On the other hand, U.S. Senator Tom Eagleton’s short-lived bid for the Vice-Presidential office of the United States in the 1972 elections illustrates how harmful psychiatry can be. As Ronald Laing has pointed out, Eagleton committed the error of consulting a psychiatrist who with his diagnosis and treatment (electro-shock therapy) marked him and defeated him for any major future political aspirations. He could have chosen a psychiatrist like Eric Berne, who didn’t use shock therapy and who would have helped him over his depression with other means.

  Most persons who consult psychiatrists are basically “cooled out,” pacified, brought back into temporary functioning; and a few are genuinely helped. I believe that psychiatrists who succeed in helping their clients do so because they reject the bulk of their psychiatric training and adopt a stance which comes out of their own experiences, personal wisdom, and humanistic convictions which overpower the oppressive and harmful teachings of psychiatric training.

  Psychiatry is taught in what appears to be several different “schools of thought” with different points of view. But in my mind the minor disagreements between the different schools of psychiatric thought are negligible; actually these minor differences only serve to obscure the fact that, fundamentally, psychiatric theories agree on three main points:

  1. Some people are normal, and some people are abnormal. The line of demarcation is sharp, and psychiatrists act as if they can distinguish between those who are not disturbed and those who are disturbed or “mentally ill.”

  2. The reason for “mental illness” and emotional disturbance is to be found within people, and psychiatric practice consists of diagnosing the illness and working with the individual to cure it. Some of the disturbances are incurable, such as alcoholism, schizophrenia or manic-depressive psychosis. Psychiatry’s job is to make the “victims” of such “illness” comfortable in their misery, teaching them to adapt and cope, often with the use of drugs.

  3. Persons who are mentally ill have no understanding of their illness, and very little if any control over it, just as is supposedly the case with physical diseases.

  These three assumptions permeate psychiatric training and are deeply imbedded in the minds of the majority (more than 50%) of those who practice psychotherapy whether they be (in descending order of prestige) physicians, psychologists, social workers, nurses, probation officers1 or any other trained psychotherapist.

  It is little wonder that most people who get into emotional difficulties are loath to consult a psychotherapist. We do not want to hear that the trouble is to be found entirely within us and that, at the same time, we have no control or understanding of our difficulties. We do not want to hear these things about ourselves not because we are “resistant to change” or “unmotivated” for psychotherapy, but because they are not true, because they insult our intelligence, and because they rob us of our power to control our lives and destinies.

  Script theory offers an alternative to this thinking. First of all, we believe that people are born O.K., that when they get into emotional difficulties they still remain O.K., and that their difficulties can be understood and solved by examining their interactions with other human beings, and by understanding the oppressive injunctions and attributions laid on them in childhood and maintained throughout life. Transactional script analysis offers an approach, not in the form of mystified theories understandable only to psychotherapists, but in the form of explanations which are commonsensical and understandable to the person who needs them, namely, the person in emotional difficulties.

  Script analysis can be called a decision theory rather than a disease theory of emotional disturbance. Script theory is based on the belief that people make conscious life plans in childhood or early adolescence which influence and make predictable the rest of their lives. Persons whose lives are based on such decisions are said to have scripts. Like diseases, scripts have an onset, a course, and an outcome. Because of this similarity, life scripts are easily mistaken for diseases. However, because scripts are based on consciously willed decisions rather than on morbid tissue changes, they can be revoked or undecided by similarly willed decisions. Tragic life scripts such as suicide, drug addiction, or “incurable mental illnesses” such as “schizophrenia” or “manic-depressive psychosis,” are the result of scripting rather than disease. Because these disturbances are scripts rather than incurable diseases it is possible to develop an understanding and approach which enables competent therapists to help their clients to, as Berne said, “close down the show and put a new one on the road.” Questioning the negative assumptions of psychiatry also generates positive expectance and hope whose importance Frank1 and Goldstein2 have amply documented. From their studies it is clear that the assumptions of mental health workers about their clients have an extremely strong influence on the outcome of their work. Their research shows that when there exists an assumption of illness and chronicity on the part o
f the workers the effect is that of producing chronicity and illness in the clients, while an assumption of curability on the part of the worker will be associated with an improvement on the part of the client. Thus, considering emotional disturbance as some form of illness, as many who work with people do, is potentially harmful and may in fact be promoting illness in people who seek help from psychiatrists. On the other hand, the assumption that psychiatric disturbances are curable since they are based on reversible decisions frees in people their potent, innate tendencies to recover and overthrow their unhappiness. Workers who offer positive expectancy, coupled with problem-solving expertise, make it possible for people in emotional difficulties to take power over their lives and produce their own new, satisfying life plans.

  The following pages describe life scripts, and how to work with them, using transactional analysis.

  SECTION 1

  TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS THEORY

  When organizing this book I had a difficult time deciding what to do with the next section. Logically, because it is an overview of existing transactional analysis (TA) theory, it belongs here, ahead of all the other sections.

  However, it is dry, tedious, and, some even say, boring. It may give readers the impression that it is an omen of things to come and prevent them from reading on. I even thought at one time it should become an appendix at the end of the book rather than an impenetrable barrier standing in the way of the land of tragic and banal scripts and the riches of the Good Life beyond.

  Obviously, though, logic won out. However, with a simple flick of the thumb, you can bypass this section—and refer to it only whenever you need to find definitions for terms mentioned later on in the book. Every new concept is italicized and referenced in the index, so you should have an easy time finding it. So read on or skip; I hope you enjoy the book.1