Scripts People Live

by Claude Steiner

  The investigation of the somatic component, that is, the manner in which the script is reflected in the body of the person, is to my mind the frontier of script analysis. And while our understanding of it is, at this point, not nearly as complete as in other areas of script analysis, there is, nevertheless, a great deal that can be said on a preliminary, somewhat tentative basis which might be interesting to the reader.

  It is safe to assume that the human body would, if left alone and properly fed, develop to maturity in an even, harmonious way. Arms and legs would be strong; back and chest and stomach muscles would be well-developed. The body would not be ruled by the head or vice versa. The person’s energies would be evenly distributed over the whole body rather than concentrated in the head, torso, legs, or genitals.

  Under the influence of injunctions, however, people’s natural flow of motion and emotions is curtailed. Hands and arms are not allowed to reach out for people or for things or to reject and push away or strike at what isn’t wanted. Feet are not allowed to plant themselves firmly on the ground, or legs to run full speed away or toward something. Face muscles become stiff and can’t move fully to express the feelings emanating from the belly or heart. Smiles, grimaces, tears, and laughter are restricted and not given full expression. Lungs and throat aren’t used fully so that people can’t speak with force, conviction, or anger because they don’t inhale fully while others who don’t exhale fully can’t sigh, whisper, plead, express sadness or pain.

  Under the influence of attributions some bodily functions are exaggerated and abused; the “intellectual’s” head dominates the rest of the body, the “athlete’s” body rejects the head.

  Personal attributes carry with them bodily configurations; for in stance, responsibility tends to develop the hands, arms, and shoulders and to inflate the upper torso, ignoring the lower body which becomes stiff and lifeless; emotionality develops the senses—hearing, vision, touch—but tends to leave the musculature soft and flabby.

  The bodily differences between women and men are distorted due to sex role injunctions and attributions. The relatively minor differences in strength are exaggerated so that men become physically strong and women weak. The built-in nurturing mechanisms of women are exploited and women are molded into caretakers and warmers, while men are made cold and insensitive. Banal scripting creates the expectation that men be potent and women warm. Men are made afraid of becoming impotent and don’t allow themselves to be warm. Women are equally afraid of becoming cold and don’t allow themselves to be strong.1

  Injunctions and attributions together distort the body, throw it out of balance as energy and attention is held away from one part to activate the overuse of another part. Polarities develop; a strong back with a weak stomach, a strong jaw with weak eyes, capable hands with incompetent legs, the capacity to swallow and digest coupled with an incapacity to push and kick away or throw up. Some people have neck, back, arm, and leg muscles which are strong and capable of making an impenetrable shell, coupled with an incapacity to express feelings. Others have easy expression of feelings from the gut but inability to act on these feelings due to an uncoordinated musculature.

  Each script has its own peculiar combinations of somatic expressions, physiological strengths and weaknesses which often imitate, as has been stated previously, the bodily posture and shape of mythical heroes.

  Over time these chronic distortions can cause tissue deterioration, heart disease, ulcers, arthritis, atrophied muscles (and, Wilhelm Reich argued, cancer)—and shorten the natural life span available to those whose body is used fully and ages evenly.

  Many interactions between mental life and bodily functions have been investigated because they can become the cause for physical illnesses. The mechanisms postulated to explain the development of these conditions are mediated by the autonomic nervous system, which responds to states of mind. An early childhood decision based on injunctions and attributions is such a state of mind which then produces certain somatic side effects. A more concrete instance of the sickening effect of a decision can be seen in the following case.1 Miss Rein, who had several episodes of urinary tract infection, admitted that she deliberately refrained from drinking water during the day and retained her urine as long as possible because she had decided the bathroom where she worked was dirty. Her own bathroom at home was extensively decorated and was her pride and joy. Her attitude about bathrooms and bathroom functions clearly contributed to the development of her recurring bladder infections by allowing the stagnation of urine in the bladder, thus affording the bacteria more time to multiply. Her constant control of the need to urinate was reflected in her posture and could be detected visually, affecting her life hour by hour, day by day, and year by year.

  Similar attitudes which are scripted could cause all manner of minor and major diseases.

  Thus, observation of the person’s anatomy often yields important information about the somatic component of the script and is therefore important in diagnosis.

  7

  Scripts: Tragic to Banal

  All of us are aware that some human beings live lives which are notorious and extraordinary, either because of their highly positive aspects, or because of their unusually negative or destructive aspects. We are not surprised to find that people who achieve notoriety in their positive endeavors are often people who made early decisions which they then followed by proper rational behavior to support their decisions. We call these human beings successful, charismatic, or famous.

  But there are many other human beings who are equally successful, notorious, and famous not because of the good things they do, but because of the way in which they seem to succeed in destroying themselves or others. Madness, suicide, homicide, drug addiction, great unhappiness, can be called life scripts, that is, prearranged, preplanned life courses which people follow faithfully from time of decision to time of death.

  The lives of people who are famous or notorious, whether in positive or hamartic ways, attract our attention and distract us from our understanding of the ways in which all of us in our everyday lives follow strict dictates and rules about our behavior. We are unaware of these because they apply to everyone and because we have lost track of what we could do or achieve, were we not bound by the banal scripting of everyday life.

  Unlike tragic scripts, banal scripts go unnoticed like water running down the drain, and those who are participants in them may have no more than a glimpse, their anagnorisis, as they draw their final breath, that their potentialities as human beings have in some mysterious way been betrayed and defeated.

  The banality of everyday life goes unnoticed because it is so common. In fact, many people use a great deal of energy reifying unsatisfying life styles into some sort of “normality” or desirability. Many of us are proudest when we feel that we are living “good” lives, where “good” means normal, average, as others would want it to be—others whom we respect and admire and who have told us what a good life is. Being married, successful in business, a good father, a good housewife, a businessman, a civic leader, a “real” man or a “real” woman are all defined for us long before we are born; we are given the illusory “freedom” to choose from those different ways of living. Once we choose we are forced to keep to the directives of that particular life plan, lest we become “failures” in living. The fact that blueprints for our banal, everyday lives are, at best, extraordinarily unsatisfying is something that people find out only after they have spent a lifetime attempting to live according to the rules—too late to do anything about it! Yet, ironically, when we wonder, after we followed all the rules, why our lives seemed senseless, we tend to blame ourselves rather than question what others told us to do.

  Banal scripts differ from tragic scripts mainly because people who live them are less likely to draw attention to themselves, since they are “normal.”

  Tragic scripts are explosive and often end with a bang; people with tragic scripts decide to live dramatically—they decide to
kill somebody, or to be so depressed that someone will have to take notice; they decide that whole institutions (hospitals, jails, psychiatric day care centers) will get involved with them.

  Banal scripts are melodramatic: they have no clear beginning or end, they go from bad to worse, they have no impressive, sudden reversals, no really suspenseful moments. Superficially, they may look good; but, in fact, they are devastatingly boring.

  Tragic scripts were the first to come to the attention of mental health workers. Working with them it is possible to maintain the superior one-up position, “I’m O.K., you’re not O.K.,” which characterizes the positions of most therapists. But as scripts were studied in depth, it became apparent that we are all scripted to some degree and that tragic scripts are only the extremes of what we all have: restricted choices, prearranged lives, and diminished freedom.

  Why are some people’s scripts tragic and other’s banal? One basis is the kinds of injunctions and attributions the young child was subjected to; severely malignant injunctions and attributions (Chapter 5) bring about early decisions which tend to be tragically inappropriate.

  The other determinant is the amount of energy that the child has—how spunky it is.1 Spunk is probably genetic. Some children are more active and energetic than others, even before they are born. If a certain child encounters the injunction, “Don’t move,” she may just give up completely or not move, but will nevertheless manage to laugh and sing. Yet, some other child will say: “The hell with you—I’ll move as much as I want.” So then the injunction will have to be enforced harder or it won’t be obeyed. The more extreme the resistance, the more extreme the injunction needed to put it down. Some parents will give up the enforcement of their injunctions, given a certain level of opposition. Others are willing to beat and even kill their children if they disobey them. The younger a child the easier it is to squelch him—he has no power. Thus, the malleability of a child combines with the oppressiveness of her environment so that at a certain point she is forced to give up a certain percentage of her potential. Some people give up 50%, some 10%, some 90%. From then on they will live a 50%, 90% or 10% life. Oppression is a reflection not only of what is passed on by parents and teachers, but of the situation in which we live. (In a ghetto it isn’t just father and mother who create pressure for giving up autonomy, but all sorts of factors which oppress father and mother.)

  Eric Berne did not consider bad conditions in the world relevant to his work. In his view, to do so was politics; and he did not want to mix politics with psychiatry. He steadfastly refused to let that kind of data enter into psychiatric discussions. He called such discussions “Ain’t It Awful.” However, it seems to me important to challenge this view. People live in a social context which is ordinarily oppressive, and to ignore that as a therapist is to ignore an important determinant of behavior.2 A therapist who ignores oppressive social conditions—sexism, ageism, racism, the exploitation of workers, and so on—will not be a potent therapist unless he is working with people of the leisure class where such oppression is relatively minor.

  Oppressive conditions which force people into scripts exist in all social classes, but they are more obvious in the lower socio-economic classes which bear heavier and more brutal oppression—there’s more physical and tissue oppression, more likelihood for tragic rather than banal scripting.

  The spunkiness of a child is often expressed when she chooses what Erikson1 calls a negative identity (Berne calls this the antiscript2) which appears to be a total denial of the parent, but is in fact a total acceptance, only in reverse. Such an opposite, mirror-image way of behaving is just as slavish as imitating the parent completely; everything is ultimately still dictated by the parents. Spunkiness is also often manifested in the tragic ending of a script where the Child says: “By God I’m not taking this lying down. I’m going out with a bang.”

  A banal script is decided just as a tragic script. The decision is just as binding. Once the die is cast people will stick to a banal script as hard as they stick to a tragic script. Tragic scripts and banal scripts are qualitatively alike. The only difference is quantity; they differ in punch, visibility, tragic ending. Tragic scripts are sharper, more clean-cut. People in tragic scripts tend to choose a dramatic character—Robin Hood, Cinderella, Jesus Christ. People with banal scripts may not even think of a character. They’re just John Doe.

  In short, banal and tragic scripts are not that different. I want to minimize the emphasis on tragic scripts because we’re all on this voyage. Some of us are just a little more extreme than others, and therapists will do better work if they can identify banal as well as tragic scripts, and if they see how they themselves are affected by them.

  A Script Checklist

  When diagnosing the various aspects of the script, it is useful to keep in mind a list of items that form its make-up, colloquially called a script checklist (based on an idea by S. Karpman and M. Groder).

  Because of the various meanings given to the word “script,” it is suggested that “script” properly refers to all of the items in this checklist and that ideally, when talking about a person’s script, the observer is referring to the whole checklist rather than to one or a few of the items. On this basis, “Ann’s injunction is ‘don’t think!’” is more accurate than “Ann’s script is don’t think.”

  The checklist3 is presented in the order in which the items are most easily diagnosed.

  Life Course: This is what the person herself as doing, or the outline of her life. It should be possible to state it in a succinct sentence such as “drinking myself to death,” “almost always succeeding,” “killing myself,” “going crazy,” or “never having fun.” The life course is best stated in the first person singular and in language understandable by an eight-year-old to emphasize that it represents the person’s early formulation of what her life course would be. The life course is usually easy to surmise and is almost always revealed in the person’s presentation of the problem. Life courses can be banal or hamartic.

  Four sub-items of the life course are the decision, the position, a mythical hero, and a somatic component. The decision is the moment when the existential position (O.K., not O.K.) and life decision were embraced. The mythical hero is the character in real life, history, or fiction that the person’s life course is intended to emulate. The life course is the reaction to negative injunctions and attributions; and this reaction usually has a somatic component which may involve any effector organ such as the tear glands, neck muscles, heart, sphincters, or any bodily system.

  Counterscript: During periods of the script when the person seems to be escaping the script’s life course, she engages in activities which appear to be departures from the script. These activities form the counterscript and represent acquiescence to a cultural and/or parental influence, such as “being on the wagon,” “drinking socially,” etc.

  Parental Injunctions and Attributions: It is important to know which parent was the enjoiner and what were the injunctions and attributions.

  The injunction is thought always to be an inhibiting statement: “Don’t think!” “Don’t move!” “Don’t be assertive!” or “Don’t look!” If the injunction is not preceded by “Don’t,” or if it is too complicated, it has not been distilled to its most basic meaning. When investigating the content of a person’s injunctions and attributions it is important to obtain their most essential meaning. For instance, a woman reported that her father, a strict authoritarian, never allowed her to sit with her legs apart, knees not touching. The injunction turned out to be “Don’t be sexy” rather than, say, “Don’t sit sloppily,” or “Don’t be a tomboy.”

  The same woman recalled repeatedly saying to neighbors and friends, “Sally is very clean,” “Her room is very neat.” This attribution, together with the injunction, was the basis for a script that called for her to be prim, proper, clean, sexless, remote, and afraid of intimacy.

  Rozlyn Kleinsinger has investigated the script matrix of s
cores of people and has found certain injunctions to be very common. “Don’t be close” and “Don’t trust” are related to Loveless scripts; “Don’t succeed,” “Don’t be important,” and “Don’t think” are related to Mindless scripts; and “Don’t feel your feelings” and “Don’t be happy” are related to Joyless scripts.

  Program: This is how the youngster has been taught by the parent of the same sex to comply with the injunction coming (usually) from the parent of the opposite sex. Thus, if the injunction is “Don’t think!” the program may be “drink,” “fog out,” or “have a tantrum.”

  Game: This is the transactional event that produces the payoff which advances the script. It appears that for each script there is one basic game of which all the other games are variants. Thus, for a “killing myself” life course, the game might be “Alcoholic” with variants such as “Debtor,” “Kick Me,” “Cops and Robbers,” all of which produce the same payoff, namely, stamps that can be traded for a free drunk.

  Pastime: This is the social device whereby people with similar scripts structure time. With a depression or Loveless script, the game might be “If It Weren’t For Him” with the pastimes “Debtor” and “Ain’t It Awful” filling in the time structure gap between games.

  It is while playing the pastime that the gallows transaction is likely to take place.1 In the case of a Mindless script, White tells the audience about his latest incredible blunder while the audience (perhaps including the therapist) beams with delight. The smile of the Children in the audience parallels and reinforces the smile of the bad witch who is pleased when White obeys the injunction by being clumsy and stupid; smiling at a person’s script behavior, in effect, tightens the noose around his neck.