Eric Berne is an American psychiatrist who specialize in the games we play with each other every day. His 1964 book “Games People Play,” introduce his theory and gives a catalog of the most common games he has identified as a professional psychiatrist.
He starts off by noting how emotional deprivation can have adverse health effects even up to death in infants and in victims of solitary confinement even in cases where all biological needs are met. “…stimulus-hunger has the same relationship to survival of the human organism as food-hunger.” Both psychologically and socially stimulus-hunger is like food-hunger and the same nutritional metaphors can easily be understood in psychological and social context. For example, if you are starving for food you may seek out and eat bad or rotten food; likewise if you are starved for emotional nutrition you may seek out and bad or harmful social interactions that satisfy your emotional and social needs. Our hunger for recognition starts from the moment we are separated from our mother. At that moment we begin our quest and find we have to make compromises. As these compromises become more complex we develop and each become more and more individual.
“‘Stroking’…denote[s] any act implying recognition of another’s presence. Hence a stroke may be used as the fundamental unit of social action. An exchange of strokes constitutes a transaction, which is the unit of social intercourse….The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours. In this existential sense, the function of all social living is to lend mutual assistance for this project.” Among the tasks that occupy our waking hours are 1) work to sustain our existence which the author calls “material programming”: it is not interesting from a psychological point of view. 2) the work of rituals, pastimes, and good manners in the social group the author calls “social programming” and is made up of the basics of what we need to know and do to get along in a cultural setting. This is mildly interesting to psychologists. However, the most interesting work is labeled “individual programming”, a major portion of which consists of observable, repeating, catalogable and highly regulated incidents that the author calls “games”. “The essential characteristic of human play is not that the emotions are spurious, but that they are regulated….games are substitutes for the real living of real intimacy…[games] are characterized as poignant forms of play….[Intimacy] is the only completely satisfying answer to stimulus-hunger, recognition-hunger and structure-hunger. Its prototype is the act of loving impregnation.”
From the perspective of the individual in a group they can structure their time through outward social activity or inner psychological fantasy. These are two levels of interpretation of events. “The goal of each member of the aggregation is to obtain as many satisfactions as possible from his transactions with other members.” These satisfactions are advantages gained to satiate a hunger.
An Ego State is “a system of feelings accompanied by a related set of behavior patterns.” These sets of behavioural patterns are easy to group based on observed “changes in posture, viewpoint, voice, vocabulary” that are consistently associated with a particular psychic attitude. The author identifies 3 main ego states: 1) the Parent: behaviours, thoughts, and feelings literally copied from parents or parental figures. They can be copied in two ways: directly when the person responds exactly how parents did or indirectly when the person responds how the parents expected them to. The parent also deals with routine tasks. 2) The Adult: behaviours, thoughts, and feelings that deal with solving the objective present task and utilitarian needs of survival. 3) The Child: Behaviours, thoughts, and feelings replayed from childhood. The Child can respond in two ways too. In the first adaptive way the Child responds as their parents would have wanted; in the second the child exhibits spontaneous creativity or rebellion. “[T]he Child is in many ways the most valuable part of the personality, and can contribute to the individual’s life exactly what an actual child can contribute to family life: charm, pleasure and creativity.” Everyone at any moment of the day is in one of these three ego states and can switch in a flash to another one.
“Simple transactional analysis is concerned with diagnosing which ego state implemented the transactional stimulus, and which one executed the transactional response….The first rule of communication is that communication will proceed smoothly as long as transactions are complementary, and its corollary is that as long as transactions are complementary, communication can, principle, proceed indefinitely.” There are four simple complementary transactions: 1) Parent-Parent for example engaging in critical gossip, 2) Adult-Adult when solving a problem, 3) Child-Child and 4) Parent-Child when playing.
“The converse rule is that communication is broken off when a crossed transaction occurs. The most common crossed transaction, and the one which causes and always has caused most of the social difficulties in the world, whether in marriage, love, friendship, or work is… [when] [t]he stimulus is Adult-Adult:
e.g., ‘Maybe we should find out why you’ve been drinking more lately,’ or, ‘Do you know where my cuff links are?’ The appropriate Adult-Adult response in each case would be: ‘Maybe we should. I’d like to know!’ or ‘On the desk.’ If the respondent flares up, however, the responses will be something like ‘You’re always criticizing me, just like my father did,’ or ‘You always blame me for everything.’ These are both Child-Parent responses, and as…the vectors cross. In such cases the Adult problem about drinking or cuff links must be suspended until the vectors can be realigned. This may take anywhere from several months in the drinking example to a few seconds in the case of cuff links. Either the agent must become Parental as a complement to the respondent’s suddenly activated Child, or the respondent’s Adult must be reactivated as a complement to the agent’s Adult.”
Superficial relationships are always confined to simple complementary transactions they are found in most activities, rituals and pastimes. Games are ulterior transactions, “those involving the activity of more than two ego states simultaneously.” This happens when the transaction is different on the outer activity and in the inner fantasy. Two fantastically simplified examples, first: a salesperson says, “This one is better but you can’t afford it” and the buyer says “that’s the one I will take.” On the outside social level it is Adult-Adult. On the inside psychological level it is Adult-Child. Second: a cowboy says, “Come and see the barn.” The visitor replies: “I’ve loved barns ever since I was a little girl.” “At the social level this is an Adult conversation about barns, and at the psychological level it is a Child conversation about sex play….Transactions may be classified, then as complementary or crossed, simple or ulterior, and ulterior transactions may be subdivided into angular and duplex types.”