Games People Play_ The Psychology of Human Relationships - Eric Berne [20]
Since there are as yet few well-trained specialists in child psychology and child psychiatry who are also trained in game analysis, observations on the genesis of games are sparse. Fortunately, the following episode took place in the presence of a well-educated transactional analyst.
Tanjy, age seven, got a stomach-ache at the dinner table and asked to be excused for that reason. His parents suggested that he lie down for a while. His little brother Mike, age three, then said, ‘I have a stomach-ache too,’ evidently angling for the same consideration. The father looked at him for a few seconds and then replied, ‘You don’t want to play that game, do you?’ Whereupon Mike burst out laughing and said, ‘No!’
If this had been a household of food or bowel faddists, Mike would also have been packed off to bed by his alarmed parents. If he and they had repeated this performance several times, it might be anticipated that this game would have become part of Mike’s character, as it so often does if the parents cooperate. Whenever he was jealous of a privilege granted to a competitor, he would plead illness in order to get some privileges himself. The ulterior transaction would then consist of: (social level) ‘I don’t feel well’ + (psychological level) ‘You must grant me a privilege, too.’ Mike, however, was saved from such a hypochondriacal career. Perhaps he will end up with a worse fate, but that is not the issue. The issue is that a game in statu nascendi was broken up right there by the father’s question and by the boy’s frank acknowledgement that what he proposed was a game.
This demonstrates clearly enough that games are quite deliberately initiated by young children. After they become fixed patterns of stimulus and response, their origins become lost in the mists of time and their ulterior nature becomes obscured by social fogs. Both can be brought into awareness only by appropriate procedures : the origin by some form of analytic therapy and the ulterior aspect by antithesis. Repeated clinical experience along these lines makes it clear that games are imitative in nature, and that they are initially set up by the Adult (neopsychic) aspect of the child’s personality. If the Child ego state can be revived in the grown-up player, the psychological aptitude of this segment (the Adult aspect of the Child ego state) is so striking, and its skill in manipulating people so enviable, that it is colloquially called ‘The Professor’ (of Psychiatry). Hence in psychotherapy groups which concentrate on game analysis, one of the more sophisticated procedures is the search for the little ‘Professor’ in each patient, whose early adventures in setting up games between the ages of two and eight are listened to by everyone present with fascination and often, unless the games are tragic, with enjoyment and even hilarity, in which the patient himself may join with justifiable self-appreciation and smugness. Once he is able to do that, he is well on his way to relinquishing what may be an unfortunate behaviour pattern which he is much better off without.
Those are the reasons why in the formal description of a game an attempt is always made to describe the infantile or childhood prototype.
4 · THE FUNCTION OF GAMES
Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him. In this connexion it should be remembered that the essential feature of a game is its culmination,