Games People Play_ The Psychology of Human Relationships - Eric Berne [42]
4. As a game, ‘Ain’t It Awful’ finds its most dramatic expression in polysurgery addicts, and their transactions illustrate its characteristics. These are doctor-shoppers, people who actively seek surgery even in the face of sound medical opposition. The experience itself, the hospitalization and surgery, brings its own advantages. The internal psychological advantage comes from having the body mutilated; the external psychological advantage lies in the avoidance of all intimacies and responsibilities except complete surrender to the surgeon. The biological advantages are typified by nursing care. The internal social advantages come from the medical and nursing staff, and from other patients. After the patient’s discharge the external social advantages are gained by provoking sympathy and awe. In its extreme form this game is played professionally by fraudulent or determined liability and malpractice claimants, who may earn a living by deliberately or opportunistically incurring disabilities. They then demand not only sympathy, as amateur players do, but indemnification. ‘Ain’t It Awful’ becomes a game, then, when the player overtly expresses distress, but is covertly gratified at the prospect of the satisfactions he can wring from his misfortune.
In general, people who suffer misfortunes may be divided into three classes.
1. Those in whom the suffering is inadvertent and unwanted. These may or may not exploit the sympathy which is so readily offered to them. Some exploitation is natural enough, and may be treated with common courtesy.
2. Those in whom the suffering is inadvertent, but is gratefully received because of the opportunities for exploitation it offers. Here the game is an afterthought, a ‘secondary grain’ in Freud’s sense.
3. Those who seek suffering, like polysurgery addicts who go from one surgeon to another until they find one willing to operate. Here the game is the primary consideration.
2 · BLEMISH
Thesis. This game is the source of a large percentage of petty dissension in everyday life; it is played from the depressive Child position ‘I am no good’, which is protectively transformed into the Parental position ‘They are no good.’ The player’s transactional problem is, then, to prove the latter thesis. Hence ‘Blemish’ players do not feel comfortable with a new person until they have found his blemish. In its hardest form it may become a totalitarian political game played by ‘authoritarian’ personalities, and then it may have serious historical repercussions. Here its close relationship with ‘Nowadays’ is evident. In suburban society positive reassurance is obtained from playing ‘How’m I Doing?’ while ‘Blemish’ provides negative reassurance. A partial analysis will make some of the elements of this game clearer.
The premise may range from the most trivial and extraneous (‘Last year’s hat’), to the most cynical (‘Hasn’t got $7,000 in the bank’), sinister (‘Not 100 % Aryan’), esoteric (‘Hasn’t read Rilke’) intimate (‘Can’t hold his erection’) or sophisticated (‘What’s he trying to prove?’). Psychodynamically it is usually based on sexual insecurity, and its aim is reassurance. Transactionally there is prying, morbid curiosity or watchfulness, sometimes with Parental or Adult concern charitably masking the Child’s relish. It has the internal psychological advantage of warding off depression, and the external psychological advantage of avoiding the intimacy which might expose White’s own blemishes. White feels justified in turning away an unfashionable woman, a man without financial backing, a non-Aryan, an illiterate, an impotent man or an insecure personality. At the same time the prying offers some internal social action with biological gain. The external social advantage is of the ‘Ain’t It Awful’ family – Neighbourly Type.
An interesting sidelight is that White’s choice of premise is independent of his intellectual capacity or apparent sophistication. Thus a man who had held some responsible positions in the foreign service of his country told an audience that another country was