Games People Play_ The Psychology of Human Relationships - Eric Berne [58]
ANALYSIS
Thesis: Nobody ever does what I tell them.
Aim: Alleviation of guilt.
Roles: Helper, Client.
Dynamics: Masochism.
Examples: (1) Children learning, parent intervenes. (2) Social worker and client.
Social Paradigm: Parent-Child.
Child: ‘What do I do now?’
Parent: ‘Here’s what you do.’
Psychological Paradigm: Parent-Child.
Parent: ‘See how adequate I am.’
Child: ‘I’ll make you feel inadequate.’
Moves: (1) Instructions requested – Instructions given. (2) Procedure bungled – Reproof. (3) Demonstration that procedures are faulty – Implicit apology.
Advantages: (1) Internal Psychological – martyrdom. (2) External Psychological – avoids facing inadequacies. (3) Internal Social – ‘PTA’, Projective Type; ingratitude. (4) External Social – ‘Psychiatry’, Projective Type. (5) Biological – slapping from client, stroking from supervisors. (6) Existential – All people are ungrateful.
3 · INDIGENCE
Thesis. The thesis of this game is best stated by Henry Miller in The Colossus of Maroussi: ‘The event must have taken place during the year when I was looking for a job without the slightest intention of taking one. It reminded me that, desperate as I thought myself to be, I had not even bothered to look through the columns of the want ads.’
This game is one of the complements of ‘I’m Only Trying to Help You’ (ITHY) as it is played by social workers who earn their living by it. ‘Indigence’ is played just as professionally by the client who earns his living in this manner. The writer’s own experience with ‘Indigence’ is limited, but the following account by one of his most accomplished students illustrates the nature of this game and its place in our society.
Miss Black was a social worker in a welfare agency whose avowed purpose, for which it received a government subsidy, was the economic rehabilitation of indigents – which in effect meant getting them to find and retain gainful employment. The clients of this agency were continually ‘making progress’, according to official reports, but very few of them were actually ‘rehabilitated’. This was understandable, it was claimed, because most of them had been welfare clients for several years, going from agency to agency and sometimes being involved with five or six agencies at a time, so that it was evident that they were ‘difficult cases’.
Miss Black, from her training in game analysis, soon realized that the staff of her agency was playing a consistent game of ITH Y, and wondered how the clients were responding to this. In order to check, she asked her own clients from week to week how many job opportunities they had actually investigated. She was interested to discover that although they were theoretically supposed to be looking assiduously for work from day to day, actually they devoted very little effort to this, and sometimes the token efforts they did make had an ironic quality. For example, one man said that he answered at least one advertisement a day looking for work. ‘What kind of work?’ she inquired. He said he wanted to go into saleswork. ‘Is that the only kind of ad you answer?’ she asked. He said that it was, but it was too bad that he was a stutterer, as that held him back from his chosen career. About this time it came to the attention of her supervisor that she was asking these questions, and she was reprimanded for putting ‘undue pressure’ on her clients.
Miss Black decided nevertheless to go ahead and rehabilitate some of them. She selected those who were able-bodied and did not seem to have a valid reason to continue to receive welfare funds. With this selected group, she talked over the games ITHY and ‘Indigence’. When they were willing to concede the point, she said that unless they found jobs she was going to cut them off from welfare funds and refer them to a different kind of agency. Several of them almost immediately found employment, some for the first time in years. But they were indignant at her