Games People Play_ The Psychology of Human Relationships - Eric Berne [62]
On the other side, the game of ‘Psychiatry’ is more apt to crop up with patients who have previously been treated by less competent therapists. A few patients, for example, carefully pick weak psychoanalysts, moving from one to another, demonstrating that they cannot be cured and meanwhile learning to play a sharper and sharper game of ‘Psychiatry’; eventually it becomes difficult for even a first-rate clinician to separate the wheat from the chaff. The duplex transaction on the patient’s side is:
Adult: ‘I am coming to be cured.’
Child: ‘You will never cure me, but you will teach me to be a better neurotic (play a better game of “Psychiatry”).’
‘Mental Health’ is played similarly; here the Adult statement is, ‘Everything will get better if I apply the principles of mental health which I have read and heard about.’ One patient learned to play ‘Psychiatry’ from one therapist, ‘Mental Health’ from another, and then as a result of still another effort began to play a pretty good game of ‘Transactional Analysis’. When this was frankly discussed with her, she agreed to stop playing ‘Mental Health’, but requested that she be allowed to continue to play ‘Psychiatry’ because it made her feel comfortable. The transactional psychiatrist agreed. She continued therefore for several months to recite her dreams and her interpretations of them at weekly intervals. Finally, partly out of plain gratitude, perhaps, she decided that it might be interesting to find out what was really the matter with her. She became seriously interested in transactional analysis, with good results.
A variant of ‘Psychiatry’ is ‘Archaeology’ (title by courtesy of Dr Norman Reider of San Francisco), in which the patient takes the position that if she can only find out who had the button, so to speak, everything will suddenly be all right. This results in a continual rumination over childhood happenings. Sometimes the therapist may be beguiled into a game of ‘Critique’, in which the patient describes her feelings in various situations and the therapist tells her what is wrong with them. ‘Self-Expression’, which is a common game in some therapy groups, is based on the dogma ‘Feelings are Good’. A patient who uses vulgar expletives, for example, may be applauded or at least implicitly lauded. A sophisticated group, however, will soon spot this as a game.
Some members of therapy groups become quite adept at picking out games of ‘Psychiatry’, and will soon let a new patient know if they think he is playing ‘Psychiatry’ or ‘Transactional Analysis’ instead of using group procedures to obtain legitimate insight. A woman who transferred from a Self-Expression group in one city to a more sophisticated group in another city told a story about an incestuous relationship in her childhood. Instead of the awe which she had come to expect whenever she told this oft-repeated tale, she was greeted with indifference, whereupon she became enraged. She was astonished to discover that the new group was more interested in her transactional anger than in her historical incest, and in irate tones she hurled what apparently in her mind was the ultimate insult: she accused them of not being Freudian. Freud himself, of course, took psychoanalysis more seriously, and avoided making a game of it by saying that he himself was not a Freudian.
Recently unmasked is a new variant of ‘Psychiatry’ called ‘Tell Me This’, somewhat similar to the party pastime ‘Twenty Questions’. White relates