Games People Play_ The Psychology of Human Relationships - Eric Berne [65]
‘Wooden Leg’ is especially pernicious in clinical practice, because the patient may find a therapist who plays the same game with the same plea, so that progress is impossible. This is relatively easy to arrange in the case of the ‘Ideological Plea’, ‘What do you expect of a man who lives in a society like ours?’ One patient combined this with the ‘Psychosomatic Plea’, ‘What do you expect of a man with psychosomatic symptoms?’ He found a succession of therapists who would accept one plea but not the other, so that none of them either made him feel comfortable in his current position by accepting both pleas, or budged him from it by rejecting both. Thus he proved that psychiatry couldn’t help people.
Some of the pleas which patients use to excuse symptomatic behaviour are colds, head injuries, situational stress, the stress of modern living, American culture and the economic system. A literate player has no difficulty in finding authorities to support him. ‘I drink because I’m Irish.’ ‘This wouldn’t happen if I lived in Russia or Tahiti.’ The fact is that patients in mental hospitals in Russia and Tahiti are very similar to those in American state hospitals.1 Special pleas of ‘If It Weren’t For Them’ or ‘They Let Me Down’ should always be evaluated very carefully in clinical practice – and also in social research projects.
Slightly more sophisticated are such pleas as: What do you expect of a man who (a) comes from a broken home; (b) is neurotic; (c) is in analysis or (d) is suffering from a disease known as alcoholism? These are topped by, ‘If I stop doing this I won’t be able to analyse it, and then I’ll never get better.’
The obverse of ‘Wooden Leg’ is ‘Rickshaw’, with the thesis, ‘If they only had (rickshaws) (duckbill platypuses) (girls who spoke ancient Egyptian) around this town, I never would have got into this mess.’
Antithesis. Anti-‘Wooden Leg’ is not difficult if the therapist can distinguish clearly between his own Parent and Adult, and if the therapeutic aim is explicitly understood by both parties.
On the Parental side, he can be either a ‘good’ Parent or a ‘harsh’ one. As a ‘good’ Parent he can accept the patient’s plea, especially if it fits in with his own viewpoints, perhaps with the rationalization that people are not responsible for their actions until they have completed their therapy. As a ‘harsh’ Parent he can reject the plea and engage in a contest of wills with the patient. Both of these attitudes are already familiar to the ‘Wooden Leg’ player, and he knows how to extract the maximum satisfactions from each of them.
As an Adult, the therapist declines both of these opportunities. When the patient asks, ‘What do you expect of a neurotic?’ (or whatever plea he is using at the moment) the reply is, ‘I don’t expect anything. The question is, what do you expect of yourself ?’ The only demand he makes is that the patient give a serious answer to this question, and the only concession he makes is to allow the patient a reasonable length of time to answer it: anywhere from six weeks to six months, depending on the relationship between them and the patient’s previous preparation.
REFERENCE
1. Berne, E., ‘The Cultural Problem: Psychopathology in Tahiti’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 116: 1076–1081, 1960.
12 · Good Games
THE psychiatrist, who is in the best and perhaps the only position to study games adequately, unfortunately deals almost entirely with people whose games have led them into difficulties. This means that the games which are offered for clinical investigation are all in some sense ‘bad’ ones. And since by definition games are based on ulterior transactions, they must all have some element of exploitation. For these two reasons, practical